Saturday, August 4, 2012

Adventures in Bean Walking


    Bean walking crew of the 70's
    (back - Aunt Kathy, Mom, Dad, Uncle Rich, Uncle Guy)
    (front - me, Mark and Matt)

We all know the feelings of summer. Those small reminders that capture the essence of our youth; the smell of burning charcoal with the faint background odor of lighter fluid, the feel of the warm sun on our face while laying back with closed eyes, or the sound of sprinklers with the lingering smell of freshly cut grass. These are the feelings of my youthful summers that resonate through me each time I encounter them. And although not a feeling I experience frequently, another memory that encompasses my summers as a child is the feel of wet plants rubbing against my exposed legs. Yes, this is the memory of bean walking on those many early June and July Iowa mornings each year. If you grew up in the farm country of the Midwest, you completely understand what I’m talking about.

While my children complain of having to get up early on an occasional summer morning for a camp, job, or sporting event; they haven’t a clue on how the sound of an alarm clock felt to child getting ready to walk beans. For those inexperienced in the former art of bean walking (machines and chemicals have made this trade obsolete), let me explain a bit. In order to receive top dollar for their harvested crops in the fall, farmers would work diligently to produce weed-free fields of soybeans. In the seventies this task was accomplished by use a work force well trained in the art of identifying milk weeds, button weeds, and arrant corn stocks. Each unintended plant visitor had a differing method of removal. My brothers and I were well trained in the use of our hoe versus pulling weeds deep from the root with our gloved hands. In later years, we were given spray bottles filled with Round Up (which I am now thinking probably wasn’t a good idea for our long-term health).

Bean walking was a common job that most all kids from my hometown held at some point in their childhood. With our grandfather a soybean farmer, this was a job my brothers and I held our entire childhood. But our grandparents paid us well; much better than our friends earned at other farms and we never questioned this as our designated annual summer job. We started our summer days waking before the sun rose so we would be ready to take on the rows of beans at the crack of daylight. 

Our grandpa had three parcels of farmland with two that required travel. Our means of transportation was either the back of a covered pick-up truck or the back seat of Grandpa’s dirty sedan. When transported by pick-up, we sat packed in the back with our hoes stacked at the end by the tailgate and our legs dangling together. Our dirty shoes were last year’s models, worn and used for their final walk in the fields. New school shoes would be purchased at the end of summer. Not only did we not question the safety of the back of the truck on the highway, the thought of securing a seat belt in any vehicle was a foreign thought. We lived in a world where these strangely placed attachments were neatly tucked back into the seats and out of our way.

When our Grandpa drove us in his sedan, there was inevitably a cigarette hanging from his mouth and I would describe his driving similar to the phrase “like a bat out of Hell”. We were petrified in the back seat listening to our seemingly mild-mannered grandpa utter profanities and drive closely, too closely, to the behind of every vehicle who had the unfortunate circumstance of driving ahead of us. But we sat quietly without a complaint. As we prayed for him to slow down; this was more to avoid the start of our bean walking than to ensure our safe arrival.
 
Depending on the height of the beans or the age of the child, we were each assigned a designated number of rows to the left and right of each of us. With keen eyes we would walk through the dew filled bean rows looking for any plant not a soybean. The mud on our legs quickly turned to dry dirt as the sun got hotter and the morning turned to high noon. A hoe rested on each of our shoulders and gloves placed on our hands. Those who finished first would work backward to help out those who pulled the short straw with the “dirtier” rows. Water breaks were provided intermittently and we knew better than to ask repeatedly when the next would occur. Our uncles, although fun and playful back at the farmhouse, were all business in the field.

Uncle Guy and Uncle Rich surveying the bean field
My grandparents lived in one of three homes on the family farm. Uncle Guy and Uncle Rich also farmed the land and raised pigs with grandpa. My brothers and I thoroughly enjoyed the antics of our bachelor uncles and later welcomed the addition of their brides and babies to our large family. During their bachelor years, my uncles shared the upstairs suite of the main farm house that was affectionately called the “pig sty”. Their bachelor pad was filled with stacks of Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, and “other” magazines that I never actually saw, but knew existed based on the conversations I overheard between my curious and pre-adolescent brothers. Our uncles had dirt-filled fingernails with the constant look of cigarettes hanging from their fingers. They smiled their boyish smiles as my brothers and I laughed at all of their jokes and shared in our facade of pretending to be farm kids; albeit only for the summer.

I am pretty sure my gainful employment in bean walking began at the ripe age of six. And although only given a couple of rows, I did my part.  As my brothers and I always worked the fields together, there are countless memories of taking dirt clogs to the head and ensuing fights between us that involved newly sharpened hoes. I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt, but I do remember the shame in being “caught” by our grandpa or uncles while in the middle of our antics. We were never told twice to not do something or to cease poor behavior. Being mean either in action or by mouth was simply not tolerated. 

Uncle Rich taking a break from chores
Our childhood antics in the bean fields came to a halt as we turned into teens and were joined in the field with the Brennan girls. Along with the addition of my Uncle Rich’s new wife, Ann Brennan, came her large family as well. Ann’s sister, Joan, and I were in the same class at school. With a total of forty-four kids in our sixth grade class, Joan and I were enamored with the fact that we were suddenly “related”. Although her sister marrying my uncle did not, in fact, create a true family association; we sure thought it did. Now we were not only friends in school, but also got to attend many of the same family functions together.

Being a large farm family, Joan and her many sisters joined our bean walking crew as well. They also brought in new elements to our morning routine. They often proudly wore bikini tops with the goal of working on their tans while working in the sun. My adolescent brothers loved this new concept. I just loved having the Brennan girls around as my brothers seemed to behave better around me (i.e. in front of them) and I was educated on what older girls did on weekend nights and the look of their resulting hangovers. I learned many lessons of young adulthood and sisterhood from this fun-loving Brennan crew.

During the peak of the bean walking season, our crew size would increase to include as many as we could recruit and would many times include “three a days”. We would walk beans in the morning, afternoon, and then again in the evening. Our farm dog, Sadie, would keep us company when we were on the home farm. Her frolics over the rolling terraces and playful romping in the fields were welcomed. Our breaks of the day would be for food and a quick nap if we were lucky. The meals were big and naps were in front of commercial size fans as the only other moving air was a small over-worked unit in a window. We prayed for rain and ideally, a lightning storm, as that would ensure a long break or even an afternoon in the house. By evening we were exhausted and would pray for the sun to go down so the choice of how many rounds were left before calling it a night was left up to nature and not our uncles.

My Grandparents' farm home. Sadie and Grandpa's sedan in the driveway.
The pay-off for all of our hard work was felt at the end of the summer when we received our bean walking money. Grandma was the family farm bookkeeper and would keep track of our hours by day in her large leather-bound ledger. At the end of the season, she would carefully tally our final hours and neatly write us each a check. Included on each check in the memo section, in her very immaculate handwriting, would be her careful pay calculations. This check always seemed massive in amount and felt magical in our pockets as we traveled to the bank. Although much of it was put into savings, we were also allowed to have some mad money for a shopping splurge.

Then at the close of each summer, my parents would take us to Omaha for a long weekend full of visiting Aunt Joan, swimming in the hotel pool, and shopping with a portion of our earnings. The picture below is of Matt and me, post-swim, showing off our new purchases. We were thrilled, to say the least. Somehow all of those early mornings and dirt clog wars became a distant memory. And unbeknownst to us, it was also good work ethic in the making. We sure didn’t know it as we began our summer mornings with the way-too-early wake up calls, but there were many adventures to be had and lessons to be learned in those endless fields of beans.     

Matt and I show off our new treasures

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