Heat

The Honest Season

Chapter 13: Heat

One hundred and two degrees. The thermometer on the porch post, the same thermometer that read thirty-one degrees in April, now read one hundred and two, and the reading was not a surprise but was a fact, the fact of July in eastern Montana, the fact that the land Ruth walked in April frost she now walked in July fire, the same land, the same woman, the same boots, the temperature changed by seventy-one degrees, the change that the season produced and that the farmer endured and that the wheat required.

The wheat needed heat. This was the paradox of July — the discomfort of the farmer was the necessity of the crop. The wheat needed heat to fill the grain. The heads had emerged in late June, the flag leaf opening and the head pushing through, the boot stage, the emergence, the wheat plant revealing its purpose, showing the farmer what it had been building toward for two months, the head that contained the florets that contained the ovules that would, if pollinated, become kernels, become grain, become the bushels that the yield monitor would count in August.

But the kernels were empty. In early July the kernels were shells, husks, the architecture of grain without the grain itself. The grain was still to come. The grain came from the filling, and the filling came from the sun and the heat and the photosynthesis that drove the sugars from the leaves into the head and the sugars filled the kernels and the kernels swelled and hardened and the filling was the conversion of light into food, the fundamental transaction of agriculture, the transaction that began with the sun 93 million miles away and ended with a kernel of Hard Red Spring wheat in a field seven miles outside Culbertson, Montana.

Heat drove the filling. Heat accelerated the photosynthesis. Heat pushed the sugars through the plant's vascular system, from leaf to stem to head, the sugars flowing the way water flows through a pipe — driven by pressure, driven by the gradient between the source and the sink, the source being the leaves that manufactured the sugar and the sink being the kernels that received it.

But too much heat burned. Too much heat shut down the photosynthesis. At 95 degrees the wheat plant began to close its stomata — the microscopic pores on the leaf surface that allowed carbon dioxide in and water vapor out, the pores that were the plant's lungs, the breathing apparatus that the plant opened in moderate heat and closed in extreme heat, the closing a survival mechanism, a self-protection, the plant's way of saying: I cannot afford to lose more water, I cannot afford to breathe in this heat, I will shut down and wait.

The shutting down was temporary. If the heat lasted one day, two days, the plant recovered. If the heat lasted five days, seven days, the plant suffered. The suffering was measurable in the kernel weight — the weight of a thousand kernels, the test that determined the grade, the test that said this wheat is healthy and dense or this wheat is shrunken and light, this wheat filled properly or this wheat did not fill because the heat came and stayed and the plant could not breathe and the sugars could not flow and the kernels did not receive what the kernels needed to become what the kernels were supposed to become.

Ruth stood on the porch at 6:00 AM. The temperature was already eighty-one degrees. The sun had been up since 5:30, the early sun of July, the sun that arrived like a worker arriving at a job site — early, ready, prepared to put in a long day. The sun would not set until 9:15, a working day of fifteen hours and forty-five minutes, fifteen hours and forty-five minutes of radiation hitting the wheat fields, driving the photosynthesis, driving the filling, driving the season toward completion.

The heat was in its third day. Three days of highs above one hundred. Three days of the particular Montana heat that was not humid, was not the wet heat of the Gulf states, but was dry, was the heat of a convection oven, the air itself hot, the wind hot, the ground hot, the heat coming from every direction, from above and below and sideways, the total immersion in temperature that was the condition of July.

Ruth drank her coffee. She drank it on the porch because the kitchen was hot and the porch had a breeze, the morning breeze that came from the northwest before the daytime winds established themselves, the breeze that was warm but that moved and the movement was relief, was the body's recognition that moving air is cooler than still air even when the moving air is eighty-one degrees.

She looked at the wheat. The wheat was different now than it had been in June. The wheat was tall — thirty inches, the full height of SY Ingmar, the height that the variety achieved when the conditions were right. The wheat was dark green, nearly blue-green, the color of a canopy at peak vegetative growth, the color of nitrogen abundance and water adequacy and the maximum expression of chlorophyll, the pigment that captured the light and drove the photosynthesis and that gave the wheat its color, the color that Ruth read the way a doctor reads a chart — for normalcy, for deviation, for the signs that indicated health or stress.

