"What am I willing to do?"After leaving Saturday's game my wife and I headed to a gun show over on the city's west side, where we ran into the guy who taught my CCW class. In addition to being a firearms instructor, a retired (but still commissioned) law-enforcement officer, a local elected official and a proponent of preserving primitive skills, he's also something of a gentleman farmer.
It's mid-September, time for him to harvest his pumpkins. He offered me a job picking the seasonal crop. I accepted.I showed up at the farm early yesterday morning, accompanied by my unemployed 18-year-old. The first field we were instructed to work was overgrown with thistles -- I'm talkin' eight feet tall, their downy seeds filling the air like snow.
We were left on our own to clear ten-foot-wide paths that'd be bush-hogged and harvested later. It took us nearly two hours to fight through the tangle to the opposite side of the field, 150 yards away. Our boss returned with another picker just as we made the turn to cut another swath.
Together the four of us cut two more paths over the next hour. We then hitched a hay-wagon to a pickup truck and followed it back and forth across the field, heaving the orange orbs onto the wagon.
Once loaded, truck and wagon began their slow journey to a local roadside stand. The spawn and I drove on ahead to unload another wagon that had been delivered the day before, finishing about the time that the morning's picking arrived. And after that wagon was empty, we set about unloading a trailer stacked with the biggest pumpkins that are practical to sell, some requiring two of us to move.
My watch read 1:30pm when our crew broke for an hour. The spawn and I picked up his younger brother at school, dropped him at home and went back to the fields, where we loaded yet another wagon.
The day's final hours saw us picking a planting of smallish pumpkins, round ones ranging from grapefruit- to cantaloupe-sized, and tossing them into the bed of a pickup. Field's end coincided with full truck, which by that time held around 2,500 pumpkins.
The boy and I boarded my TrailBlazer as the sun dipped toward the tops of the trees. We fell in behind our boss on his old John Deere and followed him across field and wood, past his shooting range and finally to his well-kept homestead. The three of us chatted in the driveway for several minutes before saying our goodbyes.
The 18-year-old is back in the fields today. I'm not.
Yesterday I pushed myself to, through and well past my physical limits. My slow recovery now isn't a matter of age -- hell, two of my fellow punkin-pickers are 65+. I dressed for the day's oppressive heat and kept myself well-hydrated. I bonked anyway, big-time.
There's no labor so honest as farming, working close to the land. I'm no farmer, though, nor am I the 16-year-old who slogged through football drills on late-summer mornings, went straight from the practice field to the hayfield to help with baling, and was back in pads by 4pm for the second two-a-day.
Willing though I may be, as hard as I'm able to work around my own yard and house, compared to men who have been doing this kind of labor all of their lives it seems that I've gone soft.
I'm not resigned to decline, however. Whether or not I can reverse my physical slide remains to be seen, but I'm committed to forestalling it at the very least.
Addendum: Gameday notes
A strange scene unfolded during Saturday's pre-game in The 'Shoe, directly below where my wife and I stood and cheered.
OSU's mascot, Brutus, was leading the #2 Buckeyes onto the field before the National Anthem when OhioU's mascot, Rufus, crashed tradition, tackled the unsuspecting Brutus (twice) and punched him repeatedly.This wasn't the play-acting typical of sports mascots -- the 19-year-old raging psycho-dumbass in the Bobcat getup admits to having planned the stunt for over a year.
"It was the whole reason I tried out," he told the campus newspaper.
It's tempting, naturally, for self-righteous Ohio State fans to shout, "Disrespect!" and make this some sort of OSU-OhioU thing. That'd be wrong, of course.
Confusing disrespectful with stupid, I mean.
