THE WITNESS OF COMBINES* BY KENT MEYERS AN APPRECIATION

The Witness of Combines by Kent Meyers

is a book I was born to write about: I wrote a memoir of a farm childhood; Meyers has written a memoir of a farm childhood. In one sense, we have written the same book. The rituals of life on the farm where Meyers grew up were pretty much the same as on the farm where I grew up, the same rituals day after day, year after year. In another sense, we have written quite different books, where Meyers' chapters are more properly essays enclosing stories out of memory, and my book alternates memory and contemporary journal entry. The question is: how do you handle the material? It's pretty much the same material, but we chose to handle it differently. I say "pretty much the same material." Meyers' father died when Kent was 16 years old; my father is still alive. They put up silage on their farm; we did not. Meyers spends a whole essay on the hammermill they used to grind feed for the cattle every Saturday morning, and I only mentioned ours. I spent a whole chapter on shelling corn, and he didn't. I castrated pigs, and I don't think he did. Both of us have a chapter about chickens, and we both end up butchering them. Meyers feels about physical work pretty much the way I do. I guess if you grow up on the farm, that stays with you. In my piece, "Shelling Corn," I spoke of labor this way:

Ah, the poetry of scooping corn! The sheer blood rush of it, the physical pulse of motion, the clock work turn and return, the long muscles of one's back pulling and reaching and pulling. The slide of aluminum shovel over the wooden floor, under and into the corn, a little rock of the shovel to work corn loose, the turn and sweep and shove of it. Unless you've done physical labor and loved physical labor you cannot fully appreciate the joy of it, the intense physical release of it, the silver tingle and jangle and run of it, the animal part of you functioning fully, your heart pumping, your blood screaming yes, yes, yes.

In his essay on "Working," Meyers says:

I am sometimes refreshed by, say, shoveling snow, and I feel the old rhythms in it, the musical attunement of body to the task, and I'm glad the snow fell to make this soaring movement necessary, to drag me from the house and reconnect me to my blood and breath, and to the physical world.

Work is central to life, especially to life on a farm. More than anything else, Meyers says, "the cattle shaped our time and informed the way we lived our daily lives." Only once during his childhood was the family away from those cattle overnight, and even then the oldest boy stayed home to take care of the beasts. Those cattle, always and everywhere:

By the time we finished chores in the winter, including bedding the cattle down with straw scattered in the barns, it was dark, and we walked under the stars to the house for supper, as we had walked out of the house under the stars that morning.

While working his way through college, Meyers had a job at Trademark Homes building modular houses. He felt as if he were part of a machine turning out cheap pre-fabs:

I came to that job with immense experience in hard and independent labor, and a love for it - for sweat, for the changes the body can accomplish in the world, for the rhythms the body discovers in even the most boring tasks and the rhythms people find in each other - such intimate knowledge - when they are working together: brother passing brother down the lines of hungry heads [of cattle]; stepping away from the small door in the silo, having thrown my forkful of silage down the chute a half-second before Kevin's fork whizzes through the same where I'd been, he not even looking to see if I've left it, as, in a few more seconds, I'll slash my fork not looking through the space he's emptied; crawling into the haymow to throw down hay to Joel or Colin waiting below for it, the decision having been made between us who will do which job, no order or command but only the mutual knowledge that each half of the job is necessary, and if one half is harder, then tomorrow the roles will be reversed.

To move from this, from work as self-knowledge and world-knowledge, work as the most intimate way to know another person - a knowledge of bone and joint and pulse, a knowledge of another contained in your own body, in the way it slows down or speeds up to maintain pace - work intermixed with awe at stars, at the winter, at the sun coming up over a flat, white, barren landscape, sometimes a pure red ball, sometimes boiling and aflame with clouds, awe at how cattle carry frost on their backs, at how horseflies cut loud, iridescent curves, seeking blood and opportunity - to move from all this to a whistle, an assembly line, a boss who tells you what to do and how fast to do it, is not in any manner to move from work to work. It is to move from lived life to prison, from responsibility to the temptation to sabotage, from expansion of body and mind to their constriction and atrophying.