The wheat did not look stressed. Not yet. Three days of heat was within the wheat's tolerance. The wheat had moisture — the May rain had filled the profile and the June rain had maintained it and the soil was holding water at depths of thirty-six inches and the roots were at thirty-six inches and the roots were accessing the water and the plant was transpiring the water and the transpiration was cooling the plant, the evaporative cooling that plants used the way humans used sweat, the expenditure of water to reduce temperature, the cost of cooling that the plant paid because the alternative was death.

But the heat would continue. The forecast said five more days above one hundred. Five more days of the oven. Five more days of the wheat breathing through half-closed stomata and transpiring water at accelerated rates and drawing down the soil moisture reserves that had been built by the winter snow and the spring rains. Five more days and the reserves would be depleted or they would not be depleted and the depletion or the non-depletion would determine the yield, would determine the number, would determine whether Section 12 produced forty-two bushels per acre or thirty-two or twenty-two, the range of outcomes that the heat would decide.

Ruth could not control the heat. This was the thing. This was the fundamental condition. She could control the seeding rate and the fertilizer rate and the herbicide application and the timing of the planting and the timing of the harvest. She could control the machines and the chemicals and the schedule. She could not control the weather. She could not control the heat and she could not control the rain and she could not control the hail and the inability to control these things was the defining condition of farming, the condition that separated farming from every other profession, the condition that made farming an act of faith rather than an act of engineering.

David was an engineer. David controlled the load on his bridges. David calculated the stress and designed the structure and specified the materials and the structure held the load because the load was known and the capacity was calculated and the margin of safety was built in. David's bridges did not fail because David did not allow them to fail. David's bridges were designed against failure.

Ruth's wheat was not designed against failure. Ruth's wheat was designed for hope. The wheat was planted in the hope that the rain would come and the heat would be moderate and the hail would miss and the price would hold and the harvest would be sufficient. The hope was informed — informed by thirty-eight years of experience, informed by soil tests and weather data and variety trials and the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime of farming. But the hope was still hope. The hope was still the thing that stood between the farmer and the weather, the thin barrier of intention that the farmer erected against the indifference of the sky.

The indifference. This was the thing that Ruth understood and that David did not. The sky was indifferent. The sky did not care about the wheat. The sky did not care about Ruth. The sky did what the sky did — it heated and it cooled and it rained and it hailed and it shone and it clouded and the doing was not directed at the farmer, was not aimed at the crop, was not personal. The sky was a system. The sky operated according to physics. The physics did not include the farmer's hope or the farmer's fear or the farmer's prayer.

And yet. And yet the farmer farmed. The farmer planted knowing that the sky was indifferent. The farmer planted knowing that the heat might come and stay and the wheat might burn and the yield might fall and the season might fail. The farmer planted anyway. The farmer planted because planting was the farmer's response to the indifference, the farmer's insistence that the work mattered even though the outcome was uncertain, the farmer's statement that doing the work was more important than controlling the result.

This was what Ruth meant when she said the season was honest. The season did not promise. The season did not guarantee. The season said: plant your seed and do your work and I will do my work and the result will be the result and the result is honest, is the true accounting of what happened, is the sum of your effort and my conditions and the interaction between the two, and the interaction is not fair and is not unfair, the interaction is honest, is the actual thing, is the truth of the season written in bushels and dollars and the weight of the grain in the truck.

Honest. Not fair. Ruth knew the difference. Fair was a human concept. Fair was the concept of a species that invented justice and that expected the world to comply with the invention. The world did not comply. The world was not fair. The world was honest. The world gave what the world gave and the giving was not calibrated to deserve or to effort or to need. The world gave what the physics produced and the physics was indifferent and the indifference was not cruelty but was honesty, the honesty of a system that operated without regard for the desires of the organisms within it.

Ruth put this differently. Ruth did not use the word physics. Ruth used the word weather. The weather was honest. The weather gave what it gave. The weather did not promise a good year or a bad year. The weather simply produced a year, and the year was what it was, and the farmer's job was not to judge the year but to work within it, to do the best she could with what the weather provided, and the doing was the farmer's contribution and the weather was the sky's contribution and the wheat was the ground's contribution and the three contributions combined to produce the season, the honest season, the season that was neither good nor bad but was true.

One hundred and two degrees. Ruth went inside. She filled a water bottle. She filled two water bottles. She put on her hat, the straw hat, the wide-brimmed hat that Tom wore before her and that she wore now, the hat that provided six inches of shade around her head and that reduced the temperature on her skin by ten degrees and that was, after water, the most important piece of equipment she carried in July.

