Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [77]
“It’ll take a month to learn how to drive one of these,” I said.
Dean laughed. “They’re simple to operate,” he said. “You’ll be driving by tomorrow afternoon.”
We rode out the next morning in a combine. Dean was at the wheel, and I perched beside him on the armrest of the driver’s seat. He shifted into gear, and the combine shuddered as the thirty-foot-wide cutting blade clacked to life below us. We moved slowly forward into the field; behind us, wheat poured into the combine’s holding bin. Dean coached as he drove. “Keep your hand on the lever, here. You can feel if something’s wrong, once you get the hang of it.” “Keep your eyes on the cutting blade, down below, and make sure the wheat falls in smoothly.” “Watch out for rocks.” And so on. After lunch, he got out of the driver’s seat and motioned me in. Thus began my crash course in operating heavy farm machinery.
It was a weird feeling, operating such an enormous piece of equipment. A short hydrostatic lever controlled the ten-ton machine. Push the lever forward to move forward, pull it back for reverse. And that was about it. We throbbed along that afternoon, Dean keeping a careful eye on things. I remained tense and alert, always scanning for any sign of mechanical trouble.
Dean stepped out of the combine sometime during the second day, leaving me all alone in the cab. He moved over to the job he loved, jockeying Ben’s semi-tractor hitched to double trailers, hauling wheat to the elevators in Great Falls, while I trundled along timidly in the fields, driving the combine on my own. For a few days after that, Ben kept a close eye on me. When he saw that I was responsible and careful, he relaxed, and I grew more and more confident with each passing day.
In the comfort of my air-conditioned cab, I drove and drove through endless acres of waving gold. And in that private zone, alone in my cab, the recent past gradually receded from my mind until it seemed far away—another world, in another life. Physically, I was a long way from Bloomfield, and emotionally, the distance lengthened each day.
I immediately connected with Donna, Ben’s wife. The year before, she had emerged from a long battle with cancer. She’d licked it, at least for the moment, although within a decade or so it would return and claim her. She was a strong and beautiful woman, exuding fortitude and courage. Perceptive and intelligent, she instantly saw through my smiling facade and sensed that I was running from something in my past, that I was lost and searching. And in time, she openly confronted me. Not as a hostile force but as someone who was genuinely interested and concerned. I remained guarded at first, but as time passed, I began to confide in her. I told her who I was. What I was. The things I’d done. And she was intrigued.
At the time, I was deeply immersed in the works of Leon Uris. During our conversations, I cautiously mentioned as much. She immediately went out and bought one of his novels and read it cover to cover in a few short days, and then we discussed our opinions of it.
Ben, too, lightened up a good deal as the weeks rolled on. He was a good and decent man, slightly dour, with a dry sense of humor. He was a businessman, a farmer, and above all else, a man who walked forward into life, tall and confident. He had been born in the Hutterite colonies in Alberta. A communal branch of the Anabaptists, this society was even more closed than the Amish. His parents had left the colonies, and Ben grew up mostly outside the confines of that isolated culture. But he knew and understood what it was to break away. Through the course of many decades, he had seen his parents grapple with the pain, the struggles, and the stress of it.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but