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Rocks
Back in the ‘good old days’, our first harvest of the spring season was an unproductive one: rock. After letting the plowed fields lay undisturbed over the winter, we’d be out on the land as soon as it had dried to prep it for whatever was going to be planted that year. After going over the fields with the spring tooth a couple of times, we had to pick stones before we could actually plant anything.
The farm isn’t an especially rocky one. There were other farms that were much, much worse, akin to trying to farm on a gravel pile. But there were always some that would pop up, enough to make it necessary to walk along every field with the old Oliver 70 towing our homemade trailer parked nearby. We used the old farm truck a few times, which I liked because we could leave the doors open and the radio cranked up. But that ended when one of us (I remember it being my father who did it, he always said it was me) flipped a rock towards the bed of the truck and it went through the back window.
I absolutely hated the job. I thought it was mind numbingly boring. The weather was usually still cold, often damp or downright wet, as we walked acre after acre, carrying a narrow tined fork, flipping a never-ending harvest of fist-sized rocks into the trailer.
Boring but necessary. It was either that or risk several hundred dollars damage to the planters or, heaven forbid, the harvesting equipment. You have no idea how much damage even a small rock can do to an expensive combine or forage chopper!
I suppose I could come up with some life lesson here, some philosophical, zen-like commentary about picking rocks and life. But when you’ve been walking around in the early morning carrying a bucket, narrow tined fork and dumping an apparently unending harvest of rock into the bucket of the tractor, the only thing you’re thinking of is getting a couple of aspirin, a cup of coffee and a nap. And what I find going through my mind are echoes of exactly the same thoughts I had 50 years ago as a child, walking that same field — F*** this is boring!
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krippner posted this
