The Hailstorm

The Honest Season

Chapter 14: The Hailstorm

The storm came on July 14. It came from the northwest, like all the bad storms, the storms that carried hail, the storms that were born in the collision of cold Canadian air and warm Montana ground and that produced the supercells that moved across the landscape like combines — cutting everything in their path, leaving behind a swath of destruction that was as clean and as total as a harvested field, the destruction that was not selective, that did not choose which crops to destroy and which to spare, that destroyed everything in the path and spared everything outside the path and the path was random, was determined by the storm's internal dynamics, by the updraft and the downdraft and the rotation of air masses within the cell, the meteorology of violence.

Ruth saw the storm at 4:00 in the afternoon. She was on the porch. The heat had broken the day before — the high-pressure dome had cracked and the cold air had pushed through and the temperature had dropped from one hundred and two to eighty-four and the dropping was relief, was the body's recognition that the oven had been turned off, that the air was breathable again, that the July siege was over.

But the cold air that broke the heat brought the storms. The cold air sliding under the warm air, the warm air rising, the rising producing the clouds, the clouds producing the rain, and sometimes the rain was just rain, was the good rain, the replenishing rain, the rain that the soil needed and the wheat needed and the farmer prayed for. And sometimes the rain was not just rain. Sometimes the rain was hail.

She watched the storm build. She watched the clouds grow from flat to tall, from cumulus to cumulonimbus, the vertical development that indicated energy, that indicated instability, that indicated the atmosphere was converting thermal energy into kinetic energy and the kinetic energy was producing wind and rain and the particular solid precipitation that was hail — ice, formed in the updraft of the storm, the updraft that carried water droplets to altitudes where the temperature was below freezing and the droplets froze and the frozen droplets were carried up and down, up and down, each cycle adding a layer of ice, the layers accumulating, the hailstone growing, the stone that started as a droplet becoming a ball of ice that was a quarter-inch or a half-inch or an inch or two inches in diameter, the size determined by the strength of the updraft, the strength of the updraft determined by the energy in the atmosphere, the energy determined by the temperature differential between the ground and the upper air, the physics that produced the thing that farmers feared more than drought, more than price collapse, more than any other force in the catalog of forces that could destroy a crop.

Hail. The word itself was hard. The word was a single syllable, percussive, the sound of the thing it described, the sound of ice hitting wheat, hitting leaves, hitting stems, hitting heads, the sound that Ruth had heard four times in thirty-eight years and that she did not want to hear again and that she could not prevent from hearing because she could not prevent the storm and she could not prevent the hail and she could not do anything except watch and wait and hope that the storm's path did not cross her fields.

The storm moved southeast. Ruth tracked it from the porch. She tracked it by the cloud base, which was dark, nearly black, the darkness of a cloud that held rain and hail and the particular malevolence of a storm that was fully developed, fully energized, fully capable of the destruction it was designed to produce. She tracked it by the lightning — the flashes in the cloud base, the light that illuminated the interior of the storm and showed the structure, the layers, the churning mass of air and water and ice that was the storm's engine.

The storm crossed the Hoffman place to the north. She could see the rain curtain, the gray wall of precipitation that hung from the cloud base and that swept across the ground the way a broom sweeps a floor — steadily, thoroughly, the sweeping that left nothing untouched. She could see the green tint in the cloud base — the green that indicated hail, the green that was produced by the refraction of light through ice, the green that farmers watched for with the particular attention of a person watching for the thing that can destroy them.

The green was there. The storm had hail.

The storm moved southeast. Ruth calculated. She calculated the direction and the speed and the width of the storm's path and she mapped the path onto her land and the mapping told her that the storm would cross Section 8, the section east of Section 12, the section that held 640 acres of spring wheat that was thirty inches tall and in the milk-to-dough stage and that represented three months of work and $80,000 of inputs and the particular investment of hope that every section carried.

She stood on the porch and she watched the storm move toward Section 8 and she could not stop it and she could not divert it and she could not do anything except watch, the watching that was the farmer's lot when the weather turned violent, the watching that was not passive but was agonized, the agony of a person who sees the thing coming and cannot step out of the way.

