Small Wonder(s)--the Soddie

I used to say there weren't any great old songs about soddies because no one went all rhapsodic living in dirt. A sod house may well have kept out heat and cold in remarkably efficient ways and not once blown away in billowing prairie winds. What's more, sod houses sure as anything were a shelter in the time of storm. But as far as I knew, nobody ever penned a melody that found its way into the American soul--not about soddies. No siree.

Then I found one. Just yesterday. A song about a soddie. Let's be plain here: it's not got the lyrical staying power of "Home on the Range" or "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," but it's there anyway. So here's a song about soddies: 

When we left our home back yonder we had all that mortal needs:horses, cows and tools abundant, household goods and gardens seeds,
covered wagon full to bursting, Bob and Betty full of glee;
going west to take a homestead, happy kiddies, Kate and me. 

Soon we landed in Nebraska where they had much land to spare,
But most ever since we've been here, we've been mad enough to swear;
First, we built for us a 'sod house' and we tried to raise some trees;
But the land was full of coyotes and our sod house full of fleas.

I know you're saying there's nothing about that ode that's in the least bit celebratory. Whatever sod-buster penned it wasn't much taken with his earthly abode. There's no wide copper bowl of sky above or endless miles of black-eyed susans waving their arms before the Almighty. That ditty is no tribute.

But then, how can anyone be nostalgic about snakes winding out of the ceiling, about ever muddy floors and thick, semi-darkness mid day. Twas a blessing to have a window. Sometimes the only hole in the soddie's three-foot walls was covered in muslin, to keep out. . .well, everything, but at least leave a light on in what otherwise would be abysmal darkness. The only memory this little song musters is forever fleas.

The very first earth dwellings in much of Sioux County, Iowa, weren't even soddies. They were dugouts. Didn't cost a dime but labor, of course, and a dugout, a fox hole, got you out of the wind. It turned you into a worm maybe, but at least you didn't freeze to death in January. Even tornadoes were mostly powerless. Dugouts and soddies were an insulator's dream, but they never came clean. How could they?--they were dirt. 

They required constant maintenance because when the dirt settled--which is always did--you had to fill the holes with something. Not fun.

But you could put 'em up in just a few days, especially where the earth took kindly to be losing its skin. Cost?--five bucks at worst, and whatever it might cost you for a window. Efficient, yes. Ecological?--to a fault. Environmentally attuned?--perfect. Frank Lloyd Wright must have had soddies in mind when he designed his places because they sure as heck fit faultlessly into grassland landscapes.

Not many homesteading Iowans started out in soddies because east of here, sufficient trees made log cabins the much-preferred real estate. But out here trees went as a premium because rivers weren't abundant. If you wanted to homestead much of Sioux County, take possession of some of the best farmland on the continent, your first move was to start cutting sod. 

Nobody stayed long. If you wanted to prove up the claim, you had to make your 160 acres look like it was producing in every way, including the domicile. Average stays in the sod, people say, were about five years. I'm guessing when they were abandoned, no one shed a tear.

No romance either. Most were just one room for the whole family. Not far from here, one immigrant family took in another, so the whole bunch slept in eight-hour shifts. There just wasn't room. 

That hymn to the prairie, up top, is the closest I've ever come to someone actually sitting down, pen in hand, to write out a memory of a way of life once upon a time all around us here, but never, ever beloved. 

The soddie. For some here, it got us by. Thanks be to God, it got us by.