A Bump in the Road
By John W. Vander Velden
I am
a farmer. That seems simple enough, even
if it is not a complete description of the man I have become. But it is the way I have earned my living for
more than a few years. How I have farmed
has changed with time, but some things do not.
I find myself near the middle of this year’s harvest and am
reminded. Plans are good…but things
never go as planned.
If I
needed to be reminded of fickleness of my profession, the weeks just past
should have done that. For I am tied to
the weather. There are few other
professions more bound to the weather than farming. And it’s more than getting wet when it
rains. Summer droughts cause their own
fears but over wet fields are no fun either.
The storms of late August and September washed out not only the
road…repeatedly…but crops as well. I was
fortunate that the number of acres lost was minimal. But the intensity of the downpours sent the
soybeans ta leanin’ in several directions.
Beans tilted steeply to the south must be harvested from the
south…against the grain you understand…if you hope to gather most of the
crop. Running the combine would seem, to
the untrained, as random wandering, a cut here…a cut there…drive all over the
place. That is not to mention dealing with all the wet spots to avoid getting
the machine stuck…hmmmmm. From outer
space the fields with its wandering trails and track, uncountable ruts, and
random, oddly shaped unharvested blocks of crops, might look like those high
Andean plain drawings of Peru…but not.
Maybe the guys at Google Earth would get a laugh at the sight of
it. But I harvest where I can in the
direction I must, it slows things down…a bunch. I have worked on beans for a
month, and what little remains will have to wait until the ground freezes. Time to get back to corn and wonder if those
fields will carry the combine’s weight.
I guess I’ll cross those rows when I get there.
The
point of this post is not to talk about the weather, or wet fields, or
farming…well maybe farming…but to say that things do not go exactly as we plan. However just because they don’t, doesn’t mean
we can’t accomplish something. Obstacles
are part of the journey. Just as falling
down is a part of learning. Every day we
face things unexpected that seem to stand in our way. We would like to brush those things aside and
just go on, but they are rooted too deeply and stubbornly block the direction
we have chosen. Some we may be able to
leap over, some we need to find away around, but some we must backtrack a bit
to take a totally new route. Yes,
they’re frustrating. Yes, we loose our patience. But, yes, they’re a part of life, so we have
to deal with it, one way or the other.
Just like I never asked for the two inches of rain on the already saturated
soil in late October, none of us ask for any of the obstacles that pop up
without warning. So when an obstacle interferes with our plans, it’s best not
to think of it as imposing barricade but rather see it as nothing more than a
bump in the road.
(566
Words) 11-18-2016
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