Weathering the Storm

My family has been farming here on the prairie since 1959, when my dad bought some land. Things have changed since then, and they haven't changed. We farm 10,000 acres now, and I harvest the wheat, soy and corn in an air-conditioned combine with a padded seat and computer controls. But we still work just as many hours, sometimes 100 a week in peak season. And family farming is still a knife-edge business. It costs one and a half million dollars to put a crop in the ground. If something goes wrong, we're sunk.

We love it, though. All that lies between us and the sunrise is our front yard and wheat rolling to the horizon. Our closest neighbor is more than a mile away—church, another 24 on a dirt road. It's a spacious, self-reliant life. That's good too. If you've got to rely on someone, it may as well be yourself. My parents, my brother, Elmer, and his family, and my wife and kids and I live alongside the farmyard in three separate houses. Elmer runs the planter in spring. I drive the pesticide sprayer. Dad does repairs in his workshop. Barb, my wife, keeps the books. Watching her at our computer, surrounded by account logs and subsidy reports, I wonder how our family keeps the whole enterprise together—all on our own.

One thing we do know, though, is weather. Growing up on the prairie, you learn the language of clouds—rain clouds, hail clouds and the black, bruised clouds that mean trouble. Usually, if bad weather's brewing, we have time to prepare. Usually.

That day in June last year, the forecast called for showers. The sky didn't look too threatening, so I drove to a school-board meeting and Barb went into town to attend a dinner. The sun rose in the sky, and it wasn't until it moved into the west that the air began turning muggy and still. By evening, a dark band of clouds had gathered on the horizon. I watched it on the road home, wondering. Barb returned, and she and our son Charles decided to get the cars and tractors into garages.

When I arrived, Charles was in the farmyard. I parked our pickup next to the tractors, and he and I walked back to the house. To the south and west the sky had grown very dark. The sun, for a moment, rode a cliff of black cloud. Then it disappeared. The light turned a sickly green. We watched the trees around the farmyard weave. I had never seen clouds so thick. They towered, like water heaving over us.

When we got back inside, the power was out. Barb had lit a few candles and she and our daughter Rachael were looking out the glass door. A covered swing on the deck outside creaked to life, then tottered in the wind. Something electric rode the air, and the glass door slammed shut. We all looked at each other.