As a family, we worked hard, but we also prayed hard.  Grace was said at every meal.  It was not only expected that we would go to church, but also expected that we would be active participates, Dad was an usher, Mom was in choir, all of us boys served as alter boys; some of us were lectors and Eucharistic ministers.  At the very least, we were to sing…or at least make an attempt for those of us that couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.  Rosaries were said when a family member or neighbor needed a little divine intervention, and we were all expected to say our prayers before drifting off to sleep at night.

But we also understood the economics of our situation – we were a small farm in a big farmer’s world.  Our labor was expected to help the family, to feed the cattle, to try and earn a couple more dollars to pay for that new baler, along with that new pair of shoes.

Only once a year did those two pillars of our life, hard work and hard prayer, come into conflict.  Independence Day.

If we were lucky, we could get out the first crop of alfalfa the first week of June – right after school let out, and usually right before the big rains that usually accompanied the start of summer in June – usually we could count on a good stretch of warm weather and a lot of rain.  Which was perfect for the formation of the second cutting of alfalfa.

It never seemed to fail, that last week of June, the hay bind was being pulled out of the shed, greased up, and the getting ready for use again.  The hay rake was pulled off of machinery hill, the old grease box refilled, the rusty old vice grip the held the cable to engage it was checked again – the best, most effective eight dollar switch on the whole farm.  The baler was being greased and prepped for the second (or in late years – sometimes the first) cutting of hay.

It always seemed like the first day of July when the call would come in from one of my Dad’s cousins, either Aunt Julie or Uncle Frank, inviting us out to their cabins on the fourth of July.

“Yeah that sounds like a lot of fun!”  Dad would say, “Maybe if it rains, we’ll be out there.  We are in the middle of haying.”

With a little more conversation and family updates, Dad would sit down.  All of us kids disappointed, but knew he was right – it would be fun, but we couldn’t let the hay sit in the field.  The rain would wash the nutrients out of the alfalfa; it would take the tender shoots and turn them tough and hard, making it harder for the cows to eat in the winter.  Good alfalfa meant a promise of a better milk check in January.

But there was still that tantalizing dream of one day of freedom on the shores of Twin Lake.  One day of swimming in the cool lake water.  One day of running around with the cousins.  One day of playing with the quiet approval of our parents, the illegal fireworks gotten by cousins and smuggled across the border from North Dakota.  One day where the hot fields would be replaced with the fun of being a kid.

But we also knew that we were working towards our futures.  That it was the milk check that would buy the shoes and braces, and provide the money we would use to go to basketball games, and track meets, and speech tournaments.  It was the money that would help to buy the used FFA jacket the next fall, and the new pair of jeans for the start of school.

For 364 days out of the year, we knew, and understood the costs and benefits of living the farm kids life, and we paid it readily and without question…but I will admit…those first few days of July, our bedtime prayers would include the phrase…”Lord, please let it rain the night of July 3^rd…but not TOO much…just enough to get us out of making hay…”

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

Now that I’m not working full-time in Boone anymore, access to my favorite services are not so easy.

Just last week, I needed a haircut.  If you haven’t noticed, the picture that accompanies this column is the same every week.  The smile is the same every week.  The smile is the same and the hair never gets any longer.  I guess Boone TODAY photographer Darrell Goemaat is too busy to take a new picture every week.  Since that photo was taken, I received a fencing scar on my left cheek, developed a wart on my chin and now have a patch over my right eye.

Just kidding.

But, my hair is longer and I am incredibly cheap about getting my hair cut.

I wait until my hair gets so long that I absolutely can’t stand it anymore.  Then I’ll go to the barbershop and get it cut.  I mean really cut.  I go from shag to kitchen carpeting in one sitting.

With a haircut like that, I figure the five bucks was well spent and everybody notices when I get a haircut.

Usually I go to Arlo at Arlo’s Barbershop.  When I worked at Boone TODAY everyday, I’d just skip out for a half-hour and duck into Arlo’s basement shop.  He’d get the job done lickety-split.  His shop is clean, but shows the many years of haircuts.

