Thursday, October 09, 2003
Harvest.
A pair of Massey Ferguson 8570s showed up on my road today to harvest the beans. Spewing a stream of chaff (probably everything but the beans) behind, they collected beans in a hopper that was emptied into a large farm truck. I watched the truck pass. The boy in the passenger seat wore a too big cap. It rested on his ears.
Seeing the boy riding along reminded me of riding with my grandfather many years ago as he collected soybeans in Clark County IL for his employer, Cole and Cole. Gramps had retired from farming and he worked at the land company. I remember riding with him when I visited. He said he had to “see a feller” and would turn the truck at a farm drive and tell me to wait in the cab. The farmer would meet him in front of the truck and they would shake hands, lean on the fence, and rearrange the gravel with the toe of a boot and chew on just pulled weeds until another handshake. I wondered about these conversations, mysterious as those between pitcher and coach on the mound. Today I see them as negotiations and Gramps, my kind grandfather, as a bill collector.
After a while, he would back his empty truck to where it could be filled with the crop of the day, often soybeans. Gramps said they were used for lots of things and some people ate them. Sometimes he would let me ride in the back with the beans and sometimes not. I would always take his cap and wear it. He just smiled and didn’t try to get it back until after I had forgotten about it and then he’d be wearing it again although I never saw him take it.
It would be fun, just once, to drive the Massey Ferguson 8570 from the closed compartment safe from clouds of ground up soybean stalks. I watched their progress from inside the house in clean air except when I went out to take a photo. As the sun set, the flakes of dust were golden in its rays.
After dark, these rotary combines shine powerful headlights onto the fields adding extra hours to Indiana harvest time.
