Montana Days

D. E. Bones

It surprises a lot of people that I used to be a farmer. I was though, even if it seems back in another lifetime. Once in a while something will happen to bring it all back--the smell of diesel fuel, a light dust hanging in the air on a dirt road, a hard cold winter sky.

I was flying to Oregon. I'd been designated by the Practical Joke Dept. of Northwest Airlines to be bounced from hub to hub thanks to weather, missed connections and, I suspect, airline incompetence. Eventually I ended up in Minneapolis, from there to be flung to Seattle and on to Portland. But at least on this long leg of the trip I had a row of seats to myself. I was sitting by the window and watching the country slide by under us. The block farms of Minnesota and North Dakota gave way to the strip farms of Eastern Montana, which went north as far as I could see, even from six miles up. I farmed some of this land once, 3000 acres of wheat and barley. It was up there, almost on the Canadian line. If you get away from the northern prairie states, it's surprising how few Americans have even heard of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan which sits north of Montana, or realize that the eastern two-thirds of Montana is prairie, grass and farmland. If they ever drive through this country, they see only barren land where the temperature is sure to hit 110 in the summer and 40 below zero in the winter. They shake their heads that anyone would choose to live here. I don't blame them, I feel the same way about some places. Mountains and forests and seashores have a magnificence to them, an unmistakable splendor. Prairies are subtle. And now, from a plane so high up in the air that the people we're flying over don't even know we're here, I can feel the land. I feel it so strongly that for now, for this moment, the only thing I really want in the world is to be standing on a hill overlooking the coulees, feeling the wind that has blown unobstructed for hundreds of miles and listening to the hawks keen. The prairie sod is gray in the coulees and the wheat is just starting to ripen, turning from green to gold. In a few minutes I'll climb back on the tractor and continue working the summer fallow, killing the weeds that rob the moisture from unplanted fields. In areas of slight rainfall such as this, land is left barren in alternating years to save moisture for a good stand of wheat. Two year's moisture for one year's crop, and those guys down in Kansas are always complaining even though they plant all of their land every year and only have half of our shipping costs.

The grain is grown in strips 40 rods wide, crop alternating with summer fallow and running north and south, crossways to the prevailing west winds so that with any luck all the topsoil won't end up over in North Dakota somewhere. Too many farmers grow too much of everything so the crop prices are always poor, and farming is at the mercy of so many uncontrollable things, like world grain supply, export climate, and, of course, weather. Small grain farming is embarrassingly dependent on our system of socialized agriculture, a bitter pill for the people who think of themselves as bastions of individualism. But none of that matters when the crop is ripe and you've finally got the combine going, all belts and chains tight, no bearings going bad for a change and you can look over your shoulder into the hopper and see the grain coming out of the auger, a regular fountain of wheat and this is what you've busted your butt for all year and last year too, when this field was summer fallow. The sun is going down in a rose sky, lines of clouds glowing while the hawks sit on rocks in the summer fallow watching you, round after round, a mile-and-a-half long, some strips, three miles on a round trip. In a good year the hopper won't hold enough for a full round and Uncle Knut will meet you part way down the other side, roaring down the stubble in the '51 Chevy grain truck so that you can unload. The custom cutters, combiners for hire, unload on the run, never stopping, sometimes even changing drivers on the run. But that's show off stuff, because if you bump the truck or pick up a rock you're down fixing things when you could be getting your crop in, and that's what it's all about. Rain can ruin your crop, bleach the grain and leach the nutrients so that it's downgraded, sometimes all the way down to cattle feed. Or just hold you up by making the grain so damp that you can't store it because it will heat and rot, just like grass clippings left in a pile. Or high winds can thresh the kernels from the heads so that they are lost onto the ground. You've got to get your crop in.

I wasn't such a great farmer. I mean, I don't have mud for blood, not like Uncle Knut or Bud Eidsness or John Murray. But I did have the farm in my blood. And if my friends could sit in my tractor and see the sun setting in a sky so intensely blue that no one can ever believe it until they see for themselves, or watch the clouds--spring storms blowing in from the southwest with the lightening flashing and dark streaks of rain trailing, or sometimes just big puffy white ones, spaced so evenly that you think maybe they were dished out with an ice cream scoop. They are so big and soft that I'm sure one could hold me if I could only get up there, where I'd lie on my stomach and watch the cloud shadows chase each other over the prairie hills and through the coulees, and I'd eat mouthfuls of cloud which would be wet and cool, like a cross between a snowball and cotton candy. If they could only sit here, my city friends who always asked, "Why do they call it Big Sky Country?" I wouldn't have to say a word.

But here I am years after leaving, 32,000 feet up and I can still smell the dust and feel the prairie wind, see the dogs panting in the shade of the pickup, hoping we'll stop for a splash in Wolf Creek. If you live here, you put the accent on the Wolf and say "crick"--WOLFcrick, like it's one word. The foxes have a den in one of the rockpiles and the pups frolic, unafraid of the huge tractors. Badgers have been digging up the yard again, and a beaver has been chewing trees in the windbreak. A weasel has a nest in the barn we use as a barley bin, mice aren't a problem in there this year. There must be a hundred different kinds of birds here. Nighthawks and eagles, ducks of every kind, herons, waxwings, thrashers, swallows and larks. Blackbirds that are red-winged, yellow-headed, tri-colored, or violet-green. Boat-tailed grackles. Pheasants and grouse. The high school team is the Medicine Lake Honkers, in honor of the Canada geese. Seagulls follow the tractors, looking for mice as the straw piles are turned over. Strange to see pelicans two thousand miles from the gulf, but they have a rookery at the refuge on Medicine Lake. They glide in a line, following the bends of the Big Muddy Creek. The leader beats his wings in a rhythm that is taken up by the second in line, then the third and on back. Wings stop in sequence the same way, like chorus girls kicking their legs from one end of the row to the other. They are the birds I like to watch the most.

In the autumn, when the crop is in and the rocks are picked, the last patches of weeds worked down and you bring the machinery in, when you kill the engine on the last tractor and the big diesel rumbles into silence, the whole world seems quiet and there is a sense of being finished. The crop may have been good or it may have been poor, but the cycle is complete. Soon the ground will freeze and in March, when the cranes pass through on their way north, the cycle will begin again. On the best nights, nights without a moon, sometimes you can see the Northern Lights--shining, shimmering, dancing, shooting, not just to the north but across the sky, everywhere. They are the most spectacular sight I have ever seen. I sometimes think that if I had a single wish, it would be for one warm Montana night when I was lying in the prairie grass, watching the Northern Lights with no thoughts in my head, just the wonder, the stars so close that I could touch them if I stood on tiptoe.

But that was a long way off and a long time ago, a different life and a different world. I keep my face to the window so that nobody can see the tears in my eyes. I couldn't live there any more, I know that. Northeastern Montana is a wide open country but it's a small world, and I live in a big world now. But no place has felt like home since I left. I wonder if any place ever will.