 He’d ask me how the newspaper business was going.  He’d ask me how I wanted my hair cut.  I’d reply “shorter.”

He remembered from visit to visit that I was from Minnesota and spent some time in Algona.  I remembered that he spent some time up in Kossuth County himself.  Since I started to visiting Arlo last fall we never had a communication problem.  I always liked my haircuts because he always cut my hair short enough.

Last week I really, needed to get my hair cut.  I went down to Arlo’s shop on Memorial Day weekend, but he was closed.  I guess even barbers need a day off or two.

So Tuesday after I got off work at Iowa State University, I decided to drop in on a barbershop near campus. I figured Arlo would be closed by the time I drove back from Ames.

This Campustown barbershop wasn’t a barbershop though, it was a style salon.  The place was so clean it gleamed.  Pictures of models with strangely styled hair graced the walls.

I waited almost two hours for my turn in the chair.  The fellow next to me was reading “An Abstract of Research on the Prosperities of Latex pain in Relation to Other Common Polymers and Coatings.”  He seemed pretty involved in his reading so I didn’t try to strike up a conversation. 

I used the wait to browse through a copy of Gentleman’s Quarterly.  I decided that Gentleman’s Quarterly is just not my kind of magazine.  I didn’t find the article about travel in Venice or dressing to impress Madison Avenue nearly has enlightening as the helpful hints on the back page of Successful Farming.  I felt as out of place reading that magazine as I felt in the styling salon.

The woman that finally cut my hair was nice enough, but she was afraid to really make an honest effort to cut my hair.  I think she was trying to sculpt it or something, but she never really enthusiastically tried to cut it.

I kept urging her to cut it shorter and shorter.  Finally the folks who had been waiting in line behind me started to give me the evil eye, so I gave up.  I don’t remember her name, and I know she won’t remember me.

The haircut’s OK, but it still too long.  I’ll be back at Arlo’s chair in less than a month, which tells me I definitely didn’t get my money’s worth.

They charged more than Arlo too.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

I was hoping that my new job at Iowa State University would be like this.

Iowa’s land grant university last week announced a first-in -the nation planting of genetically altered plants.  If experiments were successful, farmers may one day be able to abandon pesticides in favor of biological insect control.

That’s kind of announcement you’d expect from a university like Iowa State.  Even up at North Dakota State University, Iowa State was famous for its agricultural research.  Many of the textbooks and materials we used in our agricultural classes were developed at Iowa State.  Any study of recent agricultural history is closely intertwined with the history of the ag college at Ames.

That’s not always been the case, America’s land grant colleges, with Iowa Sate at the forefront, fell victim in the past decade to huge crop surpluses and low farm prices.  Folks started questioning the value of ag research.  The foundations laid by the Morrill and Hatch Acts in the late 1800′s, establishing land grant colleges and experiment stations, seemed to be crumbling.

Meanwhile, scientists, with enough vision and common sense to know better, continued their work and delved into new areas.  Who, 20 years ago, would have thought transferring genetic material from a potato plant to tobacco plants or corn or soybean plants would be possible.  Even now, I doubt if we realize all the possibilities of such an advance.

Land grant universalities like ISU and their experiment stations again gaining international acclaim for their discoveries. This time it’s not for production advances, but for better methods of resource management and environmental protection-solutions for the problems of our time.

Biotech and high tech have replaced higher yields as the bywords of a new era I agricultural research. 

If, through the miracles of biotechnology, we can find biological controls for pests and disease in our crops, many of our environmental problems will be solved.  It’s important that researchers like Bob Thornburg continue to receive state and federal monies for their work.

At the same time, Iowa State has the unique opportunity to bring salvation to a troubled Iowa economy while finding solutions to global problems.

Already, with Midland bioproducts and its pampered goats, Boone is seeing the economic benefits of biotechnology.

During the past two weeks, i’ve been doing some research of my own.  As part of my new job, i’ve been assigned to review the past 100 years of advances made by the Iowa Agriculture and home Economics Experiment Station at Iowa State University.  For many ag students across the country, Iowa State University is synomous with greatness.  I’m beginning to understand why.

