Janus

When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.

Henry Rollins

"All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world."
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

Where do you come down on August?  Thumbs up or thumbs down? Does turning the page fill you with foreboding? Or regret?  Do the days of August flutter away into the haze as the Monarch butterflies migrate?  Or do you feel trapped, cramped, imprisoned by heat, humidity, insects, or regret for the promises of summertime unfulfilled? Is Nature's bounty a cornucopia of tasty treats to be savored fresh today and preserved for the cold days tomorrow?  Or do you avert your eyes from the jungle of foxtail, bindweed,  grasshoppers and assorted crawly beasties that used to be characterized as a garden? Do you anticipate the broadcast of your favorite baseball team...or have pre-season football rankings captured your allegiance?

Like Janus, August is two faced, a time of beginnings and transitions, of doors and gateways,of change. August has one foot in the door of summer and one on the steps of fall. 

A quick trip through Augusts past confirms these dual personalities:

August is a month of fairs....4H and FFA, hogs and sweat, mud and sand and ribbons.

Following the fairs..and the conclusion of projects four-legged and not, August is a time for vacations, for seeing America, for keeping cool, for catching up with friends and family far away, for one last hurrah before school bells ring.

It is the month of farewells...as sons and daughters go back to college...or leave home for the first time.

August is a month of storms.  When we first came back to farm, we'd watch the weather map anxiously, waiting  for a Gulf Coast hurricane to come up from the south, break the July drought, and give our soybeans a good soaking.  More recently, August has blown in violently with destructive winds  flattening the ripening corn and turning the mum patch into a tedious game of 5000 pot pickup. August giveth and August taketh away. August can be synonymous with catastrophe.

But August can be a time to gather as well.  To dig and dry the onions when the ground softens.  To take advantage of all the ways that tomatoes can be canned. To choose the magic moment for picking grapes for jam that glows in a jar like the visual essence of summer. For eating apples off the tree while we water, grabbing a half dozen to bake the first new crop apple loaves, setting aside a half bushel in the 60 year old frosty refrigerator to use til the winter apples come in.

 August is a month of cakes and celebrations.  If  we all lived closer together, we would barely finish one round of desserts before we would blow out the candles on another one with three birthdays in ten days. Levi's birthday starts the birthday fortnight, a continuing feast of thanks for  him, for Ben on the 15th and for Matt on the 20th.  August: a month of new lives and new beginnings in our family.

If you are country people like we are, August brings  a new school year.  The kids have gotten their letters in the mail assigning them to their new classes in their new grade. The school supplies await in plastic bags and almost everyone needs new tennis shoes and jeans.  Aaron and Matt start EA football practice and Lee will drive Gabe over to Burlington Junction to learn the ropes of flag football.  Abbie and Lizzie sign up for the fall's dance classes with Miss Annie.  Josh will start back to Honeytree.  No more kids' laughter at the pool, no more wet towels and swimsuits for the puppies to chew through at the farm. Summer may not end with the advent of school, but the swimming season does.

And, finally, way at the end of August,  we raise our glass for one more celebration.  Some years we mark it; some years it gets no more than a passing mention.  But years ago, when we believed we were grownups, Blake and I wed, and somehow, through all the years, we have held tightly to that partnership, that bond, as we raised our children, struggled with our business, enjoyed the ups and endured the downs of both, and gloried in the happiness and blessings we did not earn.  August may show us its happy face or its scowl from one year to the next, but on the 27th, we breathe a sigh of relief and say, Thanks! Made it another year!

Bring on September!

"It Isn't the Gold that I'm Wanting...."

“There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;

It’s luring me on as of old;

Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting

So much as just finding the gold.

It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,

It’s the forests where silence has lease;

It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,

It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

― Robert W. Service, The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,

And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service

“The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.”

― Corey Ford, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story - Georg Steller & the Russian Exploration of AK

"The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people." Robert Service

“To wake up on a gloriously bright morning, in a tent pitched beneath spruce trees, and to look out lazily and sleepily for a moment from the open side of the tent, across the dead camp-fire of the night before, to the river, where the light of morning rests and perhaps some early-rising[240] native is gliding in his birch canoe; to go to the river and freshen one's self with the cold water, and yell exultingly to the gulls and hell-divers, in the very joy of living; or to wake at night, when you have rolled in your blankets in the frost-stricken dying grass without a tent, and to look up through the leaves above to the dark sky and the flashing stars, and hear far off the call of a night bird or the howl of a wolf: this is the poetry, the joy of a wild and roving existence, which cannot come too often”

― Josiah Edward Spurr, Through the Yukon Gold Diggings

Where the river is windin',

Big nuggets they're findin';

They're goin' North to Alaska!

Go North! The rush is on...

Johnny Horton

I gotta admit it: I am more likely to hit the bass note in 'North to Alaska' than to mush a dog team or partake of the type of activities that Robert Service would consider 'rough and tough'. But the lure of the country is a current that runs deep and strong; a tourist I might be, but one with waterproof boots, a raincoat, a camera, and a desire to partake, however briefly, in the wonders and grandeur of a "a wild and roving existence".  In that spirit, I welcome the gray morning light that wakes me two time zones early. At daybreak the silvery Tongass Narrows comes alive as fishing boats leave wakes like water bugs and pontoon planes lift off like dragonflies. In one way, the work of Alaska is alien: harvesting a watery world, a forested world, a rocky world. But the folks headed off this quiet morning are still kin: we are toiling at the whim of Mother Nature, dependent upon the vagaries of wind, rain, and temperature, whether we till the soil in the Midwest or harvest trees in Alaska.

It is also a mysterious and wondrous world manifested in the totems and art of the tales and lives of the native peoples that made the waters and woods their homes.

Some people belittle glaciers as nothing more that "dirty snow", but don't count me in that group! To awake in gray light to the silent passing of a blue berg passing before an opaque black forest is to be awestruck by the majesty and scale of this creation and your own minuscule part in it. The ship passes like a ghost in the waters below, the waters above, the fog shrouding all. Uncounted waterfalls cascade over the edges of the glacier sheared cliffs and pour their foam into the fjord. We are floating like a leaf, leaving next to no wake, icebergs of snowy white, gravelly gray and turquoise blue drifting with us in the milky water. Then, around a jutting ledge, we see the glacier in the distance, an immense jagged river of antique ice, compressed like rock but flowing like water, pouring out between two cliffs. It is huge, dwarfing the iceberg calves at its feet, which dwarf the smaller excursion boat of visitors that edges nearer. We stand in the all enveloping mist watching until the glacier disappears behind the mountains.

The irresistible lure of gold met the immovable force of Alaska back in 1898, making Skagway a launching point to the Klondike Gold Rush.  Up through the White Pass the would be miners struggled, carrying their one ton stake of supplies on horses that soon foundered under the severe conditions,  or on their own backs, mile by mile, pound by pound.  We make the trip through the Pass in dense fog.  Our intrepid coach driver tells us that the grocery barge arrives on Tuesday nights in Skagway; there's not much left in the produce aisle or dairy case in the town's grocery store after the weekend.  Amazon is very popular in Alaska, and many folks head down to the Costco in Juneau to order supplies by the pallet. She used to fly to Anchorage from the Eskimo village where she taught, mail her clothes back home, and fill her suitcases with meat and produce for the ten hour flight back.   Not exactly the hardship the Klondikers faced, but still a magnitude or two of difficulty above a two hour drive on I-29. The White Pass and Yukon train carries a light load of vacationers these days, but  when it was built, its 110 miles, steep grades and sharp curves made it an engineering marvel.  The line was blasted through the mountain peaks in a mere 26 months using more than 450 tons of explosives.  

We see remnants of the original "Trail of '98"from the rear balcony of the last car...but we stick with hiking and kayaking. Even in Alaska our sense of adventure has its limits.

“This country makes a man younger than his birthdays.”

― Sam Kieth, One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey

Those Magnificent Men....

 

"A non-mechanic friend has shared a story about repairing his old tractor. All went well: he got stuck things loose, loose things tight. But then things got so eerie I wonder if I shouldn’t send condolences to his widow without waiting for the obit. He finished the job…with no spare parts, no parts missing. That’s just not right. Not the way it goes. Something is horribly wrong. I presume the machine will explode first time he cranks it. Such a pity. He meant well. R.I.P. Bill".....Roger Welsch

Up, down, flying around, looping the loop and defying the ground.

They're all frightfully keen, those magnificent men in their flying machines.

From the 1965 movie

No one remembers how many harvests it has been in that fence row rusting picturesquely and providing a silent contrast to the rattling augers and whining bin fans. Most farms have an "Island of Misfit Toys", so to speak: machinery too worn or obsolete even to be traded. This old tractor was parked off to the side on a farm Blake's grandfather first rented back in the Depression years. One day, in passing, Blake told me the old Minneapolis was the first tractor he ever drove; the Hursts had an active stable of Minneapolis-Molines up til the 1980s.

The old tractor was history....and no more...until Ryan, with the blessing of the Hurst Brothers, drug it out of that fence row and into his garage as his very first tractor restoration project. I won't go into all the dead ends and u-turns and retrofitting and research and road trips this restoration entailed; anyone who has worked with machinery...old machinery....derelict old machinery...can fill in the blanks. But on Christmas Day, this piece of our family farm past, wearing a festive red bow, rattled to life and backed down off the flat bed under its own power. It was a pretty darn thrilling moment....

The local air aficionados, including my brother in law and Congressman, have a growing collection of old military planes down at our tiny airport, born of a love of history and flight. It isn't unusual for us to be "buzzed" by a WWII trainer while we are watering mum lines on a summer's day. A few years ago, I hitched a ride down to the Missouri State Fair with Brooks in one of these vintage craft, cruising below the clouds over the Missouri River bottoms and landing in Sedalia behind the massive decrepit Missouri Pacific repair shops. To infer I was anything more than a tourist on this trip would be operating under false pretenses, but it was impossible not to feel a little glamour, a hint of the romance of the past, had rubbed off on me during the flight.

This fascination with the machines of the past is more than just a private affair. Unlike art masterpieces of antiquity or one of a kind precious stones, the magnificent planes and hardworking farm equipment of our heritage are still machines that work. They fly in formation or mow hay, re-enact famous battles or carry their drivers along narrow blue highways changed primarily in the past century by pavement.

Thanks to folks with one foot in the past, crowds in the present can flock to the Greatest Little Airshow at the Gould Peterson Airport and get up close and personal with a Japanese Zero...but even more importantly, watch the graceful plane go through its paces and see what made it so feared, instead of hearing a lecture about a dull and dusty grounded fossil.

Coaxing a convoy of antique tractors to start up may not be as loud as the Tora! Tora! Tora! Exhibition at the WingNuts Flying Circus, but the grumbling, rumbling and popping of all those engines brings a smile to onlooker's faces that needs no words. The machines in a tractor cruise aren't just eye candy; they are road worthy and ready to go 40 miles under their own power, sit a bit, and do it over again. The tool boxes bolted to the frames are not for show and the grease and oil are proof that these tractors may be antique, but they are far from toys. A parade of old tractors rumbling around a county square with the Red, White, and Blue billowing behind them is a vignette Norman Rockwell might have conceived, but the tractors aren't cunning reproductions; they are vital and alive, not just for show.

Come out to the country some summer weekend! Find a thresher's reunion, a steam engine show, or a tractor cruise! Come to a place where history is alive with gears and wheels and smoke and fumes, where you can ride your past right into the present....

 

 

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