The storm hit Section 8 at 4:32.

She heard it. She heard the hail hit the wheat. The sound was a roar — not the roar of wind but the roar of impact, the percussive roar of millions of ice stones hitting millions of wheat plants simultaneously, the sound that was like the sound of a freight train but was not a train, was the sound of destruction, the sound of the atmosphere discharging its violence on the ground.

The storm crossed Section 8 in eleven minutes. Eleven minutes. Ruth timed it. She timed it because timing the storm was a form of control, was the one thing she could measure about the thing she could not stop. Eleven minutes. The storm entered the section from the northwest and crossed to the southeast and the crossing was diagonal, and the diagonal meant that not all of Section 8 was hit, that the southwest quarter was spared, that the northwest quarter and the northeast quarter were in the path and the southeast quarter was partially in the path and the southwest quarter was not in the path.

The storm passed. The clouds moved southeast, toward the Missouri breaks, toward the country beyond. The sky behind the storm was clear — the blue that followed storms, the washed blue, the blue that was cleaner and sharper than the blue before the storm, the blue of an atmosphere that had discharged its energy and was now calm, was now empty, was now the peaceful sky that followed the violent sky, the peace that was not apology but was fact, was the fact of a system that had completed its cycle and that was resting before the next cycle.

Ruth drove to Section 8. She drove the pickup. She drove fast, the way you drive when you know what you are going to find and you do not want to see it and you drive fast because driving slow would extend the time between not knowing and knowing and the extension of that time would be torture and the torture would be worse than the knowing.

She reached Section 8. She stopped the truck at the field edge. She got out.

The northeast quarter was destroyed.

The wheat was flat. The wheat that had been thirty inches tall, that had been standing, that had been filling its kernels with starch, that had been three weeks from harvest — the wheat was flat. The hail had beaten it to the ground. The stems were broken, snapped, shattered by the impact of the ice. The heads were torn, the spikelets stripped, the kernels scattered in the mud and the ice that was melting on the ground, the ice that was dissolving into the soil, the hail returning to water, the water that the wheat no longer needed because the wheat was dead.

Not all of it. Not every plant. Some plants were bent but not broken, leaning at angles, the stems kinked but not snapped, the heads damaged but not destroyed. Some plants would recover. Some plants would straighten, would continue filling, would produce a partial yield, the yield of damaged wheat, the yield that would be half or a third of what the yield would have been if the hail had not come.

But the majority was destroyed. Ruth walked into the field. She walked through the devastation. She walked through the flattened wheat and the broken stems and the scattered grain and the melting ice and the mud and she did not cry.

She did not cry because crying was not what you did when hail destroyed a quarter-section. Crying was what you did when a person died. Crying was what you did when the loss was personal, was intimate, was the loss of a thing that had been part of you and that was now gone. The wheat was not part of her. The wheat was a crop. The wheat was the product of seed and soil and work and weather and the product had been destroyed and the destruction was a financial event, a ledger entry, a debit in the accounting of the season.

What you did when hail destroyed a quarter-section was assess.

Ruth assessed. She walked the damaged area. She estimated the acreage — 160 acres of the northeast quarter, fully destroyed. Another 80 acres of the southeast quarter, partially damaged. The remaining 400 acres of Section 8 — the southwest quarter and the western half of the northwest quarter — were untouched, were standing, were still filling, the wheat in these sections unaware that the wheat 200 yards to the east had been beaten to the ground, the unawareness that was the plant's blessing, the inability to anticipate or to grieve that made plants more resilient than people.

She calculated. 160 acres fully destroyed at an expected yield of 38 bushels per acre at a current price of $6.40 per bushel: $38,912 in lost revenue. 80 acres partially damaged, yield reduced by 50 percent: $9,728 in additional loss. Total loss: approximately $48,640.

