WALKING BEANS

I grew up in a microscopic smudge of a town.  Ashkum, IL boasted some 600 residents at the time of the 1970 census, when I first became aware of such things.  I'm convinced to this day, however, that those 600 included all the dogs, cats, and otherwise domesticated creatures within the village limits.

     Frankly, I always thought the main job of the Village Clerk should be to sit at the edge of town with some chalk and a chalkboard and keep a running tally of exactly how many folks we had at a given time, changing the sign as cars entered or left town.

     Since my Mom was the Village Clerk at the time, this idea never received serious consideration.

     It was -- still is, in fact, and probably always will be -- a farming town.  Like most metropolises of similar size found throughout the Midwest, the village sprouted up and still huddles alongside the railroad tracks.  The tallest building in town by a long shot is the grain elevator, where the area farmers bring their annual harvests of corn and soybeans to be dried and stored until they're ready to be sold.  The railroad runs right past this elevator, a man-made steel river that provides the farmers a means by which to get their product to market.

     Ashkum's lifeblood was -- is -- the farmers who surround the community.  In conjunction with the 700 souls who now live in the town, the farmers shop at its grocery store, send their kids to its school, attend its three churches and patronize its three taverns, (a nice symmetry, that!)  The farmers don't need Ashkum to survive, but Ashkum sure needs its farmers.

     This has always been especially true in the summertime.  If you were a town kid in the summertime, the farms were an entire industry.  Kids would mow grass, baby-sit, take on a paper route or do a variety of other odd jobs to earn their own spending money in the summer months.  But what they did most was work for farmers.

     Now keep in mind, we're talkin' about a bunch of townies.  It's not as if we had a vested interest in a farm's success.  We were a bunch of mercenaries out for a buck.  Which naturally meant that we got the nastiest, hottest, dirtiest and most insultingly moronic jobs ever bestowed upon humans of any age with IQs higher than your average tree stump.  Generally speaking, there were three biggies, the Big 3 summertime cottage industries for youths in the Midwest.

     Of the three, baling hay was arguably the most reviled and unarguably the filthiest and most exhausting, although it generally paid the best.  Technically speaking, we didn't do the actual baling.  There was a machine for that purpose.  No, when you were on a baling crew, you either worked "on the rack" or "in the barn."

     If you were on the rack, you rode with a couple of other guys on a hayrack -- this being the only one of the Big 3 that was almost exclusively male -- which brought up the caboose of a train behind the baling machine and the tractor.

     The baling machine scooped up the hay, previously cut and piled in a continuous, spiraling row along the ground, in a manner not unlike a slack-jawed whale might scoop through an oceanic cloud of algae.  In a miraculous process I'm betting even those who designed the machine don't fully understand, the baler packed, molded, and tied this hay into perfectly formed, ice cube-shaped bales. These oversized hay briquettes then emerged onto a protruding conveyor belt as if in a bad "I Love Lucy" episode and trundled along to a rendezvous with the waiting rack crew.

     The crew's job was simply to spear the incoming bales with wicked-looking hooks that would've turned Peter Pan's nemesis a positively Pan-like shade of envy and hoist them into neat stacks on the hayrack.

     Moronically simple.  Except when a good bale-soaking rain doubled the tonnage, the rack was full and you were trying to heave this soggy deadweight over your head while balancing on the six inches you had left to stand on, all without knocking your compatriots off the six inches they had left to stand on.

     Being in the barn was similar.  You waited up in the hayloft for the full racks to come in from the field.  When they did, the rack crew downloaded the bales onto an elevator that trundled them up to the loft.  There, the waiting barn crew neatly stacked them to the ceiling.

     While in the barn, you didn't have to worry about falling off a moving rack.  You did, however, have to worry about the lack of fresh air streaming in through that tiny 2' x 3' opening, the fact that, whaddya know, heat does rise, and whether or not you'd reach terminal velocity if you fell from those bales near the ceiling to that floor waaaaay down below.

     After a brutal day of baling, it was not at all unusual to go home with scratched, punctured arms resembling those of a heroin addict.  You'd also be caked with dust and expelling substances from your nose and throat with colors and textures that were completely foreign to nature.

     While baling hay was the Hard Labor of summer jobs, de-tasseling corn was many an innocent youth's first foray into the cold-hearted world of Corporate Hell.

