The field, the field, the field is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the mother ----- burn.
Burn mother ----- , burn…
“Smokey The Bear would be rolling in his grave if he could see us now.”
“First, now is not the time for your witty remarks, and two, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FOCUS ON YOUR PIMP TECHNIQUE!”
You wanna take a wild guess as to where this already-convoluted conversation took place?
That’s right: in the middle of Kansan wheat field…
Oh, the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, that rascal. The idea of me going off to college later that Fall was starting to look like a foregone conclusion: if I wanted a shot at a higher education, first I was going to have to survive all the shots The Farm took at me.
Now you may be under the impression from the Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Never Gets Tired and its sibling stories that these tribulations were by my hand, and my hand alone. Or perhaps you are perishing the thought that no one else out there has the honor and privilege of regaling their city-slicker friends with such anecdotes.
But take heart, my friend! Just like the catchy af slogan for the hip dating site onlyfarmers.com encouragingly informs us: “You don’t have to be lonely!”
And guess what?!? As you probably inferred from the ursine-of-PSA-fame-referencing, misogynistic-slang-dropping, semi-historically accurate conversation above, I wasn’t always alone/lonely in my existential struggle with our family agricultural enterprise. Sometimes there were witnesses. Or accomplices, depending on how you look at it.
Either way, my main partner in grime was The Bard,1Not his real name, and frankly, an uncreative alias. But I felt if I took this line of nicknaming one step further and called you–yes, I know you are reading this–Billy S.S., that it would be a bit too much to ask people to figure out that it was a derived reference to William ShakeSpeare–another name for The Bard (of Avon), of course. So…that explains all that. a fiend since our days in Kindergarten, fellow fresh graduate of Rolla High School, and, if things went well, future brother-in-law.
In addition to us dating a pair of Amazonian sisters that were both taller than either of us, The Bard would occasionally help me and my dad out on the farm that summer. And since this tale finds us in the thick of wheat harvest, he was naturally part of our 3-man harvest crew.
We were literally in the middle of harvesting two of our adjacent fields when things got, er…”interesting”. For context, I’ve drawn a little map of these fields, because these details will matter later on:
(That’s…that’s uh, a Hamilton reference.)
We had just finished up harvesting Field 1, and The Bard and I, the peons that we were, were tasked with performing a controlled burn of the wheat stubble, while Dad took the combine over to start cutting Field 2. Simple enough right? Since the stubble was surrounded on all side by either a road or dirt (see Figure 1), all we had to was just light a match and watch the whole thing burn to the ground.
Oh, that critical part about “surrounded by roads and dirt”? I need to make one tiny correction. Of all that’s going on in Figure 1, I would like to draw your attention to that Wee bit of overlap. Here, much like a Venn Diagram, Field 1 and Field 2 shared not an infinitesimally short border of a single point as they should have in a geometrically perfect world, but instead had about 50 ft. of common border.
But really, how much trouble could 50 ft. give us anyways?
Uh…turns out a lot. Let’s just say our attempt at “controlled burn” spun out of control pretty quickly:
“Oh man, the fire is moving quicker towards Field 2 than I expected,” one of us noted with a bit of concern.
“Yeah…no, we’re about to be in over our heads if we don’t slow it down,” the other responded.
“Oh. Sh*t. Too late!”
“Uhhh…grab whatever you can from the pickup–we need something to beat it out with!”
“I think you meant to say ‘with which to beat it out’.”
“NOT NOW, DUDE! You pedantic ----- sucker…”
Moments later, the both of us found ourselves with faces of full of smoke, furiously trying to smack out the flames with burlap work coats we had found behind the seat. Yup, you heard me right: we were using the lesser-known yet surprisingly effective “Pimp Technique” to fight our fiery foe: beating it like it owed us money.
Not that I would recommend it to anyone though: given that the fire was less than arm-lengths away, we also had the delightful privilege of enduring moderate-to-severe smoke inhalation, and what felt like 3rd-degree sunburns. Yet we persisted.
It’s not like we had a ----- choice in the matter, now did we?
“We’re losing the battle! Go get Dad while I stay here and keep beating it!” I hollered over to The Bard.
The Bard scampered back to the pickup, but didn’t get the respite from the smoke he was indubitably hoping for. Nay–and lucky for us–Nostru-Dad-us had actually already foreseen the potential shenanigans in our future and had been keeping a side-eye on us. Sensing that a hub-bub was most likely afoot, Dad was halfway across the field, hauling ballz in the combine in our general direction.
When he got there, Dad–being the problem-solver he was–lowered the combine all the way down til it was scraping dirt, and started cutting as much of the blazing stubble as close to the ground as he could. Fortunately, after a few passes in the Overlap Zone he had it all under control. My Dude had literally saved our bacon.
I was so happy that I found myself crying tears of joy.
No, wait. Those weren’t joyful tears. My eyes were watering like one of Kansas City’s many beautiful ----- fountains, all thanks to the copious amount of smoke that had gotten all up in my contact lenses business while I had been busy Big-Pimpin’…
“Great balls of fire! Uhh…guys, I think we might have a problem…”
My smoky eyes might have rendered me largely sightless and useless, but I was pretty sure about what I had just seen.
With our fire-fighting duties fulfilled, The Bard and I had nothing to do, so there we were, the two of us crammed in the cab of the combine with Dad. How did we perform such a Tetris-Level-20-like feat, you may ask. Well, The Bard got to enjoy the privileges of the extra mini-seat found therein, while I, on the other hand, contorted myself into the only space left: the floor of the cab with my back against the front window.
And thanks to my rear-facing position, I was able to spot what sure the hell looked a lot like a meteor go whizzing out of the back of the combine.
Upon hearing my cry of consternation, Dad whipped our trusty implement around, and sure enough, there was a tiny, tiny patch of fresh stubble burning mere meters behind us. Apparently, some of the burning stubble that Dad had “harvested” early had just been smoldering somewhere deep inside the combine for the previous two hours, and finally decided to make a dramatic exit out the rear, a la a fire-breathing dragon.
Okay, so, maybe not a fire-breathing dragon. More like a fire-farting dragon.
“Oh. Oh sh*t.”
You know it’s never a good sign when you hear your dad’s voice tinged with panic. In this case, Dad was probably panicking because now he had a fire in the middle of Field 2, which was only half okay.
Sure, the 50% of Field 2 that was now stubble needed to burn sooner or later.
But the other 50%? It was still Amber Waves of Grain. By my calculations, that was about $9136.80 about to go up in smoke.2On July 12, 1999, wheat was selling for about $2.43/bushel. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-chart-data. The average per-acre yield for Kansas in 1999, was around 47 bushels. Source: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/k3569432s/ft848s81t/37720f99x/CropProdSu-01-12-2000.pdf And for you yungen’s out there, that’s approximately $14,900.55 worth of today’s coin.3Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1999?amount=9136.80
That was no bueno. No bueno AT ALL.
We all paused for a moment in a state of shock as we watched that tiny, tiny patch quickly grew into a monstrous beast. Then Dad snapped out of it.
“Okay, I’m going to try to speed-cut as much of the remaining wheat as I can before it burns to the ground. I need you two to…well, fuck, I don’t know what exactly I need you to do–just go get help!”
To be continued…(yes, there is more to this particular god-forsaken day).
Content created on: 6/7 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)
Footnotes & References:
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