Yiorgo and I are on his other piece of property, the one that Alan is trying to convince him to sell. It’s a few acres of orange and olive trees. Their haunting, distorted trunks grow like upside down hands. Alan, as usual, is right. It’s perfectly located for development. It’s far enough from the highway that all I can hear is the wind in the trees, but close enough to the sea that I can smell the brine.

It’s late afternoon and we’re working. Yiorgo is cutting the low branches from the olive trees, using a machete and a small hand saw. As he discards them, I lug them to a fire pit. After I’ve collected enough, I stuff a few pieces of newspaper beneath, and I burn them.

For a long while we work in silence, Yiorgo chopping wood and me lugging it over to the fire pit, which smolders and crackles, sending up thick, acrid smoke. We don’t have much to talk about anyway. What do we have in common? Days like this have been Yiorgo’s whole life. Years have passed in this way. They mark the quiet, anonymous survival of his lifestyle. He makes a living, he likes to say.

Inevitably I think of my cousins and my relatives back in Wisconsin, those who did not leave - which is most of them. I see them sometimes when we make our annual summer visit. There’s a strange tension to the encounters. They treat me differently - not with meanness, or hostility. Just as if I’m outside the family.

And I get it, to some extent. I am no longer one of them - a Midwesterner. But it’s more than that. They think that I no longer understand their struggles. Most of them work odd jobs. One operates a fork lift at a paper mill. One rolls a roulette wheel at an Indian casino. One drives semi-trucks across the flat, longitudinal highways of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, hauling long range freight over the upper plains. One has started a few businesses, only to watch them go under - a geothermal heating business, a gun range, an auto-garage. There are plenty others, toiling just as anonymously as Yiorgo, in villages just as isolated as Malona or Masari.

Just like here, those places are changing, in ways both subtle and overt. The overt shifts are visible to anyone who has spent even a little time in the Middle West. The small downtowns, with their brick storefronts that were once home to family stores and cafes (another cousin of mine once owned a jewelry store, for instance) are mostly vacant, or are now occupied by national chains like Perkins or Starbucks. The forests and fields that surround the villages have been carved and bulldozed for big box stores and cookie cutter subdivisions. There are moments, driving through some nameless towns in Indiana or Michigan or Wisconsin, where I feel like I could be anywhere in America; bombarded by IHOPs and Wal-Marts and McDonald’s, confronted by broad avenues of half-closed strip malls and swaying stoplights and bleating tailights, my sense of place goes haywire. Where am I? I think. Where did all this come from? Who decreed that this was a good idea?

The subtle shifts can’t be seen by just driving through. You’ve got to know someone in the Midwest, you’ve got to have family there, to understand.

How to tell about it? Part of me thinks that it’s not of this story. But then I look at Yiorgo, and I see my uncle John. There are some physical similarities. Like Yiorgo, John was broad in the chest, with a healthy gut he’d cultivated over a lifetime of steak dinners and bacon breakfasts. His stern face was weathered and lacquered from years in the sun, his hands were deeply calloused. But the deepest similarities are in demeanor and personality. John, like Yiorgo, was always working on some kind of project - repairing the junked classic cars he collected, building solar panels to provide cheap heat during the cold Wisconsin winters, distilling his own wine. John lived mostly off the grid, the kind of shambly life that most people wouldn’t aspire to, but the kind of life you could respect, if only for the tenacity with which he defended it.

He owned his own dairy farm. As kids, we‘d visit, and Jackson and I would have the time of our lives playing in his old barn that was full of his broken down cars. Or we’d watch while John and his two sons, our older cousins (who we adored, naturally), moved down the line, hooking their cows up to a hyrdaulic milking device. His property was very similar to Yiorgo’s, too - a rambling collective of spare parts and trinkets, the kind of sundries a man collects when he can’t keep his hands still. John was a man whose life was work.

And then the farming collectives came through. And because John was stubborn and self reliant, he told the lawyers and the solicitors to go fuck themselves; he was a dairy farmer, his father was a dairy farmer, and his goddamned sons were sure as hell going to be dairy farmers, too. So John didn’t sell. But all his neighbors sold. Soon, the men John had been selling milk to for his whole life - the owners of markets and cheese factories - were driving up John’s gravel driveway so that they could personally break the news to him: they couldn’t buy from him anymore. The collective’s prices were just too good to beat.

By the time John finally sold, his farm was threatened with foreclosure. He made a pittance, barely enough to stave off the collectors. Afterwards, the only job he could muster - he’d never gone to college, after all - was driving a truck for the very same collective that bought him out.

John was an intensely proud man. Losing the farm was devastating. His sons were in high school by then, and had spent their whole lives preparing for a career in their father’s footsteps. Suddenly, their futures were pulled out from beneath their feet. It wasn’t just John’s livelihood that had been stolen; it was theirs, too.

If one is cruel, or unduly harsh, they could say that John should have seen what was coming - that he should have picked up on the signs and hints, that he should have changed tack, that he should have sold when there was still money to be made and should have prepared his boys for a changing world. But this is unrealistic. Don’t small towns and communities, don’t lovers and families, exist to inoculate us from the temperamental tides of the larger world? Don’t they exist to create shelter from life’s great fires?

John couldn’t changed tack any easier than I could have left Susanna. We held onto what we knew and what we loved because we are human and holding on is what we do.

