Remembering the Harvest

Sometimes with pressures of work weighing heavy, at lunch I take a drive away from the industrial area in which I work.  I'll put some bluegrass music on and head east on Highway 90.  It only takes about 8 minutes to get me out of the hustle and bustle of traffic and I find myself between the small towns of Scott and Duson.  I turn south and drive slowly down the road, overlooking ripening rice fields and acres of peace and contentment.  No phones ring here.  No emails beg for answers. A solitary water tower and cell phone tower looms in the distance - a reminder that civilization is out there, but at arms length.

At least here, for the time being, the soil has not yielded to a surveyors instrument and flag, marking out yet another subdivision with a pastoral-sounding name like Live Oak Estates while transforming verdant countryside into grey concrete expanses adorned with flattened fast food soft drink cups and Wal Mart bags blowing across the landscape.

I stop my car and roll down the window and breathe in the smell of ripening grain. It is hot, oppressively hot and humid.  The air is thick.  I am transported back in time to when I farmed. During harvest-time, mornings were spent greasing up the grease fittings on every moving part there was on the combines and tractors. Farming taught me to keep things maintained and to be observant of the condition of your equipment.  We looked over the equipment for now is the time to get parts if you need them.  It is time to fill up your water cooler with ice and make sure you have a good inventory of sunflower seeds to snack on.  The sandwiches and chips and cookies would have been packed the night before in the lunch box.  Around 11 am the dew burns off the rice and it is time to harvest!

The field below is silent, except for the sound that the cattle egret's wings make as he jumps up and takes flight.  Although it is silent now, at 11 am, the throttle of the combine would be moved from 'turtle' to 'rabbit' and the pick up reel begins welcoming the "amber waves of grain" into the throat of the combine.  The hopper begins filling with a river of rice that doesn't stop flowing until quitting time.

I ran the carts sometimes.  The tractor driver running the cart had to keep a close eye out for the combine.  When the unload auger of the combine moved outward, it was time to unload and the cart driver had to be there.  I also ran the trucks.  The truck driver had mostly a lazy job.  I sat under the shade of the bed of the truck and read Tom Clancy and John Grisham novels.  I did push-ups and sit-ups.  I cleaned my fingernails with my pocketknife and I thought (what I thought were) great thoughts, passing the time as I watched the heatwaves dance across the field.  When I heard the unload auger of the combine slow, I prepared myself, getting up and getting a shovel and climbing atop the truck, I would spread the rice so that none would fall out of the truck as I drove the old truck down pothole-filled dirt roads as great billows of dust sprang up behind me.

I would record the number of barrels of rice in each truck on a log that I kept to track crop yield in each field.  Then I would drive the truck to the bins, back the truck up to the pit and dump the rice into the pit where an auger would deliver the rice up and into the bins.  Of course first the pit had to be emptied of water that seeped into the pit along with the occasional frog or snake.  We used a scoop made with an antifreeze jug that had been cut in half with a pocketknife.  I remember the water in the pit smelled sour as the rice fermenting in the summer heat made a powerful aroma and whose smell it was hard to get out of your hands or clothes when you got the water on you.

At the end of the day, the work wasn't over.  The rice inside the bins made a cone that had to be leveled to ensure even drying.  We climbed into the super-heated bins with shovels and began spreading the bins.  The object was to make the cone flat, with an indentation in the middle.  We worked and worked, our backs glistening with sweat, our muscles aching, our eyes burning with dust. When we finally emerged from the bin, the 90+ degree heat outside seemed cool and comforting compared to the oven we had just come from.  We sat on top of the bins, exhausted, but proud of our work.  We blew black boogers out of our noses from all the dust we inhaled in the bins and tried not to think about what got into our lungs.

We climbed down the ladder.  Right behind the bins was a pond.  We would run and jump in the pond and cool off.  Perch nibbled at our toes and we would dive down and feel the cool clay mud.  It had been a long, hot day.  It was hard work, but it was honest work and you felt good about what you had achieved.

As I drive home and see the harvest taking place, all those memories come flooding back to me.  The sights, the smells, the sounds remind me of simpler times.  A big part of me is empty because I couldn't make it farming.  Although we do live on a working farm of sorts, I a big part of me is empty because my kids didn't get to have the same experiences of growing up like I did close to the land.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security.  –Excerpt from Farmer in Chief, written by Michael Pollan, published in the New York Times Magazine on October 12, 2008.