PINING FOR THE FIELDS

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING:
I got my first job when in 1984 working as a roguer/detasseler for a local seed corn company. I was thirteen and we’d just moved to Grand Island, Nebraska. I’d spent a week or two on the couch watching TV and my mother decided that I needed something to do, so she got me a job. It was not a pleasant job. My mother would drop me off at a farm before sunrise and I’d stand there with a bunch of other teens I didn’t know. Then the busses would arrive. Everyone had a crew assignment. So you got on the bus with your crew. The crew bosses were high school kids and the crews were mostly junior high and high school boys, not many girls. As you can imagine, it was often a lot like Lord of the Flies. We would be driven out to a cornfield and get off the bus. It was often still dark when we arrived. Our job during the first part of the summer was roguing, which means cutting out unwanted plants with a hoe or a knife. It was really easy at the beginning of the summer when the corn was short, but as the corn got taller the job became more and more evil. To begin with, even during the warmest parts of the year, it’s chilly in the morning in Nebraska. The corn field catches all the moisture from the air as it cools, so when you enter a field at dawn, you can’t go ten feet without being drenched to the bone. The serious roguer/detasselers wore rain suits. The rest of us soon began to bring garbage bags. One would be worn on top like a medieval tunic and the other around the waist like a skirt. It was wet and around forty degrees Fahrenheit. I remember skinny little kids coming out of the rows with blue lips and pruney fingers shivering uncontrollably in the early hours after sunrise. As the day progressed, the field would become warmer and warmer, so that by midday the temperature might be around 100 degrees and field was like a sauna. As you walked down the rows with bare arms, you’d notice some mild discomfort as the leaves brushed your skin and then when you got to the end of the row and stood in line to be assigned another row, you notice what looked like a thousand tiny paper cuts on your arms. These things, by the way were the more enjoyable parts of the job. I haven’t mentioned the mud or the bugs or the random brutality that took place in the field where no one could see what one adolescent boy did to another. Many a skinny, little kid came out of the rows bruised and bleeding. Believe it or not, I did the same job the next summer. It was a lot easier. I was bigger and knew more people. The summer after that, I worked for a farmer keeping his irrigation wells going. It was still in the corn field, but much easier – more responsibility and more money. My mom had put me to work to get me off the couch, but the money made it worth it. I made nearly a thousand dollars that first summer and a similar amount every summer after that. Enough money, so that I never really had to think about money until much later in life. I’d kinda promised myself that I’d never work in the fields again, but I was mistaken. The summer after my freshman year of college, I found myself working for another seed corn company at their research and testing facility. It was a job very similar to my first except now I was counting corn plants for yield trials. The idea was that they were testing the yields (how many seeds per ear of corn) of various strains of corn. In order to do this, they’d planted whole fields full of test plots. Each plot was supposed to consist of two rows of twelve plants each. It was our job to cut out the extra plants. To say that it was monotonous would be an incredible understatement. We counted corn for eight to ten hours a day, six days a week. I started dreaming all night that I was counting corn only to wake the next morning to have to dress and drive to work to count some more corn. Again, this was actually the best part of the job because as the corn developed tassels, they began to have us self-pollinate plants. I’ll try to describe what this was. The first thing we had to do was slid a tiny paper sack (rather like a white paper condom) over the ear of corn in the early stages of its development. This was to make sure that it did not get pollinated. Later, as the tassels began to appear we would take a paper bag (rather like the ones they put your single bottle of wine in) and put it carefully over the tassel and make a neat little fold at the bottom and paperclip it (this was to make sure that no pollen escaped the bag). A day or two later, I would come by and take the tassel bag and whack it against my free hand and pull it off, then yank off the ear bag, and put the tassel bag over the ear and staple it (this was how we self-pollinated the plants). I know that this does not sound too bad and it wasn’t at first. In fact, at first it was a pleasant change after counting corn for a month, but then the pace picked up. The tassels on individual plants tend to come at roughly the same time. At first there are just a few, but then little by little, there are more and more and more and they all have to be bagged right away. Thus our days began to get longer and our days off fewer until we worked 34 days in a row with an average of ten hour days. There was one day when we worked 18 hours self-pollinating plants as fast as we could. We couldn’t go home until we were done. At the end of each day we’d come in from the field, sunburned and covered in pollen. There’s nothing more itchy than pollen, but if you scratch it, it burrows into your skin and give you a painful, welty rash. At the end of that summer, I was done with working in the field, hopefully forever.