The essay on "Working" ends this way:

The discovery - as opposed to the imposition - of rhythms in work, like the discovery of rhythm elsewhere - in language, in music, dance, waves, the seasonal return of the stars, the flap and glide of a bird, the flow of sports - is a satisfaction, sometimes a deep and abiding joy. Feeding the cattle allowed the discovery of rhythm within rhythm, a polyphony so complex it takes a whole life to understand and appreciate it.

At the deepest, bass level, the longest rhythms were the stories of the land itself, and of how generations had made a living on it, of how my grandparents had arrived on it, farmed it, how my father had taken it over, how he had milked cows and then changed to beef cattle - a slow development in wavelengths of decades.

Above this, in the baritone wavelengths of years, was the annual arrival of the new, lost calves, their wariness and increasing familiarity, their eventual disappearance into another truck - a gentle, cruel, common, extraordinary cycle, sustaining and informing everything else.

The tenor, diurnal rhythm of chores shaped our days, the work that began before breakfast, the cattle fed before we ate, and then fed again in the middle of the afternoon in summer, or wedged against the night in winter.

Within this was the alto rhythm of working together, a rhythm refined so that brother could pass brother in the [feed] bunks without interference, so that the rusty silage forks swinging through space met only an open door and not a brother's leg. There was the roll of shoulders, the bending of legs, the entire body moving up from the ground, unfolding to send a scoop of corn through the air in a lovely, fading arc into the hammermill.

Finally, there were the autonomous, soprano rhythms of the body - blood pounding in the temples, winter breath clouding vision, the limit that the body reaches, known without thought: this can be sustained, right here, until the time comes for a break, until the hammermill is full or the cattle fed or the barn yellow with straw.

This is what remains - the memory and knowledge of a music - after the sweat has dried, the muscles relaxed, the heart quieted its pounding, and the meandering paths of the cattle covered by weeds, the shuffle of hooves receded into wind, the brothers gone to separate lives, and the farm itself passed into another cycle, as have the generations.

Meyers' essay about the hammermill is properly called "Straightening the Hammermill" and it is a testament to farmboy ingenuity. His brother, pulling the hammermill, had turned too short and knocked "the pulleys eight inches out of line, cocking the bearings, twisting and buckling the heavy angle iron of the frame." The Meyers' boys ran the farm for a year after their father's death from a massive heart attack. Dad was not there to deal with the bent shaft, and "We had gone beyond mere mistake, beyond even disaster. We had done the impossible." There were only two feedings left in the wagon for the cattle and the boys had to find a solution within twenty-four hours. The Handyman jack, Meyers says, "seemed our best chance for straightening the hammermill.

But as we tried to fit the jack in, using various angles and bases, trying it with and without a log chain, the problem proved more and more intractable. Either there wasn't enough room to work the lever, or else the base slipped off the iron. We tried for at least an hour, until we had to do chores.

Then after supper Meyers returned to the problem. He sat on the hitch in the rear light of the International 560 "and stared into the shadows at the wild, tangled angles of the metal." He didn't move. He didn't experiment with any possibilities. He simply sat there and tried to see the solution. "But everything I imagined failed." And when he finally went off to bed, "that metal was still angled behind my eyelids, as if it had become my own veins, the branchings and bendings of my blood."

Next morning, the boys did chores, then Meyers went back to the hammermill, to contemplate the problem again.

But barely had I sat down when one of the most powerful changes in perception I've ever experienced occurred to me.... In a flash, my vision reversed, and I saw the solution. What had been in one moment distorted and impossible became in the next completely clear and simple, the vectors of force direct and straight, the placement of the jack exact.

Only he'd have to use a different jack.

Whatever happened, it was an instantaneous and complete revolution in my perception - so complete that I couldn't even see the complications any more.

Isn't this of the very essence of farm culture? No one else to depend on, so you depend on yourself, and you accomplish stupendous if unheralded feats.

In some ways even now that moment seems endowed with more than ordinary possibilities. I have since learned, for instance, how incredibly difficult it can be to align two pulleys that have been misaligned, and I realize that the chances of my straightening the hammermill simply by sticking a jack in there and unbending the metal was miniscule at best. At the time, however, I could actually envision how the metal would unbend.

