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Motto: Writers Helping Writers |
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General Information |
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“A Slice of Americana” During the early 1950s when the grain had turned from green to gold, I thought the wheat lands of Montana the most natural place to be. Every possible moment, I was in the fields feeling the wind blow through my hair as I swayed with the rustling stalks of grain. Hoping to catch glimpses of a combine moving across the prairie, I surveyed the three hundred-sixty degree horizon. Each July when the state fair was about to begin, I asked my dad, “Is it time?” He would break off a handful of heads, chew the kernels into a little ball, and cock his head. The building late afternoon storm clouds told me Dad was more anxious than I to get the grain into the bin lest a hailstorm reduce a bumper yield to less than the price of the seed. On the other hand, the elevator would dock us if the moisture content were too high. Dad said we mustn’t cut too soon. On more than one occasion, he shook his head. “Not yet.” “Can I help?” I impatiently asked. Dad, my hero, responded, “I can hire help; my daughters don’t need to do farm work.” However, he had no trouble calling me whenever my small fingers would fit in places his large ones would not. While waiting for the grain to ripen sufficiently, I was his gopher as long as he worked in the shed or the yard. The day always came when he asked, “Doodlebug, want to take a ride?” After he helped me climb up in the big red Massey Ferguson, he started the combine and we bumped and bounced our way to a nearby field. With levers going in and out, up and down, we cut a swatch to fill the hopper with maybe a bushel or two of grain. Then he stopped, motor still idling, and scooped up a handful of kernels from the hopper, chewed them into a little ball, cocked his head and … I eagerly waited … Listening … to hear: “Yes, we’ll begin harvest in the morning!” Mom and I were up before dawn preparing a farmer’s breakfast – cooked cereal, eggs, pancakes or waffles, and more – for my Dad and the motley crew he had assembled to bring in the crop. Harvest time meant helping my mother prepare lunches and snacks. It also often meant driving when I could only reach the gas pedal by standing on the floorboard. Imagine a little blonde-headed girl of eight chugging along in compound low in a one-ton pickup, up and down gentle hills for a mile or two until she caught up with the combines, the trucks, and the hungry men! That was me – too young to drive by town standards, but never too young to do what had to be done. While the men ate, I ran through the brittle stubble left in the wake of the combines and caught grasshoppers. I popped a few in a jar, added some fan weed or cheat grass, and watched the pesky critters struggle to escape their glass prison. I’m sure a twenty-first century animal protection agency would have a fit to know – please don’t tell them – I liked to dismember my share of the flying insects placing the legs in one pile, the bodies in another. “Why not,” I reasoned after hearing about hordes of grasshoppers that wiped out crops making the Dust Bowl worse during the 1930s. Besides, what else was there to entertain a farm girl too busy to go swimming with friends during the summer recess from school? It was work and more work summer after summer until I graduated from high school and moved away. Little did I realize the nail-biting times my parents must have lived through to put food on our table and provide for other necessities while they endured conditions beyond their control. During those growing up years, I never wondered why my family came to Montana, much less America. It never occurred to me to delve into my genealogy. I had a wonderful grandmother who loved to shower me with gifts and to make holidays special until she passed away when I was fifteen. That I was Norwegian didn’t seem important; we were Americans -- other than when my sisters and I ate lefsa and krumkaka and parroted words that sounded like, “Tousand Tak,” thank you for the food. After I became an adult, I learned my paternal grandfather at the age of sixteen, left his brothers, his parents and Norway to pass through Ellis Island. He moved to Wisconsin to milk cows on a dairy farm seven days a week, morning and evening. However, that was not where he wanted to settle even though he stayed for several years. Nor did he want to be a dairy farmer. He wanted to be a tiller of his own soil, but he learned not all Norwegian immigrants had the same dream when his friend, Ole Evinrude, approached him with a business proposition: “Thomas, if you put in $50 and I put in $50, we can build boats.” Rejecting the idea, my grandfather said, “Only little boys play with boats.” I do not know whether this conversation occurred before or after the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 went into effect. By 1910 though, my grandfather, who was smitten with land fever, was on his way to Montana to file an application, improve the land, and register a deed of title to 320 acres. His own 320 acres! To my knowledge, Thomas and Ole parted ways never to reconnect – one to grow wheat for a nation of immigrants, the other to establish the Wisconsin-based Evinrude Company to manufacture boats and boat motors for immigrants who had advanced beyond the subsistence level. In 1911 Thomas Selstad married my grandmother, who was a neighbor and a Norwegian immigrant. The couple and their six children who reached adulthood lived through the Great Depression farming the original farmstead. My father, their second oldest son carried on the farming tradition on his own farm, near Great Falls, and that is where I grew up. As a third generation immigrant, I cannot imagine what my paternal grandparents and other pioneers endured braving the harsh winters, droughts, insect infestations, and low wheat prices associated with early nineteenth-century farming without the benefit of electricity and motorized vehicles. Their memories live on and were celebrated July 2009 when Dutton, Montana, commemorated its centennial. Though I cannot go back to my childhood days, each summer I envision the undulating tapestry of yesteryears – the ripening grain, the grasshoppers, the combines … – and I am once again a little girl celebrating harvest time in Montana. |
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Rome Area Writers “A Slice of Americana” By Nadine Blyseth |
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Motto: Writers Helping Writers |
