This family bleeds Farmall red

My brother checks out a Farmall during our annual Thanksgiving rite of scamper-on-the-tractors.

At an antique tractor show last fall, I had the chance to drive an old restored Farmall tractor in the event’s short parade of vehicles — an International Harvester Farmall B Cub. What I know of these machines has been introduced to me in fragments by my father-in-law, John. He has almost two dozen of these old farm essentials, though he doesn’t use them to do any work on the family acreage. He collects them as a hobby, raising these iconic machines just as surely as he raises goats and cattle on the farm. He scours auctions, swap meets and online classifieds for the best-of-breed among them. When he knows of one for sale, he’s off to look it over in Ottumwa, Ozawkie or Omaha. If it’s the right fit for his collection – a certain make or year, he’ll make the winning bid on the prize and haul it home on a flatbed trailer.

They arrive at the family homestead rough and on the verge of ruin; sometimes the hulk of rusted metal looks past the point of rehabilitation. It takes months of careful reconstruction and cleaning to get them going again. Yet one by one, more than 20 in all, he has carefully restored them to optimal health. Their coats of gleaming red paint reflect his care up to the rafters of the barn. Every year at family gatherings, we wander out to the barn to see the latest addition to his collection and marvel at the lot of them. Clutching glasses of wine and beer after Thanksgiving dinner we climb all over them, transforming ourselves into children scampering on supersized toys.

Such tractors are a far cry from the modern John Deere. I recently read an advertisement for one of those behemoths. The tractor cost more than a house. It featured everything the farmer could need at the touch of a computer. Using global positioning coordinates, you can program these mindful tractors to travel up the length of a field, turn 180 degrees on the tip of a pin and return. Row after exacting row, never varying and able to navigate around that stray oak tree in the far northeast corner of the field. You can use the GPS to determine exact yield per acre to plan for next year. Interior control panels are backlit so farmers can work all night. For added comfort, the cabs are air-conditioned and ride so smooth that the 32-oz ice tea in the cupholder won’t shake. I imagine that the next ad I see for one of these modern marvels will offer a drop-down DVD screen and stereo surround-sound for farmers who are bored now that they don’t actually drive the tractor.

I’ve been in the cab of one – once. The state university took me and a group of 50 other faculty and staff on a tour of Kansas to help us understand more about small-town life. Visits to manufacturers, farms, revitalized downtown storefronts, rehabilitated theatres, artist galleries and one or two cornball tourist stops culminated in a visit to a central Kansas ranch. At the ranch we paired off into groups of two and three to board a massive John Deere for a free ride in the field. The operator took each group in a speedy run forward, an abrupt about-face and back. He shouted a description of the controls above the roar of the engine. The ride made me flushed and giddy, as though I had been on a roller coaster. Most of this I chalked up to some level of embarrassment that riding on a tractor was now a touristy thing to do, and we urbanites were offered the grand tour. -jen

Excerpted from “Powered by the Past,” an essay I wrote in 2007

Bees Through the Looking Glass, part 2

Note: This post is part of excerpts from an essay I wrote in 2007, part of my continuing experiment. Here’s part one.

Most days in the winter, when the daylight hours are shortened by the tilt of the Earth, I steal up to my 6th floor museum office and turn on my computer in the dark. I do not turn on any overhead lights; they interfere with first light of dawn. The glow of the computer screen reflects against the darkened easterly windows. Usually, about the time the first glimmer of sun pierces the gauzy gray of early morning, I leave my desk to refill my coffee and check in on the bees.

One of the perks that I did not anticipate when I accepted a job in a museum was the freedom to be in its hallways before visitors in the early hours. If the sun is not fully above the horizon or the staff has not turned on the exhibit lights, I can revel in the creepy character of the birds and mammals frozen in time by taxidermy. They live in perpetual motion, wings spread or paws raised, in decades-old dioramas titled “Our National Bird” and “Life on the Great Plains.”

