Whenever a writer wants his work to fit the definition of a story, he must consider this: The cat sat on a mat is not the beginning of a story, but the cat sat on the dog’s mat is. The first half of this little test just makes an observation, but the second leads to action and resolution following a free-for-all.
Our move to a condo a little over a year and a half ago came about in part to eliminate climbing stairways, mowing grass, blowing snow, and whatever else goes with owning a large house. It was a good move for us but isn’t particularly story worthy. However, a story can be wrestled from the fact that people were mowing grass one day and running snowblowers the next as a result of the recent October blizzard.
A big story is the powerful storm that left in its wake many thousands of unharvested acres covered with deep snow. Machines, greased and ready-to-go, can’t harvest the corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and potatoes. The acres that can be salvaged will no doubt suffer in quality as fields get torn up with machines getting stuck in soft ground. In some cases larger operations have crews standing idle with nothing to do. Adding insult to injury, reports tell of snowmobilers roaring through the fields which prompted the state secretary of agriculture to issue a plea to stay out. It is a big story without a happy ending.
As a much younger man, I followed the wheat harvest into Kansas and Nebraska for several years. The first year our outfit pulled in at a truck stop in Medicine Lodge, Kansas where our boss wanted to ask around for farmers needing a combine crew. It wasn’t long before a distinguished looking gentleman drove up in his once-stately but now well-worn Chrysler Imperial. Personal troubles had placed him in desperate financial straits and he needed his wheat crop brought in.
He had an immediate problem, though. He couldn’t talk any custom operators into bringing their machines to his fields. Why? With recent rainfalls, the Medicine River had flooded over much of his rich bottomland, flattened his heavy stand of winter wheat, and sent all sorts of broken branches and deadfall onto his fields. No one was interested in taking his job on. Since our outfit had traveled down there “cold turkey” with no pre-arranged jobs waiting for us, the boss thought about it and decided to accept his offer.
We set our headers as low to the ground as possible and started cutting. That wheat ran good, even in its sorry condition. It was slow going because we had to stop often to carry away the forsaken chunks of wood that the machines could swallow and cause damage. One other problem slowed our progress. The ground was soft and our machines often became “stuck in the mud.” A self-propelled combine generates lots of torque on the pull, so with nothing else available, the not-stuck machine needed to stop cutting and drive to the aid of the disabled one. The chains we carried that summer found frequent use.
The farmer commended our crew for saving more of his crop than he expected. I remember him saying, “It’ll pay lots of bills.” With the combines loaded on the trucks, we drove on to another job. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw what I took to be the farmer’s eternal optimism: his hired man driving a tractor plowing rich red Kansas dirt in preparation for next year’s crop. So it was that summer of 1964.
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