Names like C.F. Curtiss and Henry A. Wallace suddenly gain much more significance.  I’ve paged through 100-year-old experiment station bulletins and stacks of other yellowed publications.   Under extreme conditions, early researchers in Agriculture Hall and Morrill Hall at the Iowa Agriculture College laid the groundwork for Bob Thornburg and his colleagues.

Some of their research seems simple and out-dated now, but in other passages the writing leaps off the page in excitement as those early scientists wrote with enthusiasm of their findings.

I occasionally sit in my office in Morrill Hall and wonder if a young Wallace or Curtiss paced the floor in this very office years a go, pondering the pressing problems of Iowa’s farmers.  The diligence and brilliance of those scientists found solutions and brought prosperity to the farmers of the corn belt and beyond.

It’s a tradition that had not died at Iowa State University.  Thornburg has proved that.  Thornburg and the others who now pace the offices and grounds of Iowa State University will follow in the footsteps of Curtiss and Wallace and other far-sighted researchers.

Just as the researchers of the past found solutions for their time, today’s researchers will find solutions to the present problems.

 If you look at a topographical map of the United States, you will find the wide, long stretch of open land, void of mountains, that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico, almost all the way up to the Hudson Bay.  At the heart of it, lies the mighty Mississippi river valley.

Most people don’t realize that weather systems fight it out in spectacular fashion between the two, and it is not uncommon, especially in the summer, to have the heat and humidity make its way from the gulf of Mexico, all the way up to the Canadian border.

Growing up close to both the Mississippi River and the Red River of the North, we seemed at times to be at the confluence of the weather systems that clashed and collided.

In short, it could get hot.  Darn hot.

Temperatures in the mid to upper nineties, and even crossing one hundred degree’s Farhenhiet was not uncommon.  As luck would have it, it always seemed that those days happened when we were making hay or combining the small grains – hot, labor intense jobs.

Not only did we see those temperatures during the day, but we would often times get little respite during the night.  Sometimes temperatures would hover in the seventies, evening making our rest a hot, humid, uncomfortable one.

After a day of working out in the field, we would come home to milk hot, sweaty cows, and then pile into the house for late (usually nine o’clock) or later supper.  There was always a lot of food on the table, but the most popular item was the ice cold kool-aide that Mom knew to have on the table, iced and ready to go.  The meal was always followed by a big bowl of ice cream (Mom would buy a case of chocolate before the summer started…if we were lucky, this would get us to the start of school in the fall).

As the meal was coming to an end, we would usually start with the youngest ones first heading to the shower, to wash off the dust, grim, and sweat of the day, and retire to the living room, with a full contingent of fans trying to cool the still warm and humid night air.  We would watch the ten o’clock news and usually the episode of MASH that followed before heading for bed.

Our house had two halves to it, on the west half of the house were two normal bedrooms, with windows looking on two sides allowing a good cross current of air.  On the east half was the old part of the house, the orginal house being a story and a half, this was the lower section of the house, with just enough room down the middle to walk upright and beds tucked under the slopping roof.  This was the boy’s room.  Open on one end to the hallway and one window on the far wall and one window in the dormer – the little green fan, circa 1960 – with even the Minnesota Twin’s sticker in the middle celebrating the return of baseball to Minnesota, working overtime, and sometimes, literally smoking to keep up.

When the heat was too much and the half story too sweltering to even give us tired boy’s any respite, we spread out blankets on the living room floor, turned the fan on high and tried to get a little shut eye as we dreamed of the next cool front moving through…probably just in time for the last load of hay to be put up in the barn…

 Dad retired from farming in May, 1994.  The cows were sold six days before graduation and the land that he had helped his Uncle Charley clear was rented out to two young neighbor brothers who were trying to make a living farming the land.

Back in 1994, wheat and barley were still king of the countryside.  There were still the occasional dairy farmer that would grow oats.  There was still a fair amount of alfalfa grown for livestock feed.  There were some corn and bean fields.  The corn was primarily for silage, though a little was saved and sold for grain.  The soybeans were planted on a wing and a prayer – a good crop would pay for itself, an early frost spelled disaster.

Times change.

