I spent last weekend with my in-laws in Illinois. Needless to say, I was ready to get out there and log a few miles.
Being a city fella, I’m used to stop lights and motor cars when I run. I’m no Joel Fleishman. I’ve seen the wilds of rural America before. I even spent a week at my cousin’s dairy farm when I was eight. So, I know a thing or two about a thing or two. Here’s another situation where I’d benefit greatly from an as-yet-to-be-invented “sarcastic font.”
Despite my urban dependencies, my foray into Midwestern corn country was beyond pleasant. First of all, it was flat — really flat. It was mid-August, and I barely broke a sweat. Here’s how I’d describe the view. Forgive the purple prose: miles and miles of gold-flecked viridian carpet, long dirt roads bisecting corn and soybean fields, braying beasts-of-burden, and straight horizons cut by the the skeletal silence of never-ending power lines.
Sorry, had to get that out of my system.
One morning in particular left me with quite a story. I started out on a six-miler. It would eventually be a cloudless day. But the sky was still holding on to a few clouds at that point (7:30 or so). The smell of hay and durable earth rode on the breeze.
I passed one of the region’s century-old farmhouses with its peeling paint its and acres-big hayloft. And something caught my eye. A single-engine plane banking across a soybean field just beyond the dirt road I was on — its motor barely audible — the cockpit way back along the fuselage. It tipped its wing and headed back in my direction.
A mist of fungicide trailed behind it as it descended and skimmed the crops: a crop duster — my first encounter with a crop duster.
It buzzed me on one pass in particular, which prompted a, “seriously, did you get pesticide on you?” from my wife. A question I never thought someone would ask me. Great stuff. I loved every stride.
It seems grain silos and wheel loaders are good for the soul.
