BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 73

JUNE 2012

DAVID

The hay crop coming after the first mowing was once called aftermath. Though the word doesn't specifically refer to the smell arising from a just mown field, I include that odor as the first moment—the before—of aftermath, the intoxicating, final-breath rise of recently fallen alfalfa. I imagine medieval priests administering last rites before the first scything, bridging moments: life, then death, part of that ritual the viaticum, the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ's blood and body transformed into bread and wine—or, in this case, alfalfa changed into hay.

If you wish, you can make anything sacred. And I wonder who will administer my viaticum, or if this is it, an impersonal, pantheistic version that Catholicism mimics.

Viaticum has another meaning. Archaically, it referred to provisions for a journey, expanding the even earlier Roman meaning: an official disbursement of money for an excursion. In a broad sense, I am administering the viaticum to my siblings to spend on their sea cruises—I feel so honored!

All sarcasm aside, the day before yesterday Hoaglands dropped their crop on the field a quarter mile to the north, and the nightly breeze from that direction promptly wafted it in through my open window at two AM. That wind, which comes almost every night, is the land's inhalation, its exhalation starting in mid-morning from the south and extending through the day, often gaining speed with each passing hour.

The green, aftermath aroma lessens a little each morning, and upon baling another, riper smell will soon come, one not as deep as the fermented odor of silage, not as wet. That baled smell, released by dead and drying alfalfa stalks, serves as an intermediary between the fallen and the newly risen. It will hold its own olfactory flavor through the fall and into the winter, whether in the stack, on the truck, in the feeder or on the ground.

First crop, second crop, third crop—alfalfa provides a succession of harvests that other crops don't. Harvest was once a word for autumn, aptly used before technology pushed the threshing season forward in time—from September into January at the turn of the century, now July until early September. Technology changed potato harvest, too, via mechanical and chemical means that eliminated the reliance on frost to ripen tubers. That harvest once began in late September or early October fifty years ago—it ends about that time now.

Each haying season is a precursor of sorts but also an end—as all things, I suppose, are. Swathing is a way of splitting time, baling is a way of splitting time: befores and afters, and, more briefly, durings. Durings, in my mind, come close to being instances of syncope, given their brevity but also their frequent absence—how often do we ignore the actual moment we are in? Thrust into the role of County historian, that splitting becomes necessary to me—I swath the past into eras: native, trapper, miner, cattleman, farmer. Those distinctions bleed, though, somewhat like the the new crop growing high before the old crop gets removed.

Time is the greatest force of change, both in growth and of erosion, acting physically but also upon meaning. Aftermath, viaticum, harvest—words start out as one thing and become another, spread much as ice does as it warms and becomes water. And a life, and that life's intentions, disintegrates in a similar manner. There is beauty here, somewhere, in the metamorphosis of one thing to another, but it takes a perspective from a distance to see it—inside, it acquires the look of chaos.

Spud cellars and potato fields, as I remember, yield their own odorous aftermath, though no second crop comes from potato ground just harvested. When the digger breaks the field's seal and lifts the ripened tubers to the surface, ending their four month imprisonment, an aroma rises—a combination of dried vine, released biological processes suddenly disrupted, and the still-green field bindweed and crushed ground cherry. And there is the smell of the potatoes themselves. Each ingredient, barely noticeable singly as an odorous source, combines with the others to make a noisy, olfactory background indicating a moment in time, a between-place corresponding to autumn that bridges a finishing-up to next year's preparation. In the cellar, you might consider the thick, cool air permeated with potato and soil particles to be the physical correlate to the Greek hesuchia, the time a victor experiences after the contest, the agon.

And harvest was just that, a contest—perhaps still is, though every technological innovation makes it one of lesser drama. There were years—before farmers rolled potato vines, beat them into manageable bits, and sprayed them with herbicide—when growers, after first crossing their fingers against that early frost that would shrink their yields, then prayed for the same to come so they might begin harvest. The reason for the petition's reversal? A too narrow harvest window if a late frost came and an early hard freeze followed too soon after.

The weather always presented itself as potential enemy. Sure, there was the cold—but the heat, too. Potatoes lying in the sun too long pop with hairline cracks (you can actually hear them) which eventually become bruises. There was the wind spraying soil into eyes and mouths, rolling vines under axles, into blades and sprockets, stopping their actions and forcing repair. There was the rain—sodden vines can't be cut with coulter or blade, muddy soil precludes traction for tires. Soil thermometers came out first thing in the mornings, though before their advent a farmer could grab a handful of dirt and look for ice crystals to determine the unsuitability of digging: stand around and wait for the diamondlike glints to disappear.

Between my farm experience then and now, the contrast looms great, the changes significant, but there's a kind of syncope separating the two times not felt by those inside the context, who moved with the changes, acquired bigger equipment, assimilated marketing changes, incorporated electronic upgrades as they came, took advantage of financial loopholes and government programs as they arose. Inside the context, changes come fast in such small increments that no space exists to define differences between one moment and the next—until a change comes dramatically, in significant proportions, enough to create its own sense of syncope: the experiencer may indeed imagine himself as having fainted, as having been transported, and be unable to explain how shifted he feels.

There are other smells, all of which can be waxed poetically about but which at the time I experienced them slipped to the wayside, overwhelmed as I was by the task at hand, by thoughts reaching backward to the past and imagination leaning forward to the future, both impulses pulling from the moment like engorged ticks. Imbedded in that time frame, I sought to escape labor rather than embrace it.