Through the use of breeding and new technology, corn and soybean varieties that can withstand cooler temperatures, mature in shorter amount of time, and grow under cooler, and sometimes drier weather – all with good yields – started coming onto the market about the time that Dad retired.  Sugar beets, once the mainstay of central Minnesota and the rich soils of the Red River Valley were being debated as a viable alternative – could they grow in the soils outside of the Red River Valley?

Driving across the countryside around the family farm today, the change is almost complete.  Rows and rows of corn reach for the sky.  Bean fields sometimes stretching as far as the eye can see.  An occasional wheat field still growing under the sky’s of the northern plains, sometimes interspersed with the sweet sugar beets that grow exceptionally well in the rich loamy soils.  Sometimes the eye will even spy a hearty stand of winter wheat, surviving under the heavy snow cover, growing thick and rich like a carpet on the black soils of my home county.

The transformation is almost complete.

Walking down the road past the home farm this last weekend, where the sweet smells of alfalfa, clover, wild flowers, and sprouting wheat used to greet the senses, the nose was met by the smell that to the untrained nostril might appear to be a greenhouse.  But to a nose that knows, it was the combination of the heat, humidity, and rain from the night before, mixing with the fast growing corn plants, reaching for the sky.

I’m not sure what it is, but it is a smell unique to summer throughout the corn belt, and it was the first time that I spelled it so beautifully pungent on my home road.  I had smelled it before in my travels and visits to the corn belt – my time in grad school in Illinois, working in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a girlfriend in southern Minnesota (it wasn’t the wind rustling the corn leaves…).

Part of me loves that pungent smell of the natural greenhouse – of the heat, humidity, and ground moisture coming together to push the young corn and bean plants to reach to the sky.  Part of me misses those familiar smells of growing up, of the alfalfa, of the clover in the pasture.

Call it the smell of change.  Call it the smell of progress.  But in the end, for better or worse, it smells like Iowa.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

By now, the grass on the hill is knee high and will nearly obscure the brown and broken remnants of what grew there last year.  The steel-clad Farmers Cooperative grain elevator and the blue municipal water tower shimmer in the distance.  And if the wind is right, you can hear the trucks whizzing along the highway a mile to the north.

An ancient shed leans into the north wind, a victim of rotting beams and too much snow.  A case thresher catches rain from the roof, its galvanized metal dulled by rain and sun, gears and shafts locked in silence by rust.

A young tree grows through the mechanisms of a mccormick-Deering binder.  Heavy steel wheels have settled deeply into the prairie sod.  Other pieces of machinery have suffered a similar fate.  A Massey-Harris “27″ combine sits on cement blocks, wheels, engine and sieves gone.  A home-made silage wagon has tumbled from a perch on four 30-gallon barrels.  A John Deere manure spreader is nearly invisible in the grass, its floor rotted away.

These and other once-grand machines line a narrow, grass-lined track for nearly a quarter of a mile at the far backside of the farmstead.  The windbreak of aging oaks, poplars, and boxelders separates Machinery Hill from the rest of the farmstead.  Trees and grass hide all but the largest pieces of equipment from the road.  Those unfamiliar with rural life call this junk- a rural junkyard.  They call for the “junk” to be carted away.  “Recycle,” they say.

But they judge too quickly.

Just ask the rabbit who makes his home under the binder or the pheasant who finds a place to nest in the tangled grass under an abandoned field cultivator.  Or the pair of owls that roost in the peak of the old shed and the woodchuck that lives in a burrow under the silage wagon.

Or ask the farm boy if this is junk.  His eyes will flash with defiance as he tugs his seed-corn cap on tight.  “It ain’t junk,” he’ll say.

With birds twittering and the wind whispering through the grass, Machinery Hill is a place of solace for an angry boy-a place to escape from unruly calves, cows with muddy tails and parents who don’t understand.

It’s a place to lay on your back on the grass and think and think and think until you’re not mad anymore and the world doesn’t seem so bad.