John spent two years driving trucks for the men who fired him, making eight dollars an hour. One of his sons went to a small Lutheran college an hour away. He spent a year there before deciding he missed home. The last I saw him, two summers ago, he was delivering pizza; we spent a night driving around down, drinking beer and sharing pizza-delivery stories.

The other son enlisted, went to Iraq for two tours, came home, started drinking, and has spent the last few years living with various girlfriends and racking up a series of DUIs. I didn’t see him the last time I was back, but I heard that he was surviving by working odd jobs for friends of his.

Two years after he lost the farm, John put a shotgun in his mouth.

The funeral was at my great-grandfather’s church, three-quarters of a mile from John’s old farm. My father gave the eulogy, standing in his grandfather’s pulpit.

That’s a story you wouldn’t know if you just drove through Midwest, one you’d only learn if you stopped for a while and got to know the people. There are plenty of other, less dramatic stories, of course - families losing homes, families unable to pay medical bills, men forced to swallow their pride and work for minimum wage.

Maybe I have no right to tell their story because I left. But they’re my story in the sense that these are the people I love, the people who know me best. And part of the reason I’m beginning to feel so at home here, in Malona, is that I see my family members in these people. I see my father and Uncle John. I see my cousins. And part of me wants, desperately, to try to save them.

But I can’t. Because this is not my home. I got out. I am just passing through.

Eventually, both of us laved in sweat, Yiorgo and I take a breather. Mona comes out from the house, where she is curing olives, with two glasses of water, both garnished with lemon slices. The three of us sit on the ground in the shade of an olive tree. We smell the burning wood, listen to the bees, smell the fecund wetness of early evening - the rich, earthen aroma of a new season.

“Thank you, for your help,” Yiorgo says.

“Of course. It’s good to work.”

Yiorgo smiles, as if work being good was something he hadn’t thought about in decades. He looks around the property, taking it in. Yiorgo’s introspection surprises me. Perhaps, like Alan says, he is not terribly smart. But he’s earnest, and things are very important to him.

“This is good land,” he says. “My father’s. My brother and me, we grew up here.”

“Where is your brother now?”

Yiorgo waves his hand dismissively. It’s a gesture I know well from my own relatives. It signifies, They are off in the world; they are lost; they are dead to me. It’s a gesture my father would make, back in the Midwest, when asked about my brother, during those years when Jackson truly was lost. I don’t press the question. The answer is always more complicated, always too complicated for words. They are dead to you, but only because they have chosen to be; you would welcome them back, gladly. This, I suppose, is how I currently feel about Susanna. Yiorgo smiles privately to himself, some memory of childhood that means more to him than he could possibly convey. Though I wish he’d try. I bet it’s a good story.

“What do you think, Nathan?”

“About what?”

“About land. About my land. Do you think, like Alan, that I should sell?”

The question catches me off guard, and I fall silent for a moment. Part of me wants to tell him that, yes, for the love of God, he has to sell. That whatever he or El Presidente wants to think, love is not enough in this world, at least not anymore, and maybe it never was to begin with. That there are forces at work that don’t care about anything other than profit, and that these forces are like a wildfire gone beyond control, and that they won’t stop until they’ve spread to every corner of the world and every single person is forced to live by their rules - massive debt, tedious jobs, a world where everyone is exploiter or exploited, and there’s no ground in-between for those who want to exist out here, on the periphery, with Yiorgo and El Presidente and Jack Gilbert and me. For the love of God, Yiorgo, the world is changing, and none of us can stop it. All we can do is look out for ourselves, is worry about our own survival. We’ve all been thrown into the ocean, and this land, right here, is a life line that someone has thrown you. Grab it. Grab and don’t look back.

But part of me wants to say: fuck that. This is your blood. This is your father, and your brother, your brother who is somewhere lost to that world. This is where you grew up, where you fell in love, where you live with the woman you love. You’ve built a life from this land, and for the love of God, Yiorgo, how can you let go of that, all that history, all those roots? Because maybe, someday, that lost brother of yours won’t be lost anymore. Maybe someday he’ll be back. And then the two of you can walk this land together, the land where you grew up, and you can smell the trees and the earth, and maybe, just maybe, love will be enough.

My answer feels profoundly important. It feels like the kind of thing that will tell everyone what kind of man I am - whether I’m here as one of those tourist interlopers, selfishly seeking some authentic experience from these people, an experience that I can take with me when I leave and return to that world of capital and destruction; or whether I’m here for something deeper, whether I’m here because I care about these people and their stories, and whether I’m willing to die with them, to die a pyrrhic death in the face of insurmountable odds.

And the truth is that I do not know.

This is what I tell Yiorgo:

“I don’t know.”

He shakes his head and stares out across the earth, towards some distant point in his memory. Finally, he stands up. As he walks past me, he stops briefly, placing a hand on my shoulder. He leaves it there for just a second. He makes a soft noise in his throat, not an admonishment, but something disappointed. And then he goes back to work.

There is a third option, of course. One I had not considered. To be the kind of man who chooses neither side and who fights for nothing. To be the kind of man who is blown around on the winds of other people’s decisions, hedging his bets, refusing to make the difficult choices. To be the kind of man who passes through and vanishes, leaving no trace he was ever there.