Lunch Break Liturgies
Sacred Moments Between Rounds
It wasn’t that many years ago… I guess it was twenty…okay, almost twenty-five, sometime between the release of Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack and the series finale of Seinfeld.
We used to stop the combines every day for lunch. It didn’t matter what field we worked in, how much we had left to go, or what the weather looked like. We stopped everything, and for about thirty minutes, we’d eat.
There wasn’t much to look at on an old Nokia phone, so nobody scrolled while pretending to be a part of the conversation.
In that half hour, nothing much got done besides our bellies and bullshitting tanks getting filled. We ate and joked about the news of the day.
This was before the age of productivity, life hacks, and bro science, in the days before we felt like we always had to accomplish something.
I miss those days.
Sure, it’s handy to see the weather radar or watch highlights of the 1976 World table-tennis championship whenever I want, but some days I long for a simple flip phone or, heaven forbid, no phone.
In the twenty-five years since I’ve worked on many harvest crews and hardly seen any shut the operation down for lunch.
The problem? I don’t know; maybe it’s because many people who grew up doing it this way are dead and gone. Back then, we stopped because we didn’t have a choice. Audrey was bringing us lunch whether we liked it or not.
With casseroles and cherry crisps like hers, she never heard complaints from the crew.
To this day, I haven’t had a can of Mountain Dew that tasted like it did on those sweltering summer days.
Audrey was my boss's mother. Here was a nearly ninety-year-old lady who grew up in the depression, bringing lunch out to her son’s crew in the back of an early-nineties Oldsmobile on ninety-degree days—pretty impressive stuff.
In the words of obscure 90s country singer Boy Howdy, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Some days, when the wind blows just right, I can still hear the boss sucking his chicken bones cleaner than any dog can get them. Gross, I know, but not quite gross enough to spoil the memory.
I’d give anything to go back to the days when we didn’t mind taking a minute to stop and smell the roses and take a bite.
We don’t do that anymore.
Our equipment has grown since the dynamic duo of Seinfeld and Costanza shut down. We’ve gone from twenty-five-foot headers to fifty; our combines can chew more than twenty acres an hour. It wasn’t that long ago when averaging ten was unreachable.
Some farm outfits can knock off a quarter of wheat in less time than it takes to complete a major league baseball game, even after this year’s rule changes shortened the average game time to under two hours and forty minutes.
We’ve witnessed remarkable progress, accomplishing far more than we ever have, yet hardly any of us take the time to stop for a short snack.
Sad.
Life passes fast, especially in our hyperconnected world. We will miss it if we don’t slow down to enjoy it and live in the moment for a few minutes.
Finding a dedicated little lady to tackle the hotdish and pie may not be practical, but there are still plenty of places to find vittles.
I say slow down. Take a quick thirty to eat some lunch. Visit with your crew. You’ll still get the crop off, maybe just a few minutes later. As a bonus, you’ll probably have more fun doing it.
That seems like more than a fair trade-off to me.
Pre-Harvest Crop Tour - Grand Forks to Hayes Lake
Nobody is more of a sucker for an old-fashioned crop tour than yours truly, so it’s no surprise I jumped at the opportunity to go camping over the weekend. This allowed me to unplug with my lady for a day and check out the crop progress across a vast swath of Northwest Minnesota that I don’t usually see.
Crop tours and camping. Talk about the best of both worlds. An introvert’s dream. It’s like getting a free pass to double-dip your chips at a party without everybody looking at you like a circus freak.
If I’ve offended any circus freaks out there, I apologize. There are a lot of tender hearts out there these days.
As we slid through Thief River Falls and past Goodridge, I had to stop and wonder how long it had been since I last graced the area with my presence.
Aside from traveling through there in 2009, in a late-March snowstorm with a semi-load of seed spuds that I carried from West of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Piper Farms near Lake of the Woods, I couldn’t remember being there since Dad and I went through when I was still a kid, close to a thousand years ago.
It’s unbelievable how things have changed in a couple-three decades.
I don’t remember much about the Goodridge area besides the many rocks, potholes, and CRP acres.
Since then, crazy progress has been made.
Advancements in seed technology, equipment, and drainage have transformed the area into what appears to be a high-productivity zone for agricultural production.
The crop looks damn good too, though it desperately needs a drink across much of the area from Grand Forks to Saint Hilaire to Thief River Falls and North to Wannaska, where the woods begin.
A lot of crops in these areas have a ton of potential. Rain won’t do anything for the wheat crop, which was starting to come off with much more that will be ready this week.
Judging a crop from the road is risky, but my imagination tells me those guys should bring in above-average wheat yields.
Canola looks promising, too, though some is ripening at a rate that seems to be a week or two early.
Disclaimer: Besides a short stint as a kid, I’ve little experience with canola, so I don’t have a good handle on the maturity timelines.
I’m one of those weird guys who enjoys being wrong because it means I’m learning somthing, so please don’t be bashful about letting me know if I'm way off base.
All I know is the canola in the Goodridge area is thicker than your narrator’s swelling ego whenever a local asks him how long he’s been blogging. A popular variety for the area seems to be Pioneer 612, a strain so thick that you’d need a National Guard rescue helicopter if you ever had to walk into it at this time of the year.
There wasn’t a ton of corn in the area, primarily soybeans and wheat dominating the landscape. The soys are flipping leaves, hanging on by a root. It still looks like there could be a solid crop of beans if they hook some elusive August moisture.