She did not round. She calculated to the dollar because the dollar was the unit and the unit mattered and the precision of the calculation was the farmer's response to the imprecision of the disaster, the ordering impulse that said: I cannot control what happened but I can count what it cost, I can put a number on the loss, I can convert the destruction into a figure that the insurance adjuster will verify and the insurance company will pay and the payment will be deposited in the account that holds the farm's money and the money will be less than the crop would have earned but will be something, will be the partial compensation that crop insurance provides, the safety net that is not a net but is a cushion, the cushion that softens the fall but does not prevent it.

She pulled out her phone. She called the insurance adjuster. His name was Dale Griswold, the adjuster for Great Plains Crop Insurance, the company that insured the Enger wheat at 75 percent of the expected yield, the 75 percent that was the level Ruth chose because 85 percent was more expensive and 65 percent was not enough and 75 percent was the balance between premium cost and coverage level, the balance that farmers calculated every year in February when the crop insurance decisions were made, the decisions that determined how much of the risk the farmer absorbed and how much the insurance absorbed and the division of risk was itself a bet, a wager on the weather, a gamble that the weather would be kind or that the insurance would be sufficient and that one of the two — kindness or sufficiency — would hold.

"Dale, it's Ruth Enger," she said.

"Ruth," he said. "What happened?"

"Hail. Section 8, northeast quarter. Full loss. Southeast quarter partial."

"When?"

"Thirty minutes ago."

"I'll be out tomorrow morning."

"Thank you."

She hung up. She put the phone in her pocket. She stood in the destroyed field and she looked at the ground. The ground was covered with ice and broken wheat and the mixture was the rubble of the season, the debris of a storm that lasted eleven minutes and that destroyed three months of work and that left behind the particular silence of a field after hail, the silence that was the absence of the sound that standing wheat makes in the wind, the sound that bent and broken wheat cannot make, the sound that was gone.

She bent down. She picked up a head of wheat. The head was broken, the rachis snapped, the spikelets hanging. She held it. She looked at the kernels. The kernels were in the dough stage — soft, white, the starch semi-solid, the filling incomplete. The kernels would have been ready in three weeks. The kernels were three weeks from maturity and the maturity would never come because the plant was dead and the dead plant could not fill the dead kernel and the dead kernel would not become wheat, would not become flour, would not become bread, would become nothing, would decompose in the field, would return to the soil, would become the soil from which the next crop would grow, if there was a next crop, if the land was not sold, if Ruth was still here to plant.

She dropped the head. She stood. She looked north, across the destroyed quarter, to the standing wheat beyond, the wheat that the storm missed, the wheat that was untouched, the wheat that was filling and growing and doing its work three hundred yards from the devastation, the distance between survival and destruction that the storm determined, the random distance, the arbitrary boundary between the path and the not-path.

She walked back to the truck. She drove home. She parked. She went inside. She stood in the kitchen. She stood at the window. She looked at the fields — the fields she could see from the window were not Section 8, were Section 12, were untouched, were standing, were green and tall and filling. Section 8 was to the east, out of sight, the destruction hidden by distance, the damage that she could not see from the kitchen but that she could feel, the way you feel a bruise that is under your clothing, the pain that is present but invisible.

She poured whiskey. She poured it from the bottle on the shelf above the stove, the Evan Williams, the bourbon that Tom drank and that Ruth drank on the occasions that required bourbon, the occasions that were not celebrations but were absorptions, the absorbing of a blow, the taking-in of a loss, the processing of a thing that had happened and that could not be unhappened and that must be metabolized the way the body metabolizes alcohol — slowly, chemically, through the systems that convert the foreign substance into energy and waste, the conversion that takes time and that produces, during the conversion, the particular numbness that is bourbon's gift to the farmer who has just lost a quarter-section to hail.

She sat on the porch. She drank the whiskey. Rust sat beside her. The evening was cool — the storm had pulled the temperature down, had replaced the hundred-degree heat with eighty-degree calm, the calm that followed the violence, the peace that was not peace but was exhaustion, the atmosphere's exhaustion and the farmer's exhaustion and the land's exhaustion, all three spent, all three resting after the event.

