Table Talk

TABLE TALK By Karen Schwaller

How great it is to pull pretend we weren’t home. into the last field of the harvest season — especially a harvest season that went without a hitch. Iowa weather is fickle, if nothing else. Nonetheless, the corn and soybeans grew, matured and called us to

Or maybe, without an reap the grain. And it went UN-hitch. flawlessly.

It had been a drought Until we got to the last year — one that followed corn field. two consecutive monsoon seasons and harvest sessions of mud, fighting to keep machinery from getting mired down and waiting for rains to stop before the mud was deemed ‘dry enough.’ My husband pulled in with the combine and began opening up the field while we waited. After some time, we heard a strange utterance coming from the two-way radio. “What in the….?? There’s water standing over

“Go get the tow rope,” were the here,” my husband said in disbelief. words of the day during those two years, and when we closed the door on those harvest seasons, we turned the key in the lock and vowed to pretend that if they ever returned, we would His message sent shivers down my neck, and the radios fell silent as we all waited for the words, “Go get the tow rope,” as we had heard so many times before.

What drivers should know about farm vehicles on the road:

• Farm equipment is large and heavy, making it hard for operators to accelerate, slow down and stop. • The equipment makes wide turns and sometimes crosses over the center line. • Farm vehicles can create large blind spots, making it difficult for operators to see approaching vehicles. Safety guidance for motorists:

• Pay attention at all times when driving. • Watch for debris dropped by trucks. • When approaching farm equipment, slow down and use caution. Put additional space between your vehicle and the farm equipment ahead. Don’t assume the equipment operator can see you. • Be patient and wait for a safe place to pass. • Wear seatbelts. • Drive with headlights on. Safety guidance for farm equipment operators:

• Use lights and flashers to make equipment more visible. • Use slow-moving vehicle emblems on equipment traveling less than 30 mph. • Drive slow-moving vehicles in the right-hand lane as close to the edge of the roadway as possible. • Consider using an escort vehicle when moving equipment, especially at night and if the equipment is large enough that it may extend across the center line. Submitted by the Minnesota State Patrol. v

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Those words didn’t come; but after some investigation into the cause of the standing water, my husband saw it had come from the nearby waterway, which had overflowed.

In a drought year.

It simply wasn’t adding up — especially for someone like me, who used to get the answers to fifth grade math story problems from the back of the book.

Further investigation by one of the guys on our harvest team (who knows almost as much about wild animals as God does) found that muskrats had skillfully created a dam in the waterway. When the one rainfall we got that year that amounted to anything, it resulted in a regulation, four-alarm flood situation in that corner of the field.

If our last name is attached to bad potential, you just know it’s going to happen.

We all stood around in the dark that evening with lights shining on the dam, in utter amazement that small animals can bring these large machines and work goals to a stop.

It’s the same shivery feeling you get when you think a tornado can take down your house, but so can a team of microscopic termites.

Long story short, the muskrat construction team was trapped and hauled away (at least for that year), the waterway was opened back up by mechanical hands, the water started flowing again, and after things dried out in that corner of the field, we resumed operations.

Only someone of our heritage would have to wait for dryness during a drought year.

Fast forward to that winter when I am hanging out with our grandchildren at their house. We traipsed to the basement to play farm (which our very young grandson loves to do). As with generations of Schwaller children, he farms the carpet down there in high fashion. He instructed me that he would be grandpa (driving the combine), and I should be grandma, because I had the tractor and grain cart.

I thought I could handle such a commission of names and duties.

When we got over to one corner of the ‘field,’ I saw a few of his small stuffed animals underneath a wire basket which was turned upside down. I asked him what that was. He said, “Oh, I’m just trapping muskrats.”

Apparently now to a four-year-old, that’s just part of the corn harvesting process.

Maybe muskrats have some useful purpose; but their name still has the word “rat” in it, so in my book, they’re dead to me. Except when they bring such delight to little boys, who thinks it’s pretty big stuff to catch them in their flooded-out corn fields made of carpet fibers.

Karen Schwaller brings “Table Talk” to The Land from her home near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net. v