(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 in August, 1988)

It’s harvest time at home.

Last week the combine started rolling across the barley fields.  The oats crop is safely in the bin now.  The wheat fields will be cut soon.

Harvest time is exciting.  Life seems much more fast-paced and work suddenly more important and meaningful.  Beating the weather becomes a fixation.

Things get a little tense too.  Heat and humidity makes a tough job even more difficult for men and machines.  Stressed metal gives way.  Engines, bearings and tempers take turns overheating.  Noise, heat and long hours take their toll.

My college-age brother operates the combine.  His temper is never what anybody would call amiable, but with temperatures wavering at the 100-degree mark, I’ll bet his sweaty face was twisted into a scowl for most of the week.

His favorite word in times of stress is a muttered, “Cripes.”  He packs that single work with so much meaning and emotion it’s unbelievable.

The car is out of gas.

”Cripes.”

Somebody else ate the last cookie.

“Cripes.”

He has to stack a load of hay.

“Cripes.”

This week it was a biggie.  The air conditioner on the combine went on the fritz.  It was so hot that it just refused to work.  With a final gasp it just quit.

John’s had experience with that air conditioner before.  The combine is designed in such a way that the engine blows heat from the overworked engine toward the cab.  The hot airs blasts from the engine compartment into the cab through the control panel.  Last year when the air conditioner quit. John received second-degree burns on his arm when it slipped from the armrest onto the control panel.

“Cripes.”

This summer he spent two weeks fixing hoses, cleaning air ducts and cooling fins and testing the fan.  He was determined to make sure it worked.

“Cripes.”

I’m sure he spat the word out like some kind of foul tasting bug in his veggies.  For him, being angry is more than just an emotion, it’s an art.  And nobody does it better.

At least this time he was justified.   If the temperature outside was 100 degrees, inside that cab it must have been 120.

So dad and John were getting the combining done.  In between combining and milking sweaty Holsteins, there was straw to bale and stack.  All this going on and I’m stuck here in Iowa with a rotten, air conditioned desk job.

“Cripes.”

That combine is the family’s pride and joy.  It’s the biggest piece of equipment on the place.  The combine, a Massey-Ferguson model 510, is not new, but it has low hours and has always been shedded.

By today’s standards it’s a small combine.  But when that baby rolls snorting and roaring out of the shed in the fall it makes a farm boy feel all funny inside.

About that roar.  According to the owner’s manual, the combine was originally equipped with a muffler.  Since it rolled off the assembly line some 20 years ago somebody’s made some adjustments to the exhaust system.

Now two chrome pipes peek out from the engine compartment.  The combine, not a quiet machine anyway, roars down the filed sounding like Sunday night at the Boone Speedway.  Inside the metal machine shed, the sound is loud enough to shake the bird droppings out of the rafters.

I’d bet dad’s got the nifiest-sounding combine in the country.