Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     When summer arrives some parents go into overdrive and tend to get a little crazy trying to figure out things to do to keep the kids occupied. With season passes to the pool, more summer sports than you can shake a stick at and the occasional bible school and summer reading program, kids these days seem to have no trouble from being bored with so many things to do.

     Summer was always busy on the farm as a kid. There were chores to be done, calves and lambs to break to lead, 4-H projects to start; although we all know no self respecting 4-Her would actually finish a project until the night before judging as Mom stands in the kitchen yelling that it was nearly midnight and she wanted to go to bed.

      We walked beans as kids. Those were the days when Roundup killed everything it came in contact with. Back then no self respecting farmer would let June pass by without making sure the high school kids had walked every row and pulled or cut every weed they could find. We knew the names we gave to the weeds: button, horse, pig, even if they weren’t the technical names which I soon learned when I took my first Agronomy class at Iowa State.
There aren’t many people walking beans these days. I dare say I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone walking. We’ve done this to ourselves really. It’s faster and easier to apply chemical either with a tall spray rig or by airplane (which seems to find my garden year after year), and with kids being involved in more activities throughout the summer finding responsible bean crews is nearly impossible.

     I learned a lot about life in those fields. From making friends to doing an honest days work for my pay, walking beans was something that definitely built caricature in us. We didn’t need fancy tanning beds as the sun did a good enough job burning the back of our necks and our unprotected arms. We didn’t need a fancy weight training system for our legs, as the early morning dew mixed with the dirt on our shoes added mud weight by the tons day after day.

     I learned about straight rows, and washouts, and nature walking beans. From the chirp of the red wing black bird to the gentle song of a meadowlark we learned to identify birds quickly. We could tell the difference between a fox den and a coyote den easily and marveled at the intricacy of the web of the yellow and black “Black widow” spiders that made new traps between the rows every night. We learned about watching out for others and working as a team. I can remember many an afternoon driving back to town after spending the better part of the day in the fields only to stop and pile out to walk two hundred yards into a field to pull a single button weed we had missed earlier.

     We learned about packing a lunch, and pudding cups back when they came in little tin cups that would make your teeth hurt when you scrapped them clean with a spoon out of mom’s kitchen. We learned about the weather and wind, and that no matter how tight your ball cap was you better have your hand on the top of it when you are riding down the road in a pickup. We also learned about farm tiles and where the best ones were to refill the glass Mason jar we would place in the end rows to serve as a reward at the end of walking a row.

     We country people have lost something by not walking beans. After all, there is no funnier sight than to see a dozen arms come up in the air in a wave as a car drove past the field. We learned who drove the cars that went by simply by the sound of the gravel as it hit the wheel wells. We have lost that friendliness as today’s machines do all the work. We have lost jobs for our young people and the healthy exertion of working until you were sore.

     I worry that without bean walking we may all get lazy and chubby and disconnected. If you don’t think so just look around the room and notice how many people are on their cell phones right now. We have lost that connection between the town kids who needed a summer job and the country people who became friends and provided that important spending money for the State Fair.

     Driving home tonight as I do every night, I tend to drive a little slower than the average person and do a little crop scouting as I drive. I have watched the corn as it has sprung up the last couple of weeks, and saw tonight a field where I could just start to make out the rows of soybeans. It isn’t far from the house and I think I might just sneak over there with my bean hook and walk the rows for fun now and then, to bring myself back to nature and a little closer to a memory of growing up on the farm in the summer.

See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.