The harvest

By Paulette Tobin 8/1/00

A famous passage in the book of Ecclesiastes tells us everything has a season. There is a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, the Good Book says, and here in the Dakotas and all over the Midwest, the time of harvest is drawing near.

Those of us who grew up on the farm remember those days well, when - if all had gone well and the rains had fallen in a fairly reliable manner - the whole earth seemed to turn a tawny gold and brown. Each day seemed hot as an oven, and yet there was a sense that there wasn't a moment to be wasted. You can't really schedule the harvest anymore than you can schedule childbirth. It comes when it's ready. There's a lot of waiting for the moment of ripening, and then a lot of hard work to get the job done.

Those golden harvest days were what our parents worked for all year long, but they were tense days, too. There was so much to do, so much that could go wrong. A breakdown of equipment could delay the harvest past its optimal time. A sudden wind and hail storm could ruin everything and lay waste to the fields.

My father worked so hard during the harvest. I remember him riding the combine all day - no air-conditioned cab in those days - with a paper dust mask over his face to protect him from the dirt and chaff that made him sick. Then there would be grain to unload and shovel into bins. I remember carrying lunch out to him in the field in a pail. He would sit in the shade of the big tire and silently eat his sandwiches, cake and pop. At supper, too, he was often too tired to talk or even smile. As children, we didn't understand what an important time this was, how critical the harvest was to our standard of living for the rest of the year. I doubt we were remotely aware of the place of the harvest in the universe, even though our whole lives were so tied to it.

We lived, as they say, close to the land, as opposed to today, when most people seem to have learned everything they know about nature, animals and the harvest from Disney movies. We like to eat the hamburger, but we would rather not think about it coming from the cow. We eat the bread, the beans and potatoes, with little or no appreciation for the process that has brought them to our tables. Doesn't it all just come from the supermarket anyway?

About a month ago, I received the following essay in an email. It was called "A Tribute to Pioneers of the Plains," and, I believe, was written by Steve Miller and published in a rural cooperative magazine or newsletter. It was written as a tribute to the people who came and settled in Kansas. As a daughter of the Plains, I appreciated it very much, and I hope you will, too:

The Tennessean - June 24, 2000

LESSONS LEARNED FROM KANSAS WHEAT FIELDS ARE GOLDEN

(Thanks to Western Electric' Co-op's Dennis Deines for this gem)

TREGO COUNTY, Kan. -- After attending a funeral here the other day, I got on the plane back in Kansas City with a memento from the trip -- a few strands of wheat. A ticking bomb taped to my chest would have gotten fewer stares.

People were dumbfounded at the golden stalks I held. People looked confused. What was this stuff? As if bringing a raw sample of crop into the big city made no sense, like wearing a tux to the beach. The staring continued. Brows furrowed. People whispered. Finally a flight attendant came up, sent by the entire crew.

"We were debating what it is you have there. What in the world is it?"

She was trying to be nice, but condescension seeped through during this, her latest encounter with those wacky passengers. She didn't know it was what she had for breakfast, lunch and supper, too, her daily bread.

The Plains funeral was for an 84 year-old uncle, a lifelong Kansas wheat farmer. Burial was out at the cemetery south of WaKeeney, near the wood-frame Lutheran church that has served these High Plains farm families for more than a century.

Heartfelt eulogies spoke of Uncle Leo as a shy man who was gentle with animals, ingenious at keeping the farm equipment running, faithful to God. He also loved Nashville music, ever since tuning in to WSM in the 1930s, because the signal on the Plains was so strong at night. Leo Mai survived the Dust Bowl, the Depression, bachelorhood and 80 years of bad wheat prices, one of the last of my farmer uncles from a German immigrant family here in western Kansas.

A visit to the Great Plains these days underscores the distance between city and farm life in 2000. In the American mind, the Plains are the great blank, a glamourless stretch of flatland on the way to the Rockies. Yet the Plains feed the world. They make America the second biggest wheat producer on Earth. And before that, the Plains helped define the American character, a history that's now slipping away.

Coronado wandered through in the 1540s, looking for mythical cities of gold. The Comanches and the buffalo watched warily: They knew these gold-lusting European visitors weren't good news. The Indians hung in for three centuries more, before they, and the buffalo, were rubbed out.

Kansas bled from clashes over slavery a decade before the Civil War, then saw a population boom before the century turned. Immigrants came from Russia, Scandinavia, and New England, bringing a self-reliant ethic along with hardy new strains of winter wheat.

Severities of weather were something out of the Bible -- a ghastly locust plague in 1874 devastated the crops. In 1886, wind chills of minus-100 killed the livestock. In the 1930s, dust storms and drought blew hopes away. Yet most people stuck to it and made it bloom again, including my grandparents and their family of six surviving sons and two daughters, my mother included.

It's humbling out here. Standing in the whistling wind, you can hear yourself think, yet your thoughts aren't equal to what you're seeing - a vast treeless horizon that suggests the very curvature of the Earth. (A friendly Kansan at the funeral dinner said he'd been to Nashville recently, and liked the place, but for one thing: "Too many trees!") You realize, out here, that you're actually stationed on a planet, sweeping through a solar system. The wind tells its own narrative -- about the mysteries of creation, the impermanence of human boasts and achievements. CNN's incessant news updates feel far away.

Looking at the tombstones of relatives at the cemetery -- these tough-minded, family-loving people, ethnic Germans who settled here from Russia's Volga River a century ago -- one's mind can't help but consider the brutal forces of change. Depopulation has set in. Family farms are declining. Because of efficient machinery, it takes fewer farmers to work a crop. Because of expensive equipment, it's tougher for young farmers to get started. Some towns are putting their hopes in 24-hour slaughterhouses, run by minimum-wage earners to meet a global economy's new taste for pork.

It's hard to keep the kids on the farm. America's address is in the city, pulled by some unnamed millennial undertow of the consumer age. We know our Limp Bizkit lyrics and cell phone numbers, but we don't know what wheat looks like, or what it costs a struggling farmer to grow it.

Here, the country roads are lonely. But the fiercely golden wheat under the June sky is more beautiful than ever.

(Steve Miller, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, 785 623-3364, [email protected])

(Paulette Haupt Tobin grew up on a farm near Eureka, S.D., and graduated from Eureka High School in 1973. Today she lives in Grand Forks, N.D., and works as a newspaper reporter. You can email her at [email protected])