"I won't get mystical," Meyers tells us, "and say he [his father] was there guiding me as I tried to fix the hammermill."

Yet in a completely real and nonmystical way, he was. In a sense I finished for him a small part of his life that he died too soon to finish.... When the hammermill was ruined I had within me the way he looked at things, the way he worked and approached problems.

In the years he'd worked around the hammermill, Meyers thinks, he'd gained something from his father, "some meaning, some family culture, some true and real myth extending beyond my own life and embedded deeply in my father." Meyers could look with his father's eyes and think with his father's mind, and then with his own mind solve a new problem, making his father's "ways of knowing useful to me and my world."

As a way of passing on one's life, Meyers thinks, words may be second-order story-telling, "less powerful and direct than the silence that occurs when we simply work with someone, doing the necessary things that belong to that person's life."

Meyers admired his father, as I admire mine, for something deep and true in the man's character:

He planted straight corn rows not because they increased his yield or because anyone else cared, but because he liked them, because he liked them, liked the look of the land in straight rows, because it was his farm, because it expressed him. Those rows were a product not of necessity but of will, desire, and quiet passion.

What a lovely tribute to his father. And what a testament to farmboy ingenuity "Straightening the Hammermill" is.

Knowledge passes not only from father to son. A father can acknowledge his son's skills surpassing his own. Before his father died, Meyers took a welding class in high school. Welding came easily for the young man and he did it well. One day Meyers' father simply handed the welding wand over to his son:

He recognized I had surpassed him in a skill important to his livelihood. I accepted the wand with pride, flipped the helmet down, and set to work, running beads of hot metal up and down the shares, loving the way they solidified like ridged fossils.

Meyers' has plenty of admiration for his mother as well as his father. You can see that admiration in the simple arithmetic of the canning his mother did:

120 quarts of tomatoes.
50 quarts of string beans.
80 quarts of sweet corn.
30 quarts of sauerkraut.
50 quarts of pickles.
70 quarts of applesauce.

And those were just the crops she grew. Add the fruits she bought in wooden crates fromPaul Tempel's store in town, and the numbers increase:

70 quarts of peaches.
40 quarts of cherries.
30 quarts of apricots.
20 quarts of pears.

These are the numbers of necessity.

You also see admiration in Meyers' telling of the time his father came into the house after a hard day's work:

He recognized and honored the difficulties of my mother's position; she says he once came in from an exhausting day outside, the heat and humidity unbearable, drenched with sweat, needing water, to find her dealing with several crying children, the preparations for a meal scattered on the kitchen counters, the unnerving chaos of family. He removed his straw hat, soaked through with sweat, filled a glass with water from the tap, drank it, and turned to her. "I swear, I'd rather have my job than yours," he said.

A simple statement, but it redeemed and honored her, and she never forgot it. It was, in her own words, one of the nicest thing he ever said to her.

That is how we come to larger understanding, from daily chores to weekly grinding of feed, the cycle of the seasons, the turn and return of the year; from the performance of routine work such as picking rocks out of the fields every spring:

Every year the plow found new rocks, and every spring we picked them up. They seemed to swim upwards through the earth, floating as if in a dream of time through the subsoil and clay from some calving place of rock, some dark, hard womb. Some people say that frost heaves them to the surface, others that wind erosion gradually uncovers them, but however they arrive, they arrive, no matter how carefully they have been picked up the year before.

These rocks were buried by glacier during the last Ice Age, the same glacier that carved the famous ten thousand lakes of Minnesota. In spite of the drudgery and hard work of picking up rocks, I was enthralled by the notion of handling something dropped by glaciers thousands of years ago. The rocks became a focus for my imagination, a lens through which I saw the past and present, and realized they were vastly different and yet connected....

Picking rocks out of the fields was an immediate and personal connection to a different time and a force beyond imagination. In digging out the rocks we belonged to that force. Even if I hated the work, I knew I was undoing the work of a glacier, and it made me a part of that great thing. I felt time not as something day-to-day but as continuous and whole, as if the smell of mastodon remained on the rocks we hoisted out of the ground and threw onto the bale rack. And perhaps it did.