There was the erasure of dew in the morning and its replacement by chaff from the harvester, for instance, and even the chemical smells ("ah, spring, the smell of 2-4-D in the air" I later in life joked): sulfur applied to make stubble deteriorate quickly, the organophosphates poisoning soil organisms. And the industrial smells: hydraulic oil different from motor oil, gear oil of yet another aroma, anti-freeze and welding rod, metal being drilled or cut, gas with its signature odor and diesel with a different identifier, each tractor and truck with its own flavor of exhaust. All of them significant for me to remember but which I missed at the time. A rare thing: memory providing information that actual experience did not.

Every occupation and endeavor must have its own set of sensory inputs and if my curiosity trickles into any I reach a fork that leads to regret, to envy, or in more enlightened moments wonder, for the thickness of detail unimaginably swells from any particular place in time or space, too great a task for any individual to absorb or even compare. Some imagine a God able to disseminate this vast array of particularities but even that representation defies possibility: if you can imagine that God, you also must imagine the details he takes in—and you cannot.

The funky smell left in the wake of the receding Snake River, an aftermath with a different yield, sent its first hint upwind from the south yesterday. An explosion of fecundity is not far away in time, it whispers, but as of yet it only hints of that to come—at the moment, it is equivalent to the Romantic fascination with the consumptive patient and the beautiful death strung out by his tubercular disease.

Unpleasant ends to pleasant starts occur often enough in nature, the list of foul odors that follow sweet origins long: candytuft, rowan, sea kale, and a host of other plants begin with a sweet, intriguing scent in order to attract suitors—and then perform the bait-and-switch by taking on a putrid olfactory hue. But rot has its adherents, too. Witness a July spud cellar full of unsold product, the market having dropped precipitously and storage problems arisen—reeking of methane it draws millions of flies, all thrilled by the sudden treasure trove.

The north breeze pulses weakly, like the breath of a light sleeper, the alfalfa field drifting into the trailer through my open windows, blending with the smell of just brewed coffee intended to keep me awake. Henry's stack of papers lies boxed at my feet save a pile I extracted. It sits on the foldaway table I use when the museum is closed. Though every bit of information is valuable, not every piece is significant, and Henry's collection, seemingly random in nature, contains documents and deeds, lists and receipts, that I cannot yet determine the value of. His system of acquisition brings thoughts of thanks to the Dewey Decimal System but curses to the Internet, which has yet to adopt a methodical way to retrieve information—to Google is to ask a gang of schoolgirls what they think popular.

I start going through Henry's papers, making a quick perusal to separate them into two heaps, the first containing items interesting enough for later scrutiny—the map I found earlier will stay on top of this pile—and the second, things to be discarded. I didn't teach Museum 101, but surely sorting must come early in curator training.

Henry has kept receipts, some now eighty years old, canal company minutes (why are they in his possession?), postcards that either meant something to him or that he considered valuable in some way. Magazine articles and newspaper clippings go in the temporary keep pile, the trash pile already considerable. D.H.Blossom's engineering papers from the twenties and thirties, some official, some private notes that I briefly look at: the Lost River ditches, the Highline, the ultimately fictitious Dubois, the United's extension that became the West Side. Blossom must have been a hoarder. He has Aberdeen and Springfield townsite records, Tilden school student lists, correspondence with many different postmarks.

Henry has incomplete records of the Mackay Branch railroad, plans for another "electric road" that never went in from Pocatello to Salmon, employee lists that have Italian names circled in red—Locatelli, DiRenzo, Rossi, Fernando. He had a Japanese connection. A list of Hunt camp internees, lease records for Japanese beet growers in the 1910s. He has minutes from the Pingree Bluebird Needlecraft Club, a Methodist women's group, and a Springfield counterpart, The Domestic Science Club. Grange meeting announcements. More papers: baseball box scores—Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak, I realize, which tickles me but they still ruthlessly go in the trash. A 1952 tax return. Handwritten records of the Snake River's daily flow in 1932. I think I can part with these.

***

The phone rings, startling me awake. It's after nine in the morning.

The yellow wall phone, the same model used fifty years ago, dependably amuses me—a land line in this computer age, on the same phone system, albeit one sold half a dozen times to increasingly larger corporate entities. Every call here is a time machine. Today's is moreso. Evelyn Anderson—nee Woods, an elementary schoolmate who once yanked a considerable hank of my hair out by the roots and who is now Pingree Relief Society President—scheduling a tour. "David! We heard you'd come back!" she exuberantly starts, before continuing, with but short breaths, a litany of details punctuated with questions that she answers before I can reply.

My body turns sludge-like. Every fluid has its viscosity, every solid its density, and each emotion, each memory, carries a characteristic that alters any movement through it. The phone call delivers an anvil into the gaseous medium I'd been enjoying. One moment outside, looking comfortably inward, now I'm inside, trying to get out.

I shake it off, turn my attention back to the papers, to the coffee-soaked map atop the keep pile. It's coming together. The Township and Range, right here, McTucker Island, abbreviated McT, to the south, the road adjoining me weakly marked with a light pencil. The "X", in red, is less than a hundred yards away, to the northeast. I grab my jacket, step into the light morning wind holding the map, move across the planted spud rows to roughly mark off the footage. I can't discern any change in the soil's make-up. But this is where the ripper hit the unknown impediment. Possibilities rise and work their little war.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston