I had an interesting talk with four local boys, aged 21-ish, here in Haviland, Kansas. They were all just hanging out on Main Street, smoking and skateboarding a bit. Apparently that is what passes for a rowdy Friday night here—hanging out in front of the hardware store. Since they were right smack dab in front of the only soda machine in town, and I was wanting a soda, I had to interact with them, lest they think that the stranger in town as standoffish.
The scene here is that of a movie set, after the lights are out. It’s a nice and cool 72 degrees, at midnight. A breeze blows down the street and in the distance the rumble of the grain elevators at the local coop can be heard clearly. The only other sounds are the boys talking and the occasional skateboard wheels on asphalt. There is virtually no traffic.
I approach. They look at me with indifference.
“So this is what the incorrigible youth of Haviland Kansas do for fun on a Friday night?” I ask, with as much humor as I can muster in my voice.
One replies,” Are you kidding? Usually by now we are all shitfaced.” We all laugh, and the ice is broken.
I tell them of my trip and they don’t believe me. When I show them my tan lines on my arms, they are convinced. More ice is broken.
As we talk a little about the city, and the state of Kansas in general, I can’t help but think about the fact that back in Georgia, where I live now, kids are not having this conversation. Back there they are probably playing video games, getting high, or watching TV. Here, the conversation almost always turns quickly to farming, because as one of the young men, Rance, told me, “It’s our life, it’s in our blood.”
I asked them about the Farmers Co-ops, and gave my take on them. It seems I was pretty much correct---the farmers all bring their harvested crops in and get paid for them. That’s it. The Coops are owned by a group of the wealthiest farmers who now are into reselling the wheat and other crops in big deals, like the way that oil is sold, from barrel to the finished products. The boys started to get into the minutiae of the way they work, but it was more than I needed to know. What they did say that stuck with me is this: farming is worse than gambling. You never know if, or when it is going to rain. There are no guarantees that the temperatures will be good or if the price of the grains will be high enough to make it profitable. “Going to Las Vegas is a better deal than being a farmer anymore,” one of the young men, who is actually going into the Army soon to learn demolition.
Be that as it may, the sheer size and quantity of the wheat fields I have been walking past indicates to me that there are a lot of gamblers out there still, and the full grain trucks and trains that pass me every day tell me that something special and integral to our heartland and to our country is happening on a daily basis. At the end of a long hard day, it is our nature to kick back, blow off a little steam, complain about our jobs, and get it out of our system. Then the next morning we get up and do it all over again.
It is, after all, in our blood. It is our life.
I hope not too much of that grain is wasted, left to rot in barns... If work is our life we'd better do what we like, unlike my poor father who had to take over a family business age 16 when his dad died of lung cancer, with all he anxiety that a small business entails and him already emotionally unstable. When the labour government made it impossible for small businesses to survive in the sixties he had a nervous breakdown (as such mental crises were called back then) and had to sell up and retire early. The rest is a long story...
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