Rembering - Wheat Harvest

When I was in high school I came to Kansas from Illinois a couple of years during the summer to help my sister and brother-in-law with wheat harvest. I traveled either by train or bus, and I think one time by car back home. These were great times for me. I became reacquainted with my Kansas cousins and other family members, and with the church we had attended when living in Kansas.

Wheat harvest for Mervin was somewhat different than a lot of farmers. He didn't have a lot of resources and used older, less modern equipment. The truck I drove to haul wheat is a testimony to that. This truck didn't have a lift bed so the wheat needed to be shoveled out the tailgate when unloading into the bins. Mervin's tractors and combine worked fine, most of the time, but they often needed some major repairs in the off-season. But Mervin found a way to use this kind of machinery and was able over time to produce good crops.

Doing this kind of work in the summer time in Kansas aided me in getting a nice suntan and working some muscles I never would have used back in Illinois. It also provided me with some "scary" times I could have done without. For instance, immediately after the wheat was harvested we would begin working the ground. Plowing was done day and night when the ground was wet enough to plow, doing that until plowing was finished or when the ground became too hard for the plow to stay in the ground. I was taking my turn in the first half of the night plowing in the "back forty" when the tractor suddenly stopped. It had made a loud clunking sound when it quit and there was no doubt it would not run anymore. What I discovered was that it was in the dark of the moon and when the tractor lights were shut off it was pitch black. Needing to find my way all the way back to the house I followed the plow furrow back to the corner, followed the corners to the end of the field, then the forsaken road back to the house. I knew there were coyotes and other creatures around and not being used to that kind of environment, I was a bit apprehensive as I made that long walk.

As it turned out a couple of pistons in the engine had broken and the engine needed to be overhauled. Mervin and I towed the tractor to the yard under a shade tree and that's where the overhaul was done. That was an experience to be remembered, as I still do.

I cherish such times as those were. I learned to appreciate what it took to live without some of the taken-for-granted things we had at my home, such as indoor plumbing, running water, no stickers in the grass, and having people near by. Those, and others, were things that these people had learned to live without early on in their marriage. I still wonder at times how they did as well as they did.

Pilgrim on the way