It’s a place to stalk rabbits and search for treasures.  An abandoned combine is a battleship.  A rotting silage wagon is a frontier fort defended by pig-weed arrows.  And a truck with mice in the seat becomes a roaring 18-wheeler.  Is that a cracked engine head from a Farmall “M ” or a meteorite from Jupiter?

But Machinery Hill is also home to recycling efforts.  Every so often, the stillness is broken by the throaty roar of the cutting torch, the crash of a hammer against a chisel, the rasp of a hacksaw or the creak of long-rusted bolts being worked free.

If Machinery Hill is home to the active imagination of farm children, it is also home to the creative genius of farmers.

The tires and the engine from the combine are now at work on a newer machine.  Iron from the binder’s frame supports the barn cleaner that saves so much effort every day.  And an axle from the manure spreader is part of a home-made fork designed to adapt a front-end loader to moving those big round hay bales.

Get rid of leaky pesticide barrels, seeping buckets of used motor oil and piles of old batteries.  But before we haul away the battered thresher, the rotting silage wagon or the rusted binder, think for a moment about the chubby woodchuck, the imaginative farm boy or the creative farmer.

Then decide if it is really junk or if it is being to very good use right where it is.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

During 1988 and 1989, Boone County suffered through a severe two-year drought that dried up wells in southern Iowa and baked crops in the northern tiers of Iowa counties.

Only a series of just-in-time rains allowed Boone County farmers to salvage respectable crop yields.  The weather taxed our air-conditioners as dark clouds that could bring much-needed rain.

On New Year’s Day 1990, Boone County and the state were bracing for a third year of drought.  Subsoil moisture was nearly non-existent in most areas of the state.  Moisture levels in the top layers of soil were not much better.  Although the weather had set new records for below-zero temperatures, snowfall was sparse. 

What a difference six months can make.

Last week nearly every basement in Boone was suffering from moisture damage.   Lucky residents had damp carpets.  The less fortunate were faced with basement water levels that bordered on the unbelievable.  Foundations crumbled and basement walls collapsed.

Across the county, hundreds of acres of corn and beans are still under water.  More than a dozen counties have been declared disaster areas.  In Des Moines, Ames, Boone and other communities, streets and roads were closed by flood waters.

Few natural disasters in Iowa’s history have brought such devastation.

But in five or 15 years from now, climatologists and statisticians will add up Iowa’s rainfall over the past three years and factor those amounts into their long-term averages.  When you look at our weather from a long-term-average perspective, it doesn’t look so bad.  Our soggy 1990 balances out our parched 1988 and 1989.

But averages don’t really count for much when your basement is flooding or your lawn is drying up or your beans are drowning or our corn is curling up under the hot summer sun.

But if it helps, go ahead and think of things in terms of averages.  Because, on average, the Iowa weather is pretty nice.

My first job in the big city of Minneapolis was working for the now defunct Continental Grain Company.  At the time, they were the second largest grain company in the United States.  Their main buying office in the upper Midwest was on the seventh flour of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, right in the heart of downtown Minneapolis.Every morning, I’d wake at six o’clock in the morning at my aunt and uncle’s house in South St. Paul and hop in my 1988 Pontiac Lemmons, the one made of tin and plastic with the heater that worked fantastic – pumping out heat 365 days a year….

I’d need to be on the road a little before seven o’clock every morning, because I found out the hard way one more, that leaving even a minute or two after seven o’clock would mean an extra forty-five minutes in traffic.  It was an investment in time that was well worth the price.

Every morning I’d drive the rush hour traffic into work and out of work.  Bumper to bumper, at times doing speeds well over sixty miles an hour.  Often times in stop and go traffic.  Hit the gas, hit the brakes.  Hit the gas, hit the brakes.  Hit the gas, hit the brakes.  For fifteen miles, from downtown Minneapolis, through St. Paul, and off and over the Lafayette Bridge into South St. Paul I’d drive.

Often times, I’d long for the traffic back in my hometown, where I remembered getting mad stuck behind one of the elderly neighbors that insisted that driving at thirty miles an hour was more then fast enough to make it anywhere they wanted to go.  Or I’d long for the rush hour traffic in Fargo during my college years, when an extra five minutes in traffic would leave us fuming.  This was gridlock.