Nothing grinds my gears more than seeing a killer soybean crop shit the bed in the grain-filling stages. You hate to see a crop choke worse than me on a putting green, especially this late in the game.
Here’s to hoping they get a shot this week to fill the top cluster of pods and finish those hussies off.
Holy Versatile, Batman!
While en route to our campsite, Sheri and I stumbled upon an impressive lineup of old Versatiles along the south side of Highway 1, a handful of miles East of TRF.
I nearly put the pickup in the ditch when we came across the lineup. Not every day a fella is graced by a dozen Versatiles in such a sexy formation.
Thankfully, I travel with a photographer to share the majesty with you.
The only disappointment came from not meeting the man who owned this savage iron line. I imagine years of running Versatile tractors built bigger guns than Stallone’s in Over the Top.
As a kid, I spent a few weeks bouncing between an 875 and a 976 Versatile, doing fall tillage for a fellow between Donaldson and Drayton. This was before the days of autosteer, and I hadn’t yet mastered the art of straight tillage.
I don’t think these formerly nicotine-stained fingers had yet clutched a Marlboro, but those Versatiles whipped my young guns into shape. I went from being unable to complete a single pushup to bench-pressing Pontiacs.
Not at all impressed with crooked chisel-plowing, the bossman often asked if my middle name was Hook. Thank God we didn’t have camera phones back then. Any documentation of that shoddy work would destroy my reputation and probably send me back to the bread lines.
In less than two weeks, the locals started mistaking me for Schwarzenegger, so it was time to retire from the Versatile scene and head back to John Deere territory, where a kid is strong enough to steer without biting his lip and grinning like he’s pinching off a poop.
Anyway, enjoy this little treat of vintage Americana:
Unplug to Recharge
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
- Anne Lamott
Did you know you can stream Garth Brooks’ music on the Amazon Music app? Holy Moses, smell the roses. How did it take me this long to find him?
I must be slipping in my old age.
All these 90s Garth bangers have me doing what I do most often, reminiscing.
In school, I had this teacher who loved to rant and rap about whatever was on his mind. It was great; many days, we didn’t have to do jack squat in class cause this guy would ramble on about whatever work or family drama was grinding his gears that day.
A couple of my classmates and I secretly poked fun at our English teacher as he talked about how one sniff of Aqua Velva cologne transported him back to his high school dance, some forty years prior.
Kids can be such dick weeds. I was no exception.
It's funny how I got older before I finally understood what he meant. Sometimes a scent can do the same for me, like how the dusty insides of a John Deere 4440 or late 80s Ford pickup send me straight back to Strandquist, circa 1989.
Smells are potent transporters for many, but for me, music takes me to another place and time.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that the genre with the most transportation fuel is country hits from the early to mid-1990s.
I’ll slip into a thousand-yard stare when I hear Who’s That Man by Toby Keith.
Watermelon Crawl by Tracy Bird takes me back to bouncing off the tractor glass, riding over plow slabs with a Deere combo of an 8650 and a 635 disk.
Another Night by Real McCoy…okay, that’s not country. I best stop before I embarrass myself any more than I already have.
All this nostalgia got me thinking about how spoiled we have become. These days, I’ll have a tantrum if the Bluetooth isn’t working or I forget the cable to tether my phone to tractor speakers.
Today we can listen to whatever we want, whenever we want.
It’s hard for me to imagine having access to this thirty years ago, the days when we had to wait, sometimes a day or more, to hear Joe Diffie sing about the sheriff hidin’ from his wife down at Smokey’s Bar in his 1994 smash, Third Rock From The Sun.
The worst was station surfing, where you’d hunt for that elusive favorite song of the week. Then the song you’d been hoping to hear comes on, but you missed it because you were busy scanning. Talk about a buzzkill.
Thirty years later, it’s all sitting here; whatever song, podcast, or book you want to hear is saddled in our pants pockets.
With Joe Rogan and Clint Black living in your pocket (now there’s an odd thought), it seems like we don’t have to wait for much anymore, and I think it’s killing our appreciation for the good stuff.
Morning to night, sunup to sundown, we are connected.
In the old days, we would pay fifteen bucks for a CD, which may have had only one song that we actually liked. Listening to that compact disc in the tractor was out of the question. No CD player would function in a bouncing, rattling tractor.
Cassette tapes or AM/FM were all we had in our tune boxes.
Sometimes the radio didn’t work. This was when Dad or Uncle chimed in, reminding me I was lucky to have a radio.
Though it seemed worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t that damn bad.
Back then, unplugging was easy. Today, it’s probably easier for some of us to score a date with Jennifer Lawrence than set our devices down for thirty seconds.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a hopeless phone addict. I’ve logged more hours on the Audible and Spotify apps than most people spend working in a year.
How about you? How often do you take time to unplug?
Our voyage to Hayes Lake disconnected us for a solid twenty-four hours. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to hit the reset button occasionally, but it’s so damn worth it.
Like 90s country with a side of TLC, I can’t recommend a monthly reset enough. You don’t have to go far. You can do this little exercise at home.
Go ahead and unplug. Disconnect. Give a little reset a try in your own life. Start with an hour. See what happens.
And, as always, don’t go chasin’ waterfalls.
Thank you so much for reading. I hope some of you have at least one song stuck in your head.
Take care. I’ll catch ya back here next week.