Just before the Illinois corn and soybean harvest begins, it’s customary to tell farm-injury stories. These grim encounters between man and mechanical parts are usually recounted while the poker-faced storyteller is engaged in the very activity that led a neighbor to lose a knuckle, his face, or a testicle. “Caught his shirt sleeve in the grain auger,” the farmer might say, loading grain into an auger. “Ripped off all his clothes and broke about every bone in his body before it spit him out. Lay there for hours before anyone came by.”
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Three years ago, after 27 years of living out west, I moved to rural Illinois so my wife could be near her family. When we first arrived I liked to point out that 20 years earlier I’d come back east to work on a farm, a dairy in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was employed as an “assistant dairy herdsman,” an impressive title, though all it meant was that I toiled like an indentured servant seven days a week, 12 hours a day, without regular coffee breaks. During daylight hours I milked 60 cows twice and helped with the unending fieldwork. Nighttime was devoted to locating strays in nearby forests and chasing them back to their pasture. I usually spent my remaining time on my back, studying the insides of my eyelids. For compensation, I was given a drafty farmhouse, $600 a month, and an unlimited supply of high-fat milk and red meat.
This was during my failed back-to-the-land period. My predairy fantasy was a pastoral ideal, a Wendell Berry essay–farming with draft horses, growing weed- and insect-free patches of organic carrots, peaches, and tomatoes, working in harmony with like-minded people who never had any trouble reaching consensus, watching black Labrador retrievers with red kerchiefs around their necks frolic in meadows. Someone else would cook large meals and bake loaves of brown bread. I would have ample time to write poetry and learn to play the dulcimer and take two-hour afternoon naps in handmade Guatemalan hammocks.
My brother-in-law put me to work mowing acres of lawn and walking endless fields, cutting down weeds with scythes that could just as easily slice through an ankle or shin. Shatter cane was sprouting in the seed corn, and contagious water hemp had jumped from a drainage ditch into a soybean field. This was hot, humid, itchy work, and for a week afterward my hands and arms were covered with welts and rashes. I didn’t dare complain because, as any farmer will tell you, things could be worse. After all, I still had my thumbs and testicles.
“How’d things go?” my brother-in-law asked over the walkie-talkie.
I unloaded the first wagon, careful to keep my sleeves rolled up and to stand clear of the spinning auger. Attached to the lower end of the auger was a basketlike contraption that caught the beans as they fell from the wagon, and in my haste to get back to Terry Gross, I neglected to raise the basket out of the way before moving the second wagon into place. As the tractor rolled forward, I heard the unmistakable sound of crumpling aluminum. Looking back at what I’d done, I felt as if I’d lost a testicle.
“Copy that again?”
