Minneapolis Moline, the Big Guy on the Farm

Many of us in the nation are in for a hot July Fourth holiday with temperatures soaring into the nineties and even higher. People here in Upstate New York usually don’t have air conditioning. We’ve never needed it, but with the summers getting hotter, we installed AC in our cottage several years ago and have not regretted the expense.

I grew up in the Midwest where air-conditioned homes were also rare. Sure, there were some blistering days, but not many. In our house on the farm, we turned on the furnace fan which blew cold air up from the basement. It was usually enough to keep us comfortable for the few days of hot weather. I liked to go out to one of our fields where a small creek flowed and sit in it. It wasn’t deep enough to swim in, but you could cool off by dipping your feet and butt into it. The water from the creek ran through the property on which the local printing plant was located, and we found out years later that they had been polluting the water by dumping toxic chemicals into it. Somehow my father managed to get them to clean it up by no longer dumping and running the water underground and through some kind of filtering system. Of course, that meant the creek was gone, but it also meant our animals didn’t drink that contaminated water. It seems I suffered no ill effects unless you consider writing about murder a brain disease.

Summer on the farm was busy with haying and plowing, filling silo and fattening pigs to send to market and letting our cows graze the pastures, but it also was a mellow time for me because I was free to roam our property and spend hours in our hayloft swinging from a rope and jumping off into piles of hay and straw stacked on the loft floor. It was pleasanter to watch my dad milk the cows, too, because the barns were warm and smelled of feed and hay. Unless the heat settled in for a few days, even the manure smell was bearable.

I remember only one summer when the heat was so intense that the air from the basement did little to take away the discomfort. We ate our go-to summer meal for several days—smoked salmon, cottage cheese and tomatoes—no cooking and purchased from the local A and P supermarket. Mom and I loved the salmon, but Dad was a “meat” guy and days of fish were getting to him. All of us were in a bad temper because the heat wasn’t lifting at night and no one was sleeping well. Dad decided the only way any of us was going to survive another day was to move our mattresses outside under the huge oak trees on our lawn. Looking back on that night, all I remember is how excited I was to be sleeping outside. I doubt I got any more sleep than I would have if I’d been in my hot bedroom. I thought it was one of the greatest events of my young life up to that point. I don’t remember if bugs were a problem or if we worried it might rain on us. I’d never gone camping, so I thought it was great fun. My mother was glad for the reprieve from the heat but growing up in California and camping every weekend at the beach so her father could fish and hating the sand and bugs, she wasn’t eager to spend the night outdoors. When I was an adult and told her of the many camping trips I took with my friends, she’d only shudder and say “oh, yuck.”

The heat let up the following day and the mattresses were moved back inside. A night under the trees was never repeated, but I do remember that one “sleep out” with fondness. Camping in a tent with a sleeping bag was never quite as much fun.