Some days, I take the long route to the bees by wandering through the dimly lit, arched hallways, first past the exhibit about the waning life of the Kansas River, then by the coyote, the fox and rabbits. I detour past the live snake exhibit. The snakes, too, are kept behind glass. The background surroundings of their dwellings are painted in shocking kaleidoscope colors that attempt to portray glowing sunsets, wavy grasses and pointy purple mountains. The snakes are still but alert, keenly aware of the lack of children tapping at their glass in the early morning hours.
Around the corner from the reptiles and fish is the synthetic bee tree. It stretches from floor almost to ceiling, but a girth of more than five feet in diameter makes its trunk look much more stout. Somehow, its sculptor forged a plasticine chemical cocktail into natural ridges resembling tree bark, limbs and exposed roots. The north and south sides of the tree cut away to reveal the hive inside.
In the tree, two lamps illuminate the bees building their rich honeycomb. They have constructed their home into four double-sided frames stacked vertically through the tree’s midsection. At its widest points, the hills of comb extend outward from the frame to smash against the glass enclosure. Most of the bees cluster on the side of the tree that leads to their exit tube, a plastic highway cemented between hive and window. My favorite place to stand in the morning is near exit tube, and listen. I can hear a gentle vibrating gshzzz. A bee pulse. -jen

Gearing up for Green Acres

Quadrupeds like this one, born in March, will be our new neighbors in June.

I offer here a bit of unsolicited advice, should you be so foolish as to take on the following simultaneously: a high-energy job, graduate school, remodeling not one but two bathrooms at the same time, learning how to blog, becomming a landlord, planning for a farm, and keeping your sanity — over a period of about two months.

Here’s what can happen, in just two weeks of that timeframe. First, the remodeling gods will laugh at you and throw hideous problems in your way like a poured shower pan of concrete that can’t be replaced by something prefab/standard. The washing machine breaks, followed by a toilet that sponteously cracks in half, stem to stern. Then the compressor goes out in the fridge, what my repairman humorously called “a massive stroke” from which it will not recover (that was $53, just to get the death certificate). I swear it’s like we’re on some Truman-like stage, being toyed with (I picture it as the work of evil cats and don’t ask why).

I first wrote  about a pending transition to a more rural life in March. Now it’s May, we are closer to deadline for moving out of our house and to the farm. We’re excited to get out there and get started. I’m hoping the moving gods will be more kind than the remodeling gods. -Jen

 

Why we get along (most of the time)

In this, the penultimate year before the big 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (and his 200th birthday to boot), I’ve been tucking in evolutionary concepts into a couple of the unoccupied nooks and crannies of my brain. I always feel underead, and in areas of science, the pangs of inadequacy are acute. So, especially in honor of the title of this blog, I wanted to bring up this quesion of why we humans generally get along with each other. Why do we forgo our own safety to help others,  why cooperate, why be altruistic? We open our checkbooks with every hurricane, tornado and cyclone. The fact that other critters from bees to big cats also show cooperative behaviors makes the question more intriguing for people, because then it’s not a question of “just us.” (Humans. We’re so myopic. We think it’s all about us.)

Darwin, too, puzzled over this and how it fit with survival. And according to Science, scientists are still pondering it, looking at the idea of altruism and cooperative behavior from the perspectives of genetics, evolution, and even game theory.

Think about how many times in the course of a day you take into consideration the greater good or helping an individual. Hold open a door, work together to tackle a problem, give of your time, talents and energy. Otherwise, we’d never get anything done. We’d be rocking in a corner hugging our knees trying to figure out how to acquire our food or our shelter all on an individual basis.

I think that’s one of the reasons that I remain hopeful that the populace of the planet will eventually cooperate on some level to mitigate or halt the destruction we cause. It’ll all be for the greater good (and we’ll have no resources at all if we don’t). -jen

Bees Through the Looking Glass

The bees at the museum where I work began to die last fall. More generally, bees were struggling nationwide (and may be still, though it’s early in the spring and hard to tell).

My writings about the museum bees became a full-length essay called “Undertaking at Dawn” that recently won me some cool cash and accolades from the English Department at KU. An avid recycler, I plan to post parts of the essay here, tucking them in wherever they fit.

At that time, I wrote about them quietly, hushed, with a funeria air. Monitoring the beehive had become part of my morning routine, as much as coffee, the newspaper, and the anticipation of the challenges of the day. The deaths of those tiny pollinators pricked at my conscience, urging me to respond in a way I hadn’t determined to be feasible, at least not then.

Glass separated me from the bees in the museum’s hive exhibit. I marveled at their efficient, ordered lives. Through the glass, I observed their dances, their comings and goings, their honey-making. One day they wobbled as if drunk. Several were sick and and I knew, likely to die. I watched a bee haul one of its dying brethren up the wall of glass to the hive exit and heave it outside. The dying bee rotated in incremental feeble circles on the windowsill and struggled to stand. Wings deformed by disease, it could not fly.

Without the glass between us, I probably would not be as concerned for the bees’ welfare, and more concerned for my own; flying, stinging creatures have always unnerved me. Instead, I regarded them fondly and worried over their decreasing numbers.