Walking Beans

I don’t really miss walking beans.  I miss the money, I guess, the cash that I probably spent on Spider Man comic books, but walking beans