Wheat Planting, Again

     August 21^st.  That’s when we always started planting wheat north of Bovina, unless the 21st was Sunday.

     It fell on a weekday in 1964.  I was a senior in high school.  Football practice must have started on August 23.  We weren’t done planting wheat, had just barely started.

    It was before global warming when we still feared another ice age, maybe caused by nuclear winter (Seven Days in May was popular then) or even some natural phenomenon like sun spots or something.  A jacket was a necessity later in the afternoon perched on top of the open tractor.

     The same jacket felt good in the early morning while greasing the drill.  It probably came off during the drill-filling exercise.  The use of an auger run by an electric motor powered by the truck’s battery wasn’t in vogue yet.

    We pulled the blue Chevrolet truck up behind the drill’s press wheels, almost touching the press wheels with the truck’s left tires.  We clambered up over the grain sides into the wheat and grabbed a scoop shovel.  We aimed the shovel full of wheat at the hinged edge where the drill lid joined the drill box.

    It was probably three feet from the truck side rack to the lid on the drill box.  We had to throw the seed at the drill box because if we leaned over the truck side and tried to reach the drill box with the shovel, it was a real strain on the back.  When the truck was full at the beginning of the planting season, we risked losing our balance with 12 or 15 pounds of wheat in the scoop of the shovel.    We could easily go tumbling out of the truck onto the drill.  Later in the season, when the wheat in the truck had dwindled, the difficulty was lifting the loaded shovel over the sideboard and getting enough oomph to propel the wheat to the drill.

     So we tried to get the shovel filled just right, no seeds tumbling off the front or sides.  Cock back, swing forward, and at the right moment, drop the shovel from under its load of wheat. If done correctly, there would be a brief second between leaving the shovel and before hitting the drill lid and box when the form of the shovel could be seen in the bottom of the wheat seeds, like molded Jell-O.

     If done right, the wheat would hit the base of the lid and bounce back into the drill box.  There were obstructions to be avoided, the spring rods that held the lid open, and on the older drills, the divider in the middle of the drill where two lids joined.  We tried to miss those things because if you hit them, wheat bounced off them onto the ground.

     The other danger was undershooting the drill box.  If we undershot the box, a big bunch of wheat spilled to the ground.  Mostly, we did our job well.  Still, two or three weeks after planting, when the wheat was all up, we could always see where we had filled the drills by the abundance of wheat growing all in a line perpendicular to the drill rows.  Sometimes, at harvest the next summer, we could see where we filled the drills by that perpendicular line of wheat out of the rows.

    Another exercise in judgment required by drill filling was when to quit.  When we thought we had the drill filled just right, we would hop out of the truck (we were young, still in high school) and spread the grain by hand to get the drill brimful.  We had to overfill the middle of the box because we couldn’t completely fill the ends of the box or where there were obstructions.  If we hadn’t got enough grain in the drill, it meant another clamber into the truck.  Conversely, too much wheat in the drill box (the lid wouldn’t close) meant grabbing the shovel, raking the excess off into the shovel and throwing it back into the truck.

          The drills filled and greased, it was time to take the truck back to the farmyard, service the tractor and take it to the field.  The jacket went back on.  We would work up a sweat filling the drills.  Sitting on the open tractor cooled us off in a hurry.  Sometime around ten or eleven o’clock, the jacket came off and had to be stowed somewhere.  We would want it again along about four or five.

      The drills would have to be filled at least twice or three times a day.  A Kansas friend said he always caught cold in wheat-planting season.  He would work up a good sweat filling drills.  Then he would get back on the tractor and get chilled as the sweat dried.  I don’t remember catching cold.  I do remember practicing jacket management.

      Then came football season.  Practice always began the week before school started.  We would quit or be relieved about three and head for town.

     The first few days were non-contact without pads.  Helmets were required even for the first few days’ workout.  We did all kinds of torturous exercises, sit-ups and leg lifts to name a couple of unfavorites, and the wrestler’s bridge.

     For the wrestler’s bridge, we bent over, helmet on the ground, still standing.  We turned right and left, helmet keeping the same position, only using your hands for balance, eventually turning a complete circle.  Besides the contortion, our new helmets had vent holes in the tops.  Our football field was dirt populated by Mexican sand tacks, tire-puncture weed, whatever you call it.  (A friend dubbed our field “Marti-grass”—the grass was Marti-thin.)          

    When we straightened up from doing the wrestler’s bridge, the dirt that had been ground into the new helmets through the vent holes came cascading down into hair, neck face and mixed with the sweat.  We learned to remove the helmet before straightening up.  The “scrubs” didn’t have the problem—the old helmets had no vent holes in the tops.

     So imagine the morning after the first football practice.  Every fiber of our bodies hurt, even our hair.  There was the truck, half-full of wheat sitting behind the drill.  Nothing to do but crawl up into the back of the truck, grab a shovel, and ouch! begin filling the drill.

      It didn’t get much better the rest of the week as we continued to discover muscles we never knew we had.  Saturday was a full day of wheat-drilling.  Sunday was off.  School started on Monday.

    I usually wasn’t around for the end of wheat planting.  It would mostly be done by Labor Day.  Then summer was over, school going for real.  Saturdays would find us stacking some hay, maybe, if we didn’t have a Saturday afternoon football game.

     Later, when I was teaching school, I would try to get the wheat planted over the three day Labor Day weekend.  At first, that was late planting.  Nowadays, that would be early planting.   

     No matter the time, when I crawl up into that truck in order to fill the drills, I will think of football practice and find something to be thankful for—no wrestler’s bridge in my near future.