Walking Fields

Nature is not on the surface very forgiving nor is it disposed to fond memory. The poet Sandburg attributed this to grass, how the grass grows over and consumes humanity, at least our scars, the fallen, the battlefield, even the reasons why. I do not think Carl Sandburg would be any less certain of the power of grass to absorb the follies and foibles of mankind had he known glyphosate was our public solution to overwhelming grass.

I am walking the potato field this morning. At times I feel like a broody hen, at least to my crops. Our stand of soybeans is off some; I put the blame on planting depth. The corn however is coming along nicely even if we are a bit spoiled by the early heat of previous springs and thus able to boast by July corn shoulder high. The classic axiom is to be happy enough at corn knee-high. Potatoes by their turn are variable, if not outright cross-eyed and retarded when it comes to emergence. That is the official field term, emergence. First a tiny fissure at the surface, then a swelling as the rising shoot lifts the soil. To emerge all ragged and frumpy as is the way of potato and rhubarb. None of the elegance of the stiletto sharp corn shoot, that arrow-straight trajectory to the sunlight. The cornfield can be neatly choreographed, not a day separates the first to emerge from the last. Sandhill cranes know this, know my seed spacing and take a share; I will not quarrel over who best owns the back forty. Potato emergence can vary by a week, two weeks. A bit distracting wondering what is wrong when it’s just the backward nature of this not particularly ambitious vegetable. Not to forget the potato has no seed, as does corn and green bean, instead just a wounded and buried stem, the like of planting Uncle Charlie’s left elbow, from this we expect to regenerate to another crop, another Charlie.

It is that I walk my fields, as a child I did so behind my father, he too concerned for his crop. So was I imprinted in the way and habit of the farmer, this odd business of walking fields. It is good exercise for the path is not paved, your feet settle in the plough layer. I notice urban walkers who wishing to put on the style swing their arms in an energetic gait I find vaguely comical. Cardio-vascular I know but still hard-road stuff, not like walking woods or a field, or the fence line through the swamp.

The fields are soft this year, the sand is like walking through shallow surf, it tugs at my boots the same as a tidal pool. A pleasant sensation it is, with the notion of a well-watered earth. The addition of a sucking sound it is less pleasant, this why farmers wear high top shoes.

In the Central Ouisconsin soil type can vary from a light-textured sand to a creek bottom loam in the space of a few feet, blond sand, red sand, brown, black, gravel, rocks and pure silicate. These are glacier stories, of a streambed once in the time of the Black Hawk, a moorland dune during the Clovis period, a sandy beach at the rage of Ice. This same field now mated to potatoes.

It is I pick up stones, as did the child; my father also. That pebble with a blue hue, a face like Mickey Mouse or just because it is that smooth. My wife can tell when I have been walking the fields, the stones left in my pockets. She has a jar of them, this in turn routinely dumped alongside the porch, to be filled again. On a rainy day or a Sunday morning when I feel need for another kind of church, I dump the jar on the table. One or two I put in my pocket again. These I will carry until another washday. A stone to carry along with my jackknife and a spare grease zerk. I have on occasion carried a stone the entire summer, from planting to grading season that same stone. For luck I suppose, the gospel says our faith should be like a rock, though it doesn’t mention pebbles.

It is that I believe in fields more than flags, this as a farmer should. I think everybody should once in their life walk a field, no matter whether corn or snap beans. Walk a field in new summer when the seed is lit up and burning, see those elegant rows stretch a quarter mile out, a half mile, those long tender stands of effervescence. Such is the field’s will, this mighty thing, this irresistible force. I do not know whether this is proof of god or a godless nature. I’m not quite sure why it makes any difference.

They say almost breathlessly the Stock Market is down again, two days running, Arabian light crude up to one-thirty-eight. I am bothered, but then again not so very much. I have a field as counsel. I have those rows, that ambitious seed, I have the potato never mind it is slow-witted.

My father when we got to the end of the field would turn me around to look back on it, pat me on the head and say nothing as if I was supposed to understand what it all meant.