     If you're a city slicker driving through corn country in mid to late summer, you may notice the Dr. Seuss-like puffy brown tufts on top of the corn stalks.  Those are the tassels, the rough equivalent of a flower's pollen.  Since most farmers exhibit loyalty to a specific brand of seed corn with a fierceness scarcely seen this side of the "Tastes Great!  Less Filling!" debate, cross-pollination of different strains of corn is not a particularly welcome development.

     As a result, the farmers hired de-tasseling companies that swept through a community, plucking up unwary children like the Gypsy travelers of old and chaining them to their de-tasseling machines under the watchful eyes of the evil, bullwhip-wielding Machine Master.

     Okay, I'm exaggerating.  He just used a riding crop.

     In any case, this Dickensonian crew of children would ride the detasseling machine, suspended between the steamy rows of a cornstalk jungle, getting smacked in the face and receiving the Death of a Thousand Cuts by the thick, sharp leaves on the stalks.  Your entire existence centered on yanking the offending tassel from each stalk as you passed by, leaving in your wake a rather goofy looking field full of decapitated corn stalks.

     There was very little joy in this work.  The crew chief/slave owners who operated these coldly impersonal detasseling companies were almost universally reviled by the kids under their thumbs.  You were just working for "The Man," not a pleasant concept at any age.

     Of all three summer jobs, however, there's one that conjures up the fondest memories, while at the same time producing the most puzzled expressions whenever I say its name.  That job was Walking Beans.  Ah, even now, the memories come flooding back.

     Oh, don't get me wrong.  This was tough, exhausting, backbreaking work, usually lasting from Sun-up to late afternoon, five or six days a week.  Still, there was something about walking beans that gives it an odd, Rockwellian feeling, even to this day.

     First, lest you begin to imagine little bean plants on leashes strolling through the neighborhood, walking beans simply consisted of a crew walking up and down the rows of beans and pulling, chopping, cutting, hooking, or otherwise eliminating all the weeds in a given field.

     Hay baling was a sporadic, one or two day's worth of work.  De-tasseling corn was indentured servitude.  Walking beans was, in those days before farmers engaged in the chemical warfare practices they employ today instead, a nearly universal fact of life.  It was its own subculture with its own rules and customs.  Farmer Jones’ crew used the nasty, mini-scythes on a pole known as "hooks" to cut the weeds.  Farmer Smith preferred hoes.  Farmer Wilson’s group simply pulled the weeds.

     You knew the farmer you were working for.  Oftentimes you'd get on his crew year after year, starting from around twelve years old on up through eighteen or nineteen, depending on your post high school plans.  Choosing whom to work for forced you to consider a multitude of factors.  Timing was important, as you wanted the work to stretch out for as long as possible:  ("When is Evans starting this year?"  "Should be in a couple of weeks."  "Good.  We should be done with Johnson by then.")

How many breaks you got was important, too.  Were they just quickie water breaks or did the farmer's wife bring some snacks out to the field for a "lunch?”  Was the main, noontime lunch brought out to the field, (ugh!), eaten up at the house, (better), or did everyone pile into the truck to hit the Dairy Queen, (cool?!)

     There were also unspoken rules of etiquette passed down through the ages like ancient tribal customs.  When you reached the end of your row, you turned around and worked your way back to meet the person furthest behind.  If someone hit a particularly heavy patch of weeds, everyone hopped over to wipe out the patch in a brief, furious skirmish before forming ranks again within your own rows and resuming the march, sweeping a swath of land free of the enemy.

     Oh, you were a soldier, no doubt about it.  Armed with your trusty hook or hoe, you were out on patrol, a seek-and-destroy mission against an insidious, cleverly camouflaged foe.  Upon contact with the enemy, you fixed bayonets and charged.  If you survived, you placed your weapon confidently on your shoulder and proudly marched on ahead.

     Of course, not that many actual wars feature barely pubescent girl soldiers in the front lines, their shorts and halter tops enticing their compatriots, hormonally supercharged young boys who were physically 15 or 16 but mentally somewhere in the "Check out this loogey!" stage.

     Aw, but what the hell.  We were young and stupid, without a real problem in the world, making five or six bucks an hour with no rent or credit cards to worry about.

     If life could've stayed that simple and straightforward, and someone could have ever actually persuaded a Village Clerk to take up that chalkboard, I doubt the population count on it would ever go down.

     Ashkum would have had the cleanest bean fields around forever.