Wheat Harvests Across Time
All across the Midwest, farmers are busy making hay while the sun shines and the moon moves again toward full. Driving into town along a country road, I pass fields of corn, wheat, soybeans and sorghum now being harvested. When I began writing a quarter of a century ago, I drove down to the Hartsburg Bottoms located between majestic limestone bluffs and the Missouri River. Armed with my camera and a notebook, I was eager to capture local farmers at work harvesting fields of corn and wheat. I simply couldn’t write about the harvest underway until I’d experienced it firsthand.
I didn’t grow up on a farm like my father who, at the age of 26, masterfully piloted a massive B-29 Superfortress over the Pacific during the final months of WWII. While machines were a part of his DNA, I inherited his gardening genes and curly hair. One autumn afternoon in 1994, I parked my Chevy pickup at the edge of a wheat field where I could see dust rising and waited for my friend Orion and his rust-red International Harvester combine to appear. As he approached, I waved. As if on command, the fork-filled, wheat-thrashing, wide-grinning, diesel-powered, mechanized mouth of the combine finally came to a noisy halt in front of me. With that, I climbed aboard the massive beast and join Orion inside the combine’s glassed-in cab.
Perched high above the ground, I looked down like a pilot would at the landscape below as Orion maneuvered the combine through rows of waving wheat. When it was time to transfer his grain load, I climbed outside with my camera, leaned into the door of the cab, hooked an arm through a nearby red bar, and watched as golden grain began to pour through a funnel from the innards of the combine into the bed of a two-ton grain truck parked next to the road.
Remembering that experience, I feel a powerful connection to my father today. Seventy-five Octobers ago, Dad was en route home from the Pacific the day I was born, eager to meet me for the first time. All these years later, I’d love to be able to tell him that as off-kilter as the country seems right now, farmers are out in their fields from dawn to dark, harvesting grain to feed a world hungry for food security.