She drove to Section 12. She drove the pickup, not the tractor. She parked at the field edge. She got out. The heat hit her like a wall, the wall of July, the wall that the body encounters when it steps from the air-conditioned cab into the unshaded air of a Montana wheat field at midday.

She walked into the wheat. She walked to the center of the field, the half-mile walk, the walk through thirty-inch wheat that brushed her waist and that moved in the hot wind, the movement of a canopy under thermal stress, the leaves curling slightly, the leaf curl that indicated the plant was conserving water, the curl that was the visible sign of the stomata closing, the plant reducing its leaf surface area to reduce its water loss.

She pulled a head. She pulled it gently, bending the stem, bringing the head to her eye level. The head was four inches long. The spikelets were arranged alternately along the rachis, the central stem of the head, each spikelet containing three to four florets, each floret containing a kernel. She pressed a kernel between her thumb and forefinger. The kernel was soft. The kernel was in the milk stage — the stage when the endosperm was liquid, was a white fluid, was the starch solution that would solidify into the hard kernel of mature wheat. She pressed and the milk emerged, white, on her thumbnail.

Milk stage. The filling was happening. The sugars were flowing from the leaves to the head and the sugars were being converted to starch and the starch was filling the kernel and the kernel was growing, was swelling, was becoming the thing it was meant to become. The filling would continue for three weeks. Three more weeks of heat and light and the plant doing its work, the work of converting sunlight into grain, the work that the plant had been preparing for since April, since the seed went into the ground, since the root emerged and the shoot emerged and the plant began its climb toward this moment, this July moment, this moment of filling.

Three weeks. Three weeks of heat that the wheat needed and that the wheat might not survive if the heat was too much, if the heat lasted too long, if the soil moisture ran out and the plant could not cool itself and the stomata closed and the photosynthesis stopped and the sugars stopped flowing and the kernels stopped filling and the wheat stood in the field, tall and green and dying from the inside, the death of a plant that had everything except water, the death that was not dramatic but was metabolic, was the quiet cessation of the chemical processes that kept the plant alive.

Ruth looked at the sky. The sky was blue. The sky was the deep blue of a high-pressure system, the dome of descending air that compressed and heated and that held the clouds away, the blue that meant no rain, the blue that meant more heat, the blue that was beautiful and dangerous, the beauty of a thing that could kill the crop if it persisted, if the dome held, if the high pressure did not break and the rain did not come and the heat continued.

She could not make it rain. She could not break the dome. She could not call down the clouds from wherever clouds went when the high pressure pushed them away. She could only stand in the field, in the heat, in the wind, and look at the wheat and assess the wheat and feel the soil and check the moisture and do the calculation that farmers do in July, the calculation that balanced the moisture remaining against the moisture required and that produced a number that was either positive or negative, either surplus or deficit, either hope or concern.

She pushed the soil probe into the ground. The probe was a steel tube, thirty-six inches, with depth markings. She pushed it in and pulled it out and looked at the soil core — the cylinder of soil that the probe extracted, the core that showed the moisture at different depths. The top six inches were dry. The dry soil was light brown, friable, crumbling. From six to eighteen inches the soil was moist — dark, cohesive, holding together. From eighteen to thirty-six inches the soil was wet — dark, dense, the moisture visible as a sheen on the soil particles.

Moisture at depth. The reserves were there. The roots were accessing the reserves. The plant was pulling water from eighteen and thirty-six inches and the pulling was keeping the plant alive, was keeping the stomata partially open, was keeping the photosynthesis running, was keeping the sugars flowing, was keeping the kernels filling.

But the reserves were finite. The reserves were the bank account of moisture, the savings that the winter snow and the spring rains had deposited, and the heat was the withdrawal, the daily withdrawal that the plant made to cool itself and to grow, and the withdrawals were exceeding the deposits because there were no deposits, because there was no rain, because the high-pressure dome held the clouds away and the sky was blue and beautiful and dry.

Ruth pulled the probe. She wiped it on her jeans. She looked at the field. The field looked good. The field looked healthy. The field looked like a field that was filling, that was doing its work, that was converting sunlight into grain with the quiet efficiency of a biological system operating within its parameters.

