Walking home from the gym today, the slant of the light, the leaves beginning to drop, the warm Indian summer sun transported me right back to late afternoons in my teens, walking home after school, the grunts and thuds of football helmets smacking pads, tuning up for the homecoming game on Friday night. In the back parking lot, classmates would be working on the floats for the homecoming parade, wrestling chicken wire, papier mache, and straw on flatbeds with boasts like “Gone with Wind” (it was movie theme), or “One Life to Live” (soap opera theme). Beyond them, where the school’s parking lot ended, nothing but corn and soybeans.
The fields in late September had turned from green to golden and the farmers were already beginning to harvest by the time homecoming rolled around. I think it was about a week before homecoming in fact that Danny Boerjan lost his leg to a combine.
Although we lived in town, October was “bean season” for us. Many October nights the phone would ring at 1 or 2 in the morning, and the light in mom and dad’s bedroom would flick on. Moments later I’d hear the truck door slam as dad headed to the elevator to weigh and unload another truckbed of corn. Sometimes, if the call came early enough, I’d go along. There’s nothing quite so mesmerizing as cool corn kernels rushing over your hands as they pour out of the truck into the pit below.
For my dad, the seasons no longer dictated his life as they had during his childhood in the 1920s. “Bean season” was the exception, and I think he dreaded it so because it reminded him of his early life on the farm. Then, with his dad and brothers farming 160 acres mostly by hand and horses, they worked from sun-up to sundown. Days during the harvests were even longer–and tinged with worry. It was the harvest after all that paid the $7.25 / acre of rent, which was due once a year in November. It was the time when they sold the 100 hogs, and slaughtered the geese for Thanksgiving sales. “What you didn’t eat, you sold for income,” he told me recently. The only respite was the month off from milking cows.
“October 15 was when we started harvesting the corn,” he told me as we sat outside on their back porch over the summer, “and we wouldn’t finish until right around Thanksgiving if we was lucky.” They’d harvest with draft horses, two rows of corn at a time.
“I never cared for horses at that time. I was hoping dad would get a tractor, which he did in 1939. With horses, flies would bother them and they’d switch and get tangled in the reins. It was always something with them.”
Their take was about 70 cents a bushel on corn, but during the depths of the Depression, it would plummet to 10 cents. “Mother would sell the old hens to VandeCamps for soup in those years, and dad would sell apples. We had a good-sized apple orchard and Dad usually took the apples in to Waterloo in the Model T. He’d park in a residential area and sell them for a $1 bushel during the Depression. If he sold six bushel, he figured he had a good day. After times got better he didn’t need to do that anymore.”
It was also in October when they’d harvest their second crop of oats to mix with corn for feed over the winter. “We’d shock the oats: nine bundles together. The ninth was the cap—we’d bend the tops down and lay on top and it’d shed the rain. They’d go through a sweat—for a few days they were real damp and wet. Then the wind would dry them out. After that we’d thrash out the oats and use the straw for bedding. In the bigger barn, we’d put the oats in the barn with the hay. Otherwise, we’d stack it outside.”
“Horses got oats in the morning and night all during the summer. During the winter, we’d feed them corn. They was too sensitive to eat corn in the summer—couldn’t stand the heat if they ate it. Chickens got oats, hogs got oats. But in the winter, we’d mix in some corn so they wouldn’t lose too much weight.”
While the men were in the fields in those October days and evenings, “mother was canning. We didn’t buy much food at that time—sugar and salt mainly. Mother raised practically everything else. We had two raspberry patches, one red, one black, and a grape arbor. She had potatoes and always a patch of cabbage. Carrots, radishes onions in the spring.”
With the harvest over, and the corn in the crib, the oats stacked for winter, and the pantry set up with Mason jars, they’d cook a goose for Thanksgiving and settle in for the winter. “That’s when we got to sleep in till 6am,” he said with a smile.
Listening to him talk, his memory still sharp after 93 years, I tried to fathom the level of work he put in as a boy, but it was beyond me–and in many ways he’d seen to that, deliberately. He started working with his brothers when he was about 8, and didn’t quit until he went off to the war in the early 1940s. Plowing fields with draft horses, milking cows, churning butter, baling hay, fixing fences– it was a constant cycle of toil. One look at his hands even today and you know how much work shaped his life.
As an adult, he never wanted to return to the farm, although his two brothers continued farming until they retired– both of them mere miles from where they grew up. “Just didn’t like farming,” he said in his usual unsentimental response. Instead, he went into the grain business and suffered through bean season only once a year.
As I walk home today from the gym in the last days of an Indian summer, I no longer hear the football team practicing or look out onto fields of soybeans or corn. Instead I walk home amid the gardeners planting mums and asters in front of the high-rises, and buy my raspberries for $8 a pint at a fancy grocery store with a wine bar. In many respects, this is the American Dream, that we do better than our parents, and that our parents can live long enough to see us grow up, successful in our own right, following a path they helped shape. I can’t help but marvel at how life moves–from a 160-acre farmstead in central Iowa to a small-town homecoming and a cycle dictated by beans and corn, to my life today amid the hubbub of 3 million people doing their own form of toil.
The camper was a 1970s truck camper decked out with fold-down tables and tuck-away drawers for a “home on the road” experience–very modern. Kim and I claimed the “loft” and played gin rummy until the excitement wore off and we fell asleep to the rocking of the road. Cathy, Kim’s older sister, way too cool to hang with us, did her nails on the pull-down kitchen table.
