A Trip Down Memory Lane

A Trip Down Memory Lane

By Steve Weisman

In late September, my wife and I traveled to her hometown of Redfield, SD for her 50th year class reunion. The kids of ’69 were now in their late 60s, and as a friend of mine and I watched the Redfield homecoming parade, we cheered as the Class of 1969 passed by on their flatbed. So much had happened to those “kids” over the past 50 years, and that evening as more than 20 members of the class gathered at Crystal’s Lounge, I witnessed lots of laughter, smiles and, yes, a few tears of both joy and sadness.

It was also a reunion of sorts for me. Although I was a farm kid from the neighboring town of Tulare, I actually spent more time with Redfield kids than with the Tulare kids. It all happened during the summer after my junior year, when the Tulare Legion baseball team did not have enough players and our season was cancelled. However, the local Legion commander called up the Redfield commander and asked if any Tulare kids that wanted to could try out for the Redfield Legion team. He said yes, and three of us tried out and made the 1965 Redfield Legion baseball team.

Lucky contact
I didn’t know any of the players on the team, but something that happened during our season opener was a true ice breaker for me. We were playing Aberdeen, one of the top teams in the large class A, while Redfield was in Class B. Since it was the season opener and we had arrived just that week, none of us Tulare players played. Aberdeen had a hard throwing lefthander and since I was a left handed batter, I was kind of glad I didn’t get to play.

Then in the last inning, Coach Gary brought me in as a pinch hitter. Lefty on lefty…I knew this wouldn’t be good. We only had one hit for the entire game going into the last inning. So, to save face, I thought to myself, “I’m going to bunt. At least, I can make contact and not be another strike out victim.”

So on the first pitch I squared around to bunt, the third baseman came charging in and I made contact with the ball. Oops! The ball hit the barrel of the bat, and I lined it over the third baseman’s head. The bunt was soooo bad; yet there I was with the only other hit of the game!
That broke the ice, and I became one of the “boys of summer.” By the end of the season, we were the 1965 Class B State Champs. I played again my senior year and then seven years of amateur/town team baseball after that. I actually became a Redfield kid, and in the summer of 1969, I met Darial Scheffel, and we have now been married for 48 years. So, this was kinda like my class reunion, too. To top it off, last weekend one of my wife’s classmates asked me at the reunion, “What year did you graduate from Redfield?” I said with a smile, “I actually didn’t. I was a Tulare kid.” I thought that was pretty funny.

Back to the farm
Before heading home on Sunday, we drove out to the old Weisman farmstead four miles west and two miles south of Tulare. My parents moved off the farm in 1987, selling the farmland and buildings to the neighbor to the north and then relocated down to Estherville, IA to be near us. As a result, except for reunions or a pheasant hunting trip, we never traveled back.

As I approached the farm from the north, I knew that things would be different and that most of the buildings had been torn down, but I was shocked by what I found.

Growing up, my dad raised a hundred cattle and a hundred pigs. After the fall harvest, the yard was crowded with several corn cribs of harvested corn, grain bins filled with oats and wheat and a couple dozen stacks of hay set for feeding the cattle in the winter. The three quarters of land were planted to alfalfa, wheat, oats, sorghum and corn along with about 100 acres of pasture. Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be like that today.

BUT, the changes were stark and had been caused by Mother Nature. As I looked across the landscape, I found only one field of corn barely surviving, and the rest was water, water, water and cattails, cattails, cattails. Rains in recent years and especially this past summer had turned everything into true “duck country.” As we drove into the weed covered lane that once took me to the home place, all I could see was water…water lapped at the south side of the old machine shed and further to the west the old barn had water almost at the foundation. There was no yard to put the corn cribs, the grain bins and stacks of hay, let alone the pigs and the cattle.

Weeds and brush stood where the pasture and alfalfa field used to be, but they were nearly submerged in water. Completely oblivious to our arrival, flocks of mallards and teal swam in contentment.

An avid duck hunter, it was an incredible display for me. Wherever I looked, I saw slough after slough with ducks flying aimlessly around only to suddenly cannonball and land on the water. Only once when I was in my early 20s had I seen a few temporary flooded low areas that held ducks. That only lasted one season, and it was gone. Certainly, we had hard winters and spring flooding, but it most always went away by planting time because the land was quite sandy. Growing up, if we had a rain after the first of June, we felt extremely fortunate. That was a total 180-degree swing.

My excitement left me though as I thought what these three quarters of land had once been and how proud my parents were of their farm. They were good stewards of the land and pretty much self-sufficient. If they were alive today, I don’t think they could have survived on the farm. There is simply no way they could make a living!

Then I thought of the neighbors who were facing this same dilemma, and I was filled with sadness. How? How could a farmer make it under these conditions? And it’s not like this was a one-year deal. The land is so saturated and the land so flat that an inch or two of rain means another inch or two of water in the sloughs. They just keep growing and expanding.

So, they still own the land, pay taxes on the land and get no crops! What a mess.

With nostalgia still surrounding us, I pulled out of the lane and headed south to the Iowa Great Lakes thinking thoughts of what had been and what now faced today’s farmers. I also thought of us here in Iowa and how the heavy rains have affected us…the flooded fields, the crops not planted, the levies breached…we are definitely facing climate issues we have not faced in the past.