An August Blue Moon
As August 2023 came to an end, a second full moon appeared overhead high above the tall pines and Douglas firs that surround our home in the Sierra Foothills. Very late that night, I walked to the bottom of the driveway and stood in the middle of the quiet road that connects me to this world we’ve inhabited since the spring of 2021. The sky was illuminated by the moon’s brilliant light as I tipped my head skyward and sent a goodnight kiss in the direction of the Lodge where Kit’s rehab continues.
As I stood in the quiet and majesty of this second full moon in what has been a busy and challenging month, the night reminded me of the first time Kit and I witnessed a blue moon back in the summer of 1996. Such moments are rare and deserve retelling.
It was early summer in Missouri and our farmer friends Orion and Glen Beckmeyer had been combining since six o'clock in the morning in the Hartsburg Bottoms—rich land that the family has farmed for generations. Barbara and Linda, their wives, had spent the morning cleaning and bagging soybeans that had just been harvested to take some of the load off the two brothers who were now deep into the June wheat harvest.
After a call from Barbara who knew I loved photographing and writing about their family farm operation, Kit volunteered to help bag soybeans, and I offered to bring lunch over around noon. When Orion and his son-in-law Brad arrived for lunch awhile later, their faces were covered with a coat of fine dust. Crow's feet spread out from the edges of their suntanned faces, dry from long days of moving through clouds of blowing wheat dust stirred up by their giant combining and plowing machinery. It was one o'clock, and their workday was not yet half over.
Around 6:30 that evening, Kit and I drove out to the Hartsburg Lion's Club Park for a fish fry political fundraiser. It was still 90° without a breath of a breeze to cool down the crowd. At 8:30 when the hot sun had finally started its slow decline, Kit suggested that we drive out to the Bottoms and take Orion and Glen a cold beer.
Great idea I thought, and before long I’d headed my red Chevy pickup west along Hartsburg Bottom Road, while Kit tried to keep three cups of beer balanced on his knees. That evening, the fields were awash in amber waves of wheat, rising and falling on the breezes that come up just as the sun begins to set. Corn stalks that we could almost touch out each side of the truck were tall and starting to tassel.
Searching for the lights of the Beckmeyer combine and tractors, Kit and I found ourselves on the narrow road that runs atop the levee, looking at fields of wheat to our left and the Missouri River creeping in on the wetlands to our right. "I’m driving my Chevy on the levee!" I joked nervously, wondering how I’d ever get us turned around. It was then that we saw the lights of the combine and a route leading from the levee down to our friends. In a field of freshly cut wheat the color of a harvest moon, we parked and walked toward the lights flooding from the giant combine coming our way.
When the fork-filled, wheat-thrashing, wide-grinning, diesel-powered, mechanized mouth of the combine finally came to a noisy halt, wheat grain began to pour through a funnel from the innards of the combine into the bed of a two-ton grain truck. Already, two tractors were busy double cropping their fields, plowing under the wheat stubble in preparation for planting the soybeans.
This was the very field where Orion and Glen lived as kids with their parents and dangled their feet in the river when it flooded in 1942 and again in '43. When it flooded again in 1944 and water spread from bluff to bluff across the Bottoms, Al and Erna Beckmeyer relocated the family upslope.
The scene was illuminated by a blue moon--the term for the second full moon in a month. We listened to a train passing somewhere across the Missouri and the levee that is all that holds the river back from these fields. We had driven into the heart of the country and been, for those few magic moments, connected to the June wheat harvest going on across the American Heartland.
As we left our friends and Kit inched the truck by the light of the moon back onto the levee road, I thought to myself, "What a day it has been! Only once in a blue moon, does it get any sweeter than this."