Harvest Memories

I've never driven a BMW, never even been inside one. In fact, the closest I've come to a BMW was the time a neighbor backed hers into my Chevy Citation.

I've never flown first class, never been sailing (unless you count the time Carl and I sailed a little catamaran in the Bahamas), and never ridden on a train. But I used to operate one of these:





For several summers I drove the combine during wheat harvest, which beat the heck out of driving the truck (no air conditioning) or the grain cart (I lived in fear of running into the combine when unloading "on the go"). I loved it, though admittedly being a girl made it more enjoyable. I didn't have to grease the combine in the morning (I fixed and packed lunch while the guys did that), fix flat tires or solve major problems.

I did, however, have to know what I was doing; after all, a combine is more than an oversized lawn mower. The driver needs to drive fast enough to finish before being rained out or worse, having the wheat destroyed by the next hail storm. But she can't drive so fast that the wheat spits out the back end instead of pouring into the bin. And I learned the hard way that driving too quickly through dense wheat results in a jammed header. More than once I had to climb down from my air conditioned cab into the sweltering Kansas humidity, crawl through the reel and pull out the bunched-up wheat stalks handful by handful, all-the-while dripping sweat and inhaling lung-clogging wheat dust. Ah, those were the days. I won't take the time to explain the maneuvering acrobatics required to remove one of these monsters from a mud puddle.

We often couldn't begin until late morning because the dew caused the wheat's moisutre content to be too high, but I remember cutting past midnight many nights. Farmers work many months to raise a crop that is cut in a few short weeks, so when harvest time rolls around everything else goes by the wayside, even sleep, lest Mother Nature leash some fury that destroys the months of work in a matter of hours.

Here is what prompted this little trip down memory lane. How many town folk can say they've witnessed this in their front yard?




The neighbors across the street backed their combine into our front yard so they could mount their row header. I'm sure the men thought I was some town girl all twitterpated about seeing a combine up close. If they only knew...

In a related story, Pop sent me an e-mail today about some farmers in Norton, Kansas who broke a Guiness world record by cutting 160 acres of wheat in 10 minutes and 15 seconds using 100 combines. They have a Guiness world record for everything, don't they?