The Rural Life
Death of a Farmer
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By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: September 14, 2006
My dad called the other night to tell me that my cousin Myron had died of a heart attack. I was in upstate New York, my dad was in the San Joaquin Valley, and Myron was at the Clay County Fair in Spencer, Iowa, when he collapsed and died. He had turned 61 in August. I last saw Myron a little more than a year ago. My uncle’s steers had broken down a section of fence, and we all went out into the night to herd them back in and fix the spot where they escaped.
Myron has been seven years ahead of me all my life, which means he always seemed like one of the grown-ups. It felt the same way that night. I was the visiting town kid. Myron was helping. I was conscious of helping. There’s a world of difference between those two things.
I seem, to my own surprise now this late in life, to have grown up in a world full of men I admired without quite knowing how to admire them. They lived near the home farm in northwest Iowa, and we lived in a small town a hundred miles away. What we had in common was that home farm, where I spent parts of several summers, and the Sunday and holiday dinners that my grandparents hosted, where the common language was pinochle.
I thought at the time that Myron was shy and untalkative — a tall young man with a big smile and a red face, clearly a part of the grown-up world. He ran the corn-sheller, after all, the most dangerous piece of machinery I had ever seen. But what does any 18-year-old have to say to an 11-year-old, especially when one has grown up farming and the other has grown up reading books?
I thought of this when I stood at the edge of a bean-field talking to Myron and his younger brothers a couple of years ago. We were talking about genetically modified crops — they were growing all around us. As the conversation came to an end, Myron invited me to come out for bean-picking one autumn and run the combine. He guessed how that would impress someone who is still, essentially, a town kid. And of course I wish I had taken him up on it.
But there’s something I wish even more. It turned out that Myron was not the least bit untalkative. The night we rounded up the steers I had already listened — more than happily — to an evening-long monologue of his that was about nothing but was also about all the kinships of land and family and commerce in the country around us. One name led to another, one place to another, in the present and the past. The real measure of how empty the countryside is depends on who is doing the telling. To hear Myron tell it, we were having cake and coffee in the midst of a richly peopled land. I have been looking forward to hearing the rest of the story ever since.
