Been thinking about: Hay field rites

The summer sun is bright and the air is heavy. Squinting against sweat, the world turns briefly gray, then fades back to color. Heat and exertion do strange things as I remember a certain time long past.

"Too bad we can't bale hay in the winter," I hear my mom saying as she wipes sweat and shifts her dark sunglasses. She was a small, tough, beautiful woman who thought nothing of dragging 60-pound bales of alfalfa through the fields, driving trailer-loads of hay across the rolling Illinois prairies, and still making sure supper was on the table. She taught me how to work, how to push beyond limits, how to leave comfort and ego behind. When I was a soft, pale, flabby kid on the cusp of adolescence, she pushed me.

The worn-out hay wagon creaked beneath the weight of too many bales as the tractor pulled over one-too-many ruts in the field. Poorly stacked bales shifted precariously, plunging forward with me on them. Fortunately, the tractor stopped so I didn’t get run over. Nobody said farm work was safe. Just the same, hay season was special magic for me. Other kids can keep their teamwork and special uniforms. I'll take the hay fields with all the sweat and dust and impractical danger as the sun beats down, hour after hour. It’s a raw grittiness whose reach goes far beyond acceptability.

"Wear a long-sleeved shirt so you won't sunburn!" Boyhood rites of passage do not make sense to a polite or androgynous society, to the experts or the egg heads or the overly protective mothers. Hay season was a time of worn out jeans and dusty cowboy boots, men in sleeveless shirts and open shirts and no shirts at all, all braced against the towering sun and the weight of hay bale after endless hay bale. To be strong enough to pick up a hay bale and toss it onto the wagon? That's like crack cocaine to a boy longing to join the ranks of manhood, to be accepted, to be seen, to be respected. I worked hard those long summers, working to be able to buck a bale, to be as strong as a man. Unknown to me at that time, I was never alone. Agrarian societies have — for as long as there have been agrarian societies — measured manhood by feats of strength.

I am sitting in front of a new computer, late autumn, 1990. I was always bookish, always too sensitive. This computer was fancy (back in those days) and it had a handful of games, inserted via floppy disk. I was obsessed, as only a 12-year-old boy can be. Competitive and confident that with the right combination of arrow keys, I could be a Jump Jet champion, even as a pixelated and grinning pink skull bounced into my equally pixelated fighter jet on level 10 and the game restarted. "I don't know how he can spend so many hours on that thing." The words drift over the remains of a Thanksgiving meal, the tone disdainful. Competition takes many forms and worlds forever collide, me never quite in one world, never quite in the other. No wonder I love crossroads.

"What are you training for?" I spend many hours in the gym and yet the question is still awkward for me.

Others train for competitions or particular events, like holiday 5Ks. I assume those others also grew up with teams and uniforms. It's all alien to me and my deer-in-the-headlights stare leads others (I suspect) to conclude I'm not quite right in the head. What am I training for? “Life, war, or dessert." Everything is a joke with me because a joke is easier than the truth. Easier than attempting to voice the thousand images that flash through my mind, the heat of the fields, the never-ending quest, the journey to — and into — manhood, and the inexorable fight against the great wheel of time, the drive to create, to become more than I currently am.

The 80-pound tractor tire looks immovable sitting there on the sidewalk as it blocks foot traffic outside the gym. The clock is ticking. Deep squat, hands beneath the tread, push with the hips; the tire flips. Repeat, again and again. “Keep your breathing under control, Josh. Focus. Ignore the pain. Ignore the heat. Ignore the heart rate.” Peripheral vision fades. I am loud when I lift and it helps control my breathing. The elderly couple making their way to the salon look around, startled. The more polite facets of my brain want to break away, to rush over, calm them, let them know I'm not like this all the time. I’m not really angry. But there is a time and place for anger, for strength, for overwhelming force of will, however fleeting. And there is beauty in raw power far removed from polite, tepid society. Yin and yang, sun and moon, light and shadow, an eternal and ancient dance.

And tonight, against the heat of the summer wind, a waxing crescent moon and bright Venus rule over the western skies, whispering to the dark the mysteries of life and the unknown, the passionate rising of the blood. I am again called out beneath the pale light to memories intense and impossible to forget. Lessons long-past, but never really far away. Again, I smell the alfalfa, and in my dreams remember the old hay field rites beneath an eternal summer sun.