She looked at the fields she could see. The standing wheat. The good wheat. The wheat that was untouched and unaware and filling and growing and three weeks from harvest. She looked at the good wheat and she did not think about the destroyed wheat because thinking about the destroyed wheat was not productive, was not useful, was the kind of thinking that led to bitterness and bitterness was a luxury she could not afford, a luxury that the season did not provide, a luxury that farming denied the farmer because the farmer who was bitter about the hailstorm could not tend the unhailed wheat, could not focus on the standing crop, could not do the work that the remaining acreage required.

The loss was in the ledger. The ledger was the record. The ledger contained every loss that farming had inflicted on the Enger place since Arvid broke the first ground in 1938 — every drought, every frost, every hailstorm, every price collapse, every mechanical failure, every death. The ledger was not a physical ledger. The ledger was the accumulated experience of four generations of farming, the experience that Ruth carried in her body and her mind, the experience that said: this has happened before and this will happen again and the happening is not a judgment and is not a punishment and is not a message from the sky. The happening is weather. The happening is the condition of farming. The happening is the cost of doing work that depends on forces larger than the worker.

Tom's death was in the ledger. Tom's death was the largest entry, the most devastating loss, the hailstorm that destroyed not a quarter-section but a life, not a crop but a partner. Tom's death was in the ledger beside the drought of 2012 and the frost of 2017 and the price collapse of 2009 and the combine fire of 2004 and every other loss that the farm had absorbed and survived, and the ledger said: you have absorbed this, you have survived this, you will absorb this too, this hailstorm, this 160 acres, this $48,640, this eleven minutes of ice on wheat.

She finished the whiskey. She did not pour another. One was enough. One was the number that allowed the numbness without producing the excess, the one drink that took the edge off the loss and that left the mind sharp enough to plan the morning, to think about the adjuster's visit, to calculate the insurance payment, to consider the remaining acreage, to do the arithmetic that was the farmer's response to the catastrophe, the arithmetic that converted the emotional event into a financial event and the financial event into a plan and the plan into a future, the future that continued even when the wheat did not.

She went inside. She washed the glass. She put it on the rack. She went to bed.

In the morning she would meet Dale Griswold at Section 8. She would walk the field with him. She would show him the damage. He would take photographs. He would measure the acreage. He would estimate the yield loss. He would write the report. The report would go to Great Plains Crop Insurance. The insurance company would calculate the payment. The payment would come in six weeks.

The payment would not replace the wheat. The payment would replace the money. The money was important. The money was essential. But the money was not the wheat, and the wheat was not the money, and the difference between the two was the thing that David did not understand when he said $4.2 million, the thing that Sarah did not understand when she said she wanted Ruth to keep the land, the thing that Grayson did not understand when he said minimize disruption.

The wheat was not money. The wheat was work. The wheat was the physical product of a physical process performed by a physical woman on a physical piece of ground under a physical sky. The wheat was real in a way that money was not real, was tangible in a way that money was not tangible, was honest in a way that money was not honest.

The hail destroyed the wheat. The hail did not destroy the work. The work was done. The planting was done. The tending was done. The spraying was done. The work stood in the farmer's record even though the wheat did not stand in the field. The work was permanent even though the wheat was temporary. The work was Ruth's even though the wheat was the ground's. And the distinction between the work and the wheat was the thing that the hailstorm taught, the lesson that the season delivered on July 14 in eleven minutes of ice: the work is what matters. The work is what the farmer controls. The work is honest. The wheat is the result of the work and the weather, and the weather is not controlled, and the wheat is therefore not controlled, and the wheat is honest but the wheat is not guaranteed, and the absence of the guarantee is the condition of the work, the condition that the farmer accepts when the farmer plants, the condition that says: do the work and accept the result, do the work and let the season be honest, do the work and the work will be enough, even when the wheat is not.

Ruth closed her eyes. The destroyed wheat lay in the dark, in the field, in the silence that hail leaves behind. The standing wheat stood in the dark, in the other fields, in the continued sound of growth.

The season was honest. The season did not spare. The season did not apologize.

The season continued.