He came to greater understanding with the killing of chickens. The first time his father said Meyers could kill the chickens at butchering time, the boy almost wanted to back out of it:

But I couldn't. He was watching, and I suddenly understood that if I didn't do this, he would have to. I sensed at a wordless level that he had never enjoyed it, had never seen the fun we saw in it, that it was an obligation to him - a have-to, not a want-to. If I didn't go through with it, he would.

You kill the chicken, and you never forget the look of the chicken's head separated from the rest of the creature:

The eyelid of the chicken's head lying on the block blinked twice, slowly, the eye with each blink losing light and glitter, the comb paling and fading, until lid and comb both were bluish-white.

And what did Meyers learn at a tender age?

Never after that could I laugh and skip at chicken-killing time. I didn't protest it, didn't refuse to eat chicken or quit relishing its flavor. I wasn't sickened by what we did. I was simply no longer above or ignorant of death.

In the year after their father's death, those Meyers boys, all of them in high school or younger, ran the farm. They fed and bedded and sorted and sold the cattle. They planted and cultivated and harvested the crops. Neighbors helped out at times but mostly stood back and watched with admiration. Those farm boys were doing what had to be done.

Then it came time to sell the farm and the equipment. After two generations of recurring and eternal annual cycles on that farm, something had ended.

An auction sale is like a certification of loss, a stamp of certainty. Nothing makes a decision more clear and solid than to see someone you don't know climb onto the seat of a tractor you've driven since you were ten and start it up and put it in gear and, once on the driveway, open the throttle so that the tractor emits its familiar roar, pours a single cloud of blue smoke out its exhaust, and follows the diminishing perspective of the driveway up to the county road, its roar thinning as its outline does, until tractor and stranger are gone altogether, together. After everything is gone, emptiness is left. Space. When you walk in it, you hear your life echoing.

And so Meyers went off to college, off to a life of his own separate from the rhythms of the farm. He took a wife, he fathered children of his own. Yet, while you can take the boy off the farm, you can't get the farm out of the boy. Meyers felt the need to go back and see the farm again, the place he had grown up. What is this need to go back? It tugged at me, too, as I wrote Curlew: Home. The land won't let go. Meyers says:

We are formed by our surroundings, and our surroundings contain stories that, if we learn them, form us too. The landscape of the northern prairie, which seems so passive, changeless, and lacking in surprise, is in fact a place of power and mystery to those who know its story and who carry that story on, a core of coolness in their hearts as they stoop in the sun to a rock, lift it off the earth and hold it, smelling a strange, musty scent deeper than earth, as the sky revolves above them, and from the north a cool wind springs.

So Meyers returned to the old farm, he walked the farmyard, he wondered:

Is it possible that all those years I spent treading this spot of land, working it, sweating on it, dripping blood upon it time and again from some cut, some gash, some rip delivered by tool or tin or machine or fall - is it possible that all those years have washed away, that sweat and blood have grown into greenness until not even this dog [belonging to the new owners] detects the faintest presence of my molecules clinging in the soil or wood?

I look up at the trees, the elms and maples that have grown so large, and think: It's possible. The place may be in me far more than I in it. We'd like the earth to regret our passing, but we have no proof that it does.

With the decline of family farms and the growth of corporate agriculture, people matter less in the production of food, their stories matter less. Something has been lost out here in the great heart of our country. Meyers is a trustworthy witness of that loss and The Witness of Combines is a trustworthy measure of what is gone. More than that, it is a lovely testament to who we were, and who we are.

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*The Witness of Combines by Kent Meyers. University of Minnesota Press (1998). 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520. $17.95.

Comments

[suzanne]

thank you so much, tom
for this review
I've ordered the book

and it reminded me
of a farm tale of my own
which I will write before today
draws to a close
and post at the gig

[Tom Montag]

You are welcome, Suzanne. I'm sure you'll like the book. I'll watch for the posting on he gig about your own farm experience.