The first time Tom Whitaker planted pine trees in his pasture, the whole town of Miller’s Bend laughed. Not politely, either. Men laughed with their mouths open at the feed store.
Women laughed behind church bulletins on Sunday morning. Boys laughed from pickup beds as they rattled past his north fence, pointing at the thin green seedlings standing in crooked rows across land that had once carried Black Angus cattle. “Tom’s growing Christmas trees for cows,” Buck Harlan said one morning at Clay’s Feed and Seed, and the men around the coffee pot nearly spilled their cups.
It was April of 1982, and Miller’s Bend, Kansas, was not the sort of place where a man could do something different without every porch, counter, and church pew having an opinion about it. Tom Whitaker, thirty-nine years old, widowed, quiet, and stubborn as a fence post, had taken forty acres of his best grazing pasture and planted it with tiny pine seedlings. A thousand of them.
He planted them with his own hands, kneeling in the dirt with a shovel and a bucket of water, his twelve-year-old daughter Emily walking behind him, pressing soil around the roots. “Daddy,” Emily asked on the third day, wiping sweat from her forehead, “why does everybody keep slowing down when they pass?”
Tom looked toward the road. A red Ford pickup had rolled nearly to a stop, two men inside staring through the open window.
One shook his head like he was watching a barn burn. Tom turned back to the seedling in front of him. “Because folks like a show.”
“Are we the show?”
“For now.”
Emily frowned at the little pine, no taller than her boot.
“They think you’re wrong.”
Tom pushed dirt around the roots and pressed it down firm. “Most people think different means wrong until it saves them.”
Emily did not understand that then. No one in Miller’s Bend did.
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