And Friday’s were even worse.

Every weekend I’d make the track out to the farm, which meant that I was competing with what seemed like the entire population of the cities trying to make it out of town and out to the lakes.  This made the daily grind seem like kid stuff.  It was miles, and miles, and miles, and miles, and miles of traffic – nothing but brake lights as far as the eye could see over the horizon.

I never truly appreciated my luck until that one Saturday the end of June.  After having fought rush hour traffic day in and day out, I was looking forward to the quiet country roads of back home, thirty mile an hour driving neighbors and all.

My Dad had made an appointment for me at the local service station for an oil change.  So dutifully, I woke early to make sure that my car made it in when the station opened at seven thirty in the morning, sharp.  The plan was to make it into the service station and walk down to the café where Dad would be finishing up his morning coffee.

Driving the two miles into town was refreshing after the daily grind of the rush hour traffic.  With the windows rolled down, I was enjoying the sights and sounds of the countryside, coasting along at a leisurely pace, I pulled into town and the first stop sign by the Catholic School.  Nothing happened as I coasted through the stop sign.

“Huh.” I thought to myself.

Up the next block, by the Catholic Church, was the stop sign and my left turn onto Main Street.  Hitting the brakes frantically and hoping there was not traffic on Main Street at seven thirty, glided around the corner doing about thirty miles an hour.

Down deserted Main Street my car coasted along.  Fearful to hit the gas, and still pumping the brakes, I came up on the service station, whipping around on main street, I aimed for the curb and did a quick combo of throwing the parking brake and easing the little Pontiac into park as she pumped up against the curb.

“Whew!” I thought as I turned her off.

The service station manager, owner, and all around good guy, Dave came walking out and said, “You could just drive her right up and into the bay.”

“Well, Dave,” I replied, “I seem to be having some trouble with the brakes.”

“Wonder if that is brake fluid pouring out onto the street?” He asked, from ten feet away noticing the fluid running out from under my door – right where the brake line ran.

As unfun as that experience was…I was glad that it happened in my sleepy hometown on a Saturday morning then in rush hour, bumper-to-bumper traffic of the city.

For a guy whose brakes went out, I felt like the luckiest guy alive.

 From my home to McClusky, North Dakota is about 450 miles through the farm fields and prairie lands of Minnesota and North Dakota.  To most people that I’ve told about the trip, they make it sound like some sort of torture to have to drive through that landscape.  Miles and miles of endless fields and a road that seems to go on forever.

But to the well trained eye, it is one of the most beautiful drives in the world.

The big city of Minneapolis-St. Paul and its suburbs slowly give way to the rolling hills, trees, lakes, and farm fields of rural Hennepin and Wright Counties.  The landscape changes again as you pass into Stearns County – the trees and sandy soil turning into the hills and fertile farm fields of once was the heart of Minnesota Dairy country.

The rolling hills of Stearns County turn into the flat farm fields until Alexandria marks the change back into the rolling prairie pothole region of Minnesota, as the rolling hills of grass and valleys with small lakes and sloughs are interspersed with farm fields until you pass through Fergus Falls, and all the way through Barnesville, when the hills and prairie descend sharply as the road dips into the Red River Valley.

For almost thirty miles, the road is flat and smooth as it passes through the fertile valley of the Red River of the North.  The flat as a pane of glass valley that is the where the ancient Lake Agassiz once resided, draining to the north, leaving yards of fertile silty soil behind.  The farm fields stretch on for miles, broken only by the city rising out of the valley, the twin cities of Fargo-Moorhead, right on the might Red River itself.

Beyond Fargo, the Red River Valley extends for another forty miles, through Mapleton, Castleton, Buffalo, and on to Tower City, where once again, the road climbs out of the valley and into once was once the great grasslands of the northern high plains.