But the parameters were narrowing. The heat was narrowing them. Each day of heat without rain narrowed the parameters, reduced the margin, moved the crop closer to the line between enough and too much, the line that was invisible and that could not be drawn on a map but that existed in the soil profile, in the moisture reserve, in the mathematical relationship between what the plant needed and what the soil could provide.

She walked back to the truck. She drove home. She sat on the porch. The heat radiated from the ground and the buildings and the gravel and every surface that had absorbed the sun's energy during the day and was now returning it, the re-radiation that made July evenings warm even after the sun went down, the stored heat that the land held and released and that the farmer lived within, the envelope of temperature that was the condition of July.

Hector came by in the evening. He came to check the sprayer — the herbicide application was done, the weeds were dying, the wheat was clean, but the sprayer needed maintenance, needed the daily attention that all machinery needed, the attention that prevented the small problem from becoming the large problem, the leak from becoming the flood, the crack from becoming the break.

He stood beside Ruth on the porch. They looked at the fields.

"Hot," he said.

"Hot," she said.

"Forecast says five more days."

"I saw."

"Moisture's holding?"

"At depth. Top eighteen is dry."

He nodded. He did not need more. The information was sufficient. The moisture was holding at depth. The wheat was filling. The heat was doing what the heat did, which was drive the filling and deplete the moisture and narrow the margin and ask the question that July always asked, which was: is there enough? Is there enough water in the ground to fill the grain? Is there enough resilience in the plant to survive the heat? Is there enough of everything to make it to August, to the harvest, to the moment when the combine cuts the wheat and the number appears on the monitor and the season gives its answer?

They did not know. They could not know. The knowing came in August. The knowing came with the harvest. The knowing came when the combine cut the wheat and the grain flowed into the tank and the yield monitor counted the bushels and the number was the season's truth, the season's honest accounting of what happened, the sum of the rain and the heat and the work and the soil and the seed and the thousand variables that the farmer influenced but did not control.

Ruth watched Hector drive away. She sat on the porch until dark. Rust lay beside her. The heat did not break. The temperature at ten o'clock was still eighty-eight degrees. The wheat stood in the dark, in the heat, doing the work of filling, the nighttime work, the work that continued even without light because the sugars that the day's photosynthesis produced were still flowing, still moving from leaf to head, still filling the kernels that would become the grain that would become the yield that would become the answer.

The heat was honest. The heat did not pretend to be mild. The heat did not apologize for its intensity. The heat was the heat, was the condition, was the thing that July produced and that the farmer endured and that the wheat used or was damaged by, depending on the moisture, depending on the duration, depending on the line between enough and too much that no one could see and that everyone would know about in August.

Ruth went to bed. She did not sleep easily. The heat made sleep difficult — the bedroom on the second floor, the heat rising, the house holding the day's warmth in its walls and its floor and its ceiling, the warmth that Carl and Maryann built into the house when they built the house, the insulation that kept the winter cold out and that now kept the summer heat in.

She lay in the dark. She thought about the wheat filling in the dark. She thought about the kernels swelling, the starch accumulating, the grain becoming grain. She thought about the moisture at depth and the moisture declining and the heat continuing and the line narrowing.

She thought about what it meant to do work that depended on forces larger than the worker. She thought about the dependence and she did not call it weakness. She called it honesty. The honesty of a person who knows that she cannot control the outcome and who does the work anyway and who accepts the outcome when it comes, whatever it is, because the outcome is honest and the honesty is the thing she respects.

The honesty is what she means when she says the season is honest.

The season does not lie.

The heat does not lie.

The wheat does not lie.

The lie would be to say she could control it. The lie would be to say the outcome depended only on her effort. The lie would be to say that a good farmer always gets a good yield, that hard work always produces reward, that the equation between input and output is linear and predictable and fair.

It is not fair. It is honest. And the honesty is harder than fairness and more valuable than fairness and more real than fairness, because honesty does not comfort and does not reassure and does not promise. Honesty simply reports. Honesty says: this is what happened. This is what the heat did. This is what the moisture did. This is what the wheat did. This is the yield.

Ruth closed her eyes. The heat pressed down. The wheat filled in the dark. The season continued, honestly, toward the answer she was waiting for, the answer that the heat was helping to produce or helping to destroy, and the helping was not intentional and was not malicious and was not kind, the helping was indifferent, was the physics of July, was the honest condition of a world that does not care about the farmer but that gives the farmer everything the farmer has.