Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (7 page)

Walking Beans

B
ecause I ended up his spitting image, my dad gets a lot of screen time (page time?) in this book. A lot of ink. But as a kid growing up in a very simple and happy household (which I learned later was a very modest one)—an honest, salt-of-the-earth household—my mom was also one of my heroes. Big time. It must be said that the ladies on any farm—the housewives and the farmer’s daughters—are out there swinging the axe and the hoe with the fellows. It didn’t occur to me until later how equally heroic, and perhaps even more so, the women of the farm were. Because at the time I saw the guys drive the tractors and thought, “Who’s in that big goddamn tractor? The boss, that’s who. That’s what I want to do.”

Around age eight or nine I began having “coffee with the guys.” With plenty of milk and sugar and just a dollop of coffee, of course—I didn’t start drinking it black until I was eleven or even older. As I mentioned previously, by a mere six months over my cousin Ryan I was the oldest grandson in the family. That did—and still does—make a difference on a farm. Of course, Ryan’s folks, my uncle Dan and aunt Dee, were running the Roberts farm by then, so he had a distinct advantage in being a full-timer. I lived six or seven miles away, so I was a guest laborer.

At home, I was taken outside and taught to use the tools in a way the girls weren’t. They learned possibly more valuable skills, cooking and feeding the family and sewing and whatnot. It was a very fair household, though. I did some cooking and sewing, and they cut some grass. We siblings and our cousins all had our turns baling hay and chopping firewood and making bean soup, but all I wanted to do was go out in the field and work with the guys.

The first step was to travel out to the crops and ride on or in the tractor and the combine with the guys, meaning Grandpa Mike, Uncles Dan and Don, and sometimes my dad. It was amazing. Pretty soon, Uncle Don would let me steer when we’d drive the tractor together. And when I could reach the pedals, he’d have me drive the combine. It felt like undergoing some sort of cowboy training right at home with my family. Uncle Don was always encouraging Ryan and me to drive, on a motorcycle, snowmobile, go-kart, truck, or tractor. I guess that’s how you do it on a farm. You get next year’s labor trained as soon as possible.

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I
hung around them and did everything I could. When Ryan and I were old enough to start earning wages, there were two things we could do. Number one is called, simply, “picking up rocks.” There’s not a lot of embellishment in that title. When you cultivate field dirt, you’re constantly turning over the top foot or sixteen inches of the topsoil. As the earth continues to shift and erode, the larger stones constantly come to the surface.

When you’re big enough to pick up rocks, you’re sent out with a little tractor and a little cart and a buddy, and you canvass the entire field to pick up rocks and take them to the rock pile. One of the fun parts is that you find a lot of arrowheads and Indian artifacts. My uncle Dan has an amazing collection of arrowheads. He spots them from twenty feet up, on top of a combine, even though he has lousy eyesight. Both of my uncles have seemingly no end to their superhero abilities, and they’re also full-on MacGyvers. They wear vise grips on their belts as well as about eighteen other tools about their person at all times.

The other remunerative chore one could perform was called “walking beans.” I started walking beans in the late seventies. When soybeans are full grown they go up about to a child’s sternum, but when they’re half grown they only reach your thigh or your waist. You head out with a garden hoe or a machete, which we called a corn knife. Grandpa Mike taught you how to sharpen the steel blade with a file. You’d get a very strict safety lesson, because it’s easy to lop off a toe or put a considerable dent in an ankle with a corn knife. We learned at a young age to respect machinery and sharp steel, an education that continues to serve me well in more than one of my walks in life.

We had a great crew on the Roberts farm once the grandchildren came of age: myself and Ryan, his older sister, Angie, and my big sis, Laurie. We would go out and walk beans. Uncle Don, who was then in his late teens, would be the captain of the walking-beans team, and we’d sometimes bring in a neighborhood friend or two from the local families to round out our numbers. We got paid, but I can’t remember how much. People from my dad’s generation would remember the details, I’m sure, because they grew up much nearer to the Depression. They remember what they got paid for any job, down to the penny. I don’t, to my detriment, remember our starting wage in 1981. We were probably making a dollar an hour, a considerable improvement over zero dollars an hour, and so nickel raises were a big deal. By August it was a buck twenty-five. On Sunday after church, if you could afford a Snickers bar and a Coke at Ralph Hibner’s Grocery Store in town and still have sixty-five cents in your pocket? That was walking in pretty tall cotton.

We walked beans and I loved it. I was out in the sun (or rain, at least until it got too muddy) all day, walking up and down the field. We would take a crew of six, and each person would take four rows on either side. We’d then walk all the way down the length of the field, hustling to try to keep up with the older kids, and simply kill the weeds with a hoe or a knife.

Certain weeds, if you could, you’d pull them, roots and all. There were promiscuous weeds called buttonweeds and milkweeds that were very prevalent. In the soybean field you also run into a lot of corn, because the crops are switched over, so maybe last year’s corn left some random seed in the ground. Then there was black nightshade (such a satisfyingly evil name), which we would do our best to pull out by the roots if we could. Some weeds are so tenacious that they grow to seem like a small tree in a matter of weeks, stealing precious sunlight and water from your crop. Even if we’d cut them off at the ground they’d grow back in a week. Generally speaking, there were different degrees of death and dismemberment that were doled out to the weeds, commensurate with that weed’s ability to inflict damage on our soybeans.

At the end of the row, there would be a cooler jug with water or lemonade, and all things considered, it was a good time. I think many modern urbanites would find this activity repugnant or even impossible, but in our family we always had the ability to tuck into tedious work with a positive attitude and the knowledge that a cold soda pop or beer was waiting at quitting time.

Walking beans evolved into something even more idyllic over the years. Uncle Don got us this huge steel bar that attached to the front of a tractor that had maybe—I want to guess—four seats on the twenty-foot bar, two on each side of a thirty-gallon tank. Each seat had a spray gun on a hose, connected to the tank, which contained a minor herbicide. So walking beans became shooting beans. The guns had adjustable nozzles that you could set to “spray” or “stream,” so we became sharpshooters. They’d just come out with Roundup herbicide, which has turned out to be the bane of biology, but even in ’84 or so, we knew enough to keep it in a separate little bottle. We’d reserve it for plants like jimsonweed or black nightshade, and—this is how scary this shit is—we would just place ONE DRIP on one leaf of a weed as we drove by on the bean bar, and when we came back around the loop maybe ten minutes later, that plant would be a shriveled corpse. The stuff is like napalm for plants.

Maybe by the time you read this book, we’ll have finally voted that poison out of our fields, but something sadly tells me it’s going to take rather longer.

Thus walking beans was now riding the bean bar. We would take turns driving the charismatic, old Minneapolis Moline 602 tractor from the sixties, which Uncle Don kept in perfect running order.

Our fields were twelve miles apart, so at some point one of us would have to drive the tractor twelve miles. The 602 does twenty-five, tops, on the road. So I’d be on a tractor, everybody passing me, waving, and I’d be out in the sun with the wind in my hair, some Doobie Brothers on the ancient radio. I’ve never been happier than just getting to drive farm equipment between fields. Being out in the weather was such an incredible part of engaging in the privilege of rewarding work. Even if it was raining, we’d just work in the rain. After weeks in the July and August humidity, it could be mighty refreshing. Working outside instilled a toughness in me, my siblings, and my cousins that I’ll always be thankful for.

It was hard work, sure, but I don’t remember any shortage of playing baseball or going swimming. Jumping in the pond was that much more delicious when you’d been out working in the sun all day. And I had sixteen dollars in my pocket to boot. Six or seven of those days and I could buy a motherfucking Walkman. To arrive at the age at which you could buy a Walkman and the new George Michael record on cassette with your own earnings—if that wasn’t heaven, I don’t know what was. Although I wish, in hindsight, that somebody had pointed out Talking Heads to me.

* * *

T
hroughout the years, Ryan and I especially enjoyed each other’s company, and walking beans was a way to spend all day together. We’d screw around just enough to have a blast, but just little enough to still do a good job in the bean field.

Ryan and I really benefited from being the young men in our farming circle. We were attempting to come across as “good-looking” teenagers, which means we
thought
we looked awesome, but we really looked a bit like teenagers trying too hard, especially me. Ryan was always the more modest and decent of the two of us, and now he’s a paramedic, and I’m full of shit for a living. Amazing.

In the summer we would sell sweet corn at a stand near the main intersection in town. We’d put Sun-In in our hair and listen to music and hope that girls would come by to buy a dozen ears for their family dinner. You can bet your ass we gave them a baker’s dozen. It was a dream life. A couple of times during the harvest season (also the homecoming season, lucky for us), the cheerleaders would hold a car wash at the nearby gas station. It goes without saying we were happy as pigs in shit.

Eventually, as we grew into our teen years, Ryan and I started running the walking beans crew. We became autonomous, because we had the system down. Sometimes it was just the two of us, sometimes we had a crew of six. We spent a lot of time by ourselves in the field.

It was 1984 or 1985, and break dancing was becoming a huge sensation all over the country. Unfortunately, we really had a hard time finding appropriate music in Minooka. I’ll remind you this is decades before the Internet, let alone the iPod, but we were aware of the whole movement because of the break-dancing movies we could rent at the video store. We just couldn’t find the music for sale. Our favorites were Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, Melle Mel, Newcleus and songs like “Rapper’s Delight” and “Jam on It.” We knew that in the cities this exciting new culture was happening, but we were just too far removed to even begin to know how to get to where it was. We’d listen to these late-night radio shows out of Chicago on which they’d play break-dancing music, and we’d record tracks off the radio onto what were quickly rendered our most prized cassettes.

Ryan and I had a two-man break-dance team that would practice in his basement, in front of a mirror, on the requisite large sheet of cardboard. We’d take our fly stylings to the Channahon skating rink on weekends and take part in competitions. We had break-dancing names—I was Tick-Tock and he was Flip-Flop. Tick-Tock was named because of my propensity for popping and locking, and Flip-Flop did flips and the hard moves on the floor, like the helicopter and whatnot. We dabbled with a cool team name like “the Minooka Crew,” but I don’t think we ever had a name that stuck. For some strange reason, we never could fully reconcile our farm flavor with the hardscrabble aesthetic of inner-city street dancing.

Out in the fields we would write raps about ourselves, touting our prowess and our manhood. How our dope-ass moves would attract the ladies like bees to honey. In hindsight it was really funny (I’m told), but it was sincerely a big part of our coming-of-age. We carried ourselves at school like some kinda badass street thugs, like we knew the ways of subway trains and the back alleys of Harlem.

It was a quick phase, though. It came and went like our parachute pants. We each had one pair of said pants, from Sears or Chess King, perhaps, and we’d accessorize like Michael Jackson and Adam Ant. Of course, we inexplicably drew the line before donning the scarves and bracelets of Boy George and George Michael (because their effeminacy was somehow more girly than Michael Jackson’s? Or Adam Ant’s?). There were other dudes wearing bangles, but they were okay because they were New Wave, which, again, could be tough to pull off. A Flock of Seagulls? Duran Duran? Kajagoogoo? These are guesses. I don’t know much about New Wave. The Smiths? Lots of people dug them, but I never did hear them, at least not at the time. Before I wander too far afield, I had better get back to my element. The break dance.

Our parents were really very generous about it. We would show them our moves and routines. They understood that even though they didn’t appreciate the break-dancing movement, we were exhibiting prowess. Ryan’s mom and dad, Dan and Dee, had undertaken an earlier disco phase, after all.