| |
LESSONS FROM DAD
My dad loved to work and he love to sweat.
In May and June, as temperatures edged into the eighties, I'd wipe sweat from my face and complain about the heat. Dad would always say, "You can't call this hot...what are you going to do when it really gets hot?!" (I also remember complaining about the cold in early December and Dad would say, "This isn't cold...wait 'til it really gets cold!"
From the time I was old enough to walk, I followed Dad around our southern Minnesota farm. I liked to watch him work. And I was always eager to discover what project he'd think of next on our 160-acre dairy/turkey/corn/alfalfa operation. I didn't necessarily enjoy every task he assigned me, but I was always fascinated by how he never seemed to run out of projects.
In August 1965, suitcase in hand, I headed off to college, leaving behind Mom and Dad and the family farm I'd grown up loving. For the past 25 years I've been a city dweller. Traffic congestion, low-flying airplanes, next-door neighbors and streetlights have replaced the quiet nights, cow pastures, corn fields and stars that surrounded me for my first 18 years.
On a weekend journaling retreat, our facilitator suggested we write about a person who had a significant impact on our life. As my mind drifted back to the years of my youth, a flood of memories about my dad, mostly good, rushed over me. I realized that Dad helped shape who I am today mostly by example. I learned a lot about life just by following him around.
I can't remember what project we were doing that afternoon, but whatever it was got interrupted when Harry, a farmer five miles north, phoned for Dad. "I understand you know how to splice rope," Harry said. "I've got 100 acres of hay down and our rope's broke. Can you fix it?"
"Should be able to," Dad said nonchalantly. And off we went, me in the seat next to Dad. This was a real adventure!
I knew Harry had a lot of kids but I didn't expect they'd all join us in Harry's haymow, the site of the ruptured rope.
"Wow, how did you learn to do that?" asked a boy about my age. "Who taught you?" asked his sister. "Will the rope still be strong enough to lift bales?" asked another brother. Harry's kids had dozens of questions and Dad answered every one as he expertly intertwined the strands of rope from the frayed ends. As Dad toiled, I sat quietly on a hay bale, watching intently and recording memories.
Harry offered to pay Dad, but Dad wouldn't take any money. He said he might need a favor from Harry some day and that was the end of it.
There may have been trucks on other farms that got more use but, at the age of eight, I couldn't imagine it. Ours was a 1950 two-ton Chevrolet and I rode shotgun with Dad over many miles of dusty gravel road.
In the span of a year, that truck hauled hay, oats, corn, lumber, dairy cows to South St. Paul, sawdust for the brooder houses, turkeys from the brooder houses to the range, bagged and bulk feed for the turkey flock and dairy herd, gravel for the driveway, Mom's new washing machine, new equipment from town, and just about anything else that needed to be moved from here to there.
Today when I drive on a bumpy road, I often think of spring trips I took with Dad to the gravel pit. Dad and I would bounce up and down on the seat of that old cab, our heads bumping into the roof from really big bumps. We laughed and sang as the tired springs and washboard road rattled our bones and distorted our voices.
I loved softball. I lived for softball. We played softball three times a day outside our one-room schoolhouse. We played softball at 4-H Club meetings. We played it at church gatherings. But the best games were always when the kids played the dads.
Even though we knew our dads' errors were more often intentional than natural, we competed like it was the last game of the World Series. Except, that is, when it was my dad's turn to bat. Then I secretly wanted to see him crunch another towering fly ball past our centerfielder's head. Dad's powerful swing and the long flight of the ball would live on in my daydreams for weeks.
I saw so many things born and bred by the time I went off to seventh grade in town that some of the stories and humor of my new classmates seemed a bit naive. Looking back, I knew how to spot a cow in heat many years prior to understanding what "heat" meant in the first place. I suppose I asked Dad often enough, and I'm sure he had some rehearsed explanation, but to me, checking for heat was just something we did every day, like milking cows and eating breakfast. Is was an everyday routine: Spot cows in heat, call the AI (artificial insemination) technician, watch him pluck that capsule from the smoky nitrogen tank, deposit it deep into Samantha or Betty, and nine months later, if we were lucky, we'd have a dandy heifer calf.
Not every calf came easy. The calf I remember most vividly was born just outside the back door of our barn with Dad playing the role of veterinarian and midwife. When the mother cow's eyes began bulging and she started groaning like there wasn't going to be a tomorrow, Dad knew it was time to act.
Lying on her side, the cow seemed to know that Dad was going to help her through this ordeal. The first step was to reposition the breached calf. How Dad knew what to do I can't explain. Maybe he didn't know and simply realized that it was a choice between doing something or losing the cow and the calf.
I watched as Dad's hands groped deep inside the cow's birth canal for clues. After a minute I spotted a foot, then another foot appeared. Following Dad's step-by-step instructions, I fastened a rope-and-pulley fence stretcher to a nearby fence post with a bowline knot. Dad fastened the rope from the other end of the fence stretcher to the two legs and gave me the order to begin adding tension.
I pulled tentatively at first, then harder, as Dad maneuvered the calf's head in line to follow the two front feet. "Okay, keep it up, you're doing fine," he said. I wasn't sure if he was talking to me or to the cow. Sweat poured off his eyebrows as his hands searched for a handle, something to grip. Then suddenly, there she was, a huge, black-headed heifer calf. The mother strained her head up off the dry manure clumps to first inspect her newborn, then to peer at Dad, as if to say, "Thanks for the assist."
I must have been a teenager before I realized that New Year's Eve was, for many, a time for partying and excess. For at least my first dozen years of life, New Year's Eve meant a much-anticipated gathering of families at our little country church.
Folks of all ages began gathering about 8 pm for several hours of socializing, games and contests. Following a potluck "lunch" of sandwiches and cake served about 10 pm, we gathered in the sanctuary for a countdown-to-midnight hymn fest and worship service. I remember sitting close to Dad and twisting his wrist so I could read his watch as the minute hand climbed closer to midnight. We sang familiar hymns, heard wise words from our minister, and shared prayers about the year just ended and the year to come.
When just minutes separated the old year from the new, we sat in silence, each alone with his or her thoughts. Then, as the hands on Dad's watch lined up on the 12, anticipation turned to joy as the church bell high in the steeple pierced the cold winter air with its rhythmic peal. A new year had arrived, and I had experienced it in a way I've never experienced since: sitting next to my dad in a little country church.
The day of the year Dad enjoyed the most, I think, was the late-summer day we sent our flock of fattened turkeys to market. Early in the morning, a convoy of giant semi-trucks stacked with empty steel cages rolled into our yard. The drivers of those trucks were some of the saltiest, most-memorable characters I'd ever encountered.
Soon we were all on location doing our assigned jobs. One by one, we'd catch and hand-pass thousands of turkeys to the last men on the line, who stuffed the bewildered birds into the cages. It was hard work. But unlike with horses or cows, farmers don't get emotionally attached to turkeys. We kept working throughout the afternoon, anticipating the satisfaction of stuffing the last squawking bird into a cage.
Throughout the spring and summer we had fed, watered, medicated and fenced those feathered creatures. At least once a week, more often if it rained, we moved the entire turkey village - steel posts, woven-wire fence and dozens of feeders, waterers and roosting sheds - to fresh alfalfa ground. We protected them from night attacks from raccoons and fox by lighting flares and by having one of us boys and our farm dog sleep in a movable shack next to the flock. Now a fleet of trucks was heading down the road, stuffed to the limit with the fruits of our labor. And we were standing in a quiet, empty, almost-eerie alfalfa field. Sad? Are you kidding? It was time for Dad to throw the biggest ice cream party you could imagine. We ate it by the gallon. No more turkeys 'til spring - that was cause for celebration.
We were hauling two wagonloads of baled hay late one summer afternoon. My two older brothers were sitting high up on the bales on the front wagon. Dad was driving the tractor. I was standing on the drawbar with an arm slung over the back of the tractor seat.
Riding up there with my brothers looked like more fun than standing where I was so I attempted an acrobatic walk to the wagon. I made it half way, then lost my balance and tumbled to the right. Alerted by my brothers' screams, Dad turned around just as the hair on the top of my head passed under the left-front wagon wheel. Dad jumped down to inspect my crumpled body even before the tractor and wagons had skidded to a complete stop. More surprised than broken, I waited for Dad's angry lecture to begin. But Dad didn't shout this time - I guess at that moment he realized I had survived favorable odds for ending up dead.
I sat next to Dad on the tractor seat the rest of the way to the barn.
I spent countless hours fishing in Silver Creek, the lazy stream that snaked its way through our cow pasture. Silver Creek could always be counted on to yield a bucketful of "chubs" - 3- to 12-inch silvery fish with enough spunk to pull our red-and-white bobbers below the creek's surface. Most days, we'd toss the chubs back into the creek and catch them again. But every couple of weeks during the summer, Dad would issue the command that was music to my ears: "Better catch a couple dozen chubs," he say. "We're going fishing tonight."
Never was an order followed with more enthusiasm. My brothers and I took turns muscling a 5-gallon pail of creek water and squirming chubs straight to the cow tank, where we'd let them swim for a couple of hours while we milked cows and did other chores. Then off we went to Pearson's Lake.
To get to the lake, we had to drive through a farmer's wooded pasture. Dad would pay the farmer a dollar for the use of rowboat and then we'd carefully unhook and re-hook the electric fence gates that kept the cows in the pasture separating the farmer's barn from the lake. Paraphrasing Dr. Seuss' McElligot's Pool (one of my favorite boyhood stories), "You never knew what you might catch in Pearson's Lake!" On a bad night, we always caught giant bullheads - upwards of two pounds. And on a good night, a stringerful of hefty northern pike would cause more commotion in our small boat than a hailstorm on a tin roof. Of the hundreds of fishing trips I've taken in my life, I think those evening outings with Dad to Pearson's Lake are the most memorable.
If there's a lesson in all this, it may be that parents - especially farm parents - teach more by what they do than by what they say. In all those years on the farm, I can't recall a single time when Dad sat me down and said "Son, this is what life is about. Here's what you need to know." But as I reflect back, Dad did teach me what life is about. And he did teach me what I needed to know. I learned it by watching him work. By following him around. By observing how he treated other people. But sitting next to him in church every Sunday. And by doing the things he told me to do.
Dad taught me how to work and how to sweat. And the lessons have served me well, even if I have lived in the city these past 25 years.
|
|
|
 |
| |
PUTTING DOWN ROOTS:
A Delightful Blend of
Gardening Wisdom, Wit
and Whimsy
$10 + $2 for shipping
by Cliff Johnson |
 |
 |
| |
|