Rolling hills and fertile farm fields are broken only by the bluffs of the river valleys where the city of Valley City (on the Sheyenne River) and Jamestown (on the James River) sit.  Turning north into the even more sparsely populated interior country, off of the interstate; the fields go on for miles, broken by pastures and pock marked by sloughs and wetlands.  Past once thriving mushroom towns that once bloomed on the prairie, but today, wither with a lack of youth and jobs.  Towns that still have pride, as they slowly decay and turn into relics.  Towns built up under the promise of one family on every 160 acre parcel of land…brought low by the realities of modern agriculture and the modern transportation – where a trip of seventy miles, once thought unheard of, is now a common occurrence.

But it is more then the land.  It is the doe watching the passing traffic among the trees of central Minnesota.  The buck grazing in the open prairie pasture north of Pingree, North Dakota.  It is the pheasants flying across the road as we pull out of Sykston.  It is the two big hills by Hurdsfield, one with the herd of cattle slowly chewing their way through the new summer grass and the other with the ancient threshing machine sitting, waiting for the harvest that will never come.  It is the calves jumping through the tall prairie grass just past the Ashby exit.  The fox stealing across the road outside of Carrington.

There is beauty in the man made as well.  The rows of corn and beans that curve around the hills of Stearns County.  The barns and silos and the grazing Holsteins.  It is the fence and the ancient farm equipment through the hills and broken prairies.  The ancient farmsteads on the North Dakota plains.  The straight rows of corn, beans, wheat, and sugar beets that march off into horizon, broken only by the section lines.

But the land is not dead, and the greatest beauty of the land lies in her people.  The farmer waving from tractor and manure spreader, leaving the dairy farm near Melrose.  The elderly gentleman in the bib overalls and straw hat cutting the ditches by Dalton.  The farmer finishing up the soybean harvest just outside of Downer.  The big tractor rumbling to break up the corn stalks from last years crop by Oriska.  It is the people at Mass in Sykston that greet us with a smile.  The rancher near Goodrich, riding his horse to check fence.  The people of McClusky that came out to help celebrate a wedding on a beautiful June night as the music wafted from the fire hall and out on the street where the farmers and families stood under the moonlight, enjoying the night.

Yes sir, to the well trained eye, there is nothing but beauty in those 450 miles, if you know what to look for.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

For you vocabulary builders out there who like to lean a new word every so often, you may want to try “ubiquitous.”

Then, if someone asks you what you think of all the rain we’ve been having, you can say,” I think it’s very ubiquitous.”  Whoever is asking you about the rain is certain to be impressed with your language skills.  And because ubiquitous means something that is “constantly encountered ” and “widespread,” you’ll be absolutely correct.  In fact, ubiquitous seems to be the perfect word for describing Boone’s recent rainy weather patterns.

Sunday’s weather was not ubiquitous, however.  The skies were blue.  The few clouds that could be seen were fluffy and white.  There weren’t any of the ubiquitous rain clouds around.  The temperature and humidity, while trending toward the sticky side, were not unbearable.  It was a marvelous day.

You couldn’t step outside without smelling someone’s barbecue.  People were walking and biking and hiking and generally enjoying outdoor pastimes all day long.  And they were all smiling.  It was amazing.

There’s no denying that the rain has had its effect on attitudes.  Farmers, especially, have suffered much stress at the hands of Mother Nature this spring.  I overheard one area farmer comment that he thought all of this rain was worse than a drought.  “It seems like you can always find something to do when it’s too dry, but all you can do is worry when it’s rainy,” he said.

Farmers probably have the best reason to be stressed and depressed, but we’ve all been grouchy and crabby.  A few hours of Sunday’s sunshine effected a wonderful change on just about everyone.

And despite the damage to local crops and morale, the rain has made the area’s vegetation as lush as it’s ever been.  The countryside displayed a brilliant emerald green under Sunday’s sun.

But the weather prognosticators again are predicting persistent precipitation for the rest of the week.  And so it seems that the situation faced by area farmers will become even more dire and the rest of us will be doomed to drizzly dispositions.

Will this rain ever end?

Sunday’s sunshine, however brief, gives us hope.  That’s why we watch the sky, hoping for a break in the clouds.  We long for a string of days with Sunday’s sunshine.  It would be wonderful to feel the sun on our arms kick up a little dust in the fields.

Wouldn’t it be nice to look up a the sun and say,” Isn’t this sunshine ubiquitous?”