Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [19]
Where once there was nothing but relatively uniform dairy pasture, now the bottoms wait for row crops of blue wild indigo, coreopsis, Indian paintbrush, foxglove beardtongue, and dozens of other prairie flowers. The surrounding hills are covered with grasses, all high and wild and dry at this time of year. “Up there we take whatever she gives us,” Frank says of the grasslands. But his seeming nonchalance disguises the brutally hard work needed to replicate the dramatic processes of the natural prairies: “Growing for seeds is a young man’s sport. Hard work, weeding and harvesting and clearing.” Someday he’d love to have it as an outreach and education spot, maybe set up some cabins—have people come out “for a week, or until they get weak.”
Until then he’s lucky in his workers. One of the first things that Frank told me was not to photograph the faces of the three lanky teenagers in plain blue work clothes, who moved quietly and without eye contact as they readied the farm vehicles for the coming burn. Naturally, I agreed to keep my camera pointed away, learning only later that the three come from an Old Order Amish community and would consider photos to be forbidden graven images.
They’re hard, hard workers; by the time Frank picks them up at 8:00 A.M. for a full day’s work, they’ll already have put in two hours in their own dairy barns. But it’s difficult for me to figure out what, exactly, they’re allowed to do. They can’t drive cars (Frank has to drive them forty miles twice a day), which seems straightforward enough—no machinery allowed, except for the horse-powered implements they use on their own land. Then I find that they can operate his tractor, so apparently owning the machine is what matters. But no, they can’t drive the quick, tough little camo Kawasaki Prairie four-wheeler. Evidently, the fact that it has handlebars instead of a steering wheel puts it off-limits. This one I never figure out.
Two of the Amish silently push the Kawasaki from the barn, while the third fires up the tractor so Frank can check the rear sprayers. The worst thing that could happen today would be not to have enough water in the right place at the right time. At last it’s done, and Frank invites me into the house for coffee while the others fuel up the machinery.
Frank’s connections to this mixed and rolling country run deep. His mother’s side of the family arrived from France in the 1700s and prospered for well over a century as fur traders. “In fact, I grew up in a French-speaking household. I’m the last generation to have heard that, listening to my grandmother and my grandpa’s sister speaking French the whole time they were baking bread on Tuesdays, there along the river.” As the fur bearers grew scarcer, the family turned to truck farming. “But I had that sense of wonderment from my grandmother. She’d say, ‘We only use this land. When the river needs it, we move.’ In my family it’s almost a disgrace to talk about getting government money when the floods come. You know when you’re planting in that ground that the river owns it. So our mentality is that we only use it.” Frank talks about a century ago and this morning in the same present tense, using “we” to speak of things he likely only ever heard about. “We use the land when she lets us. When she needs it, we go up to the hills. We come back when it’s dry.” The river would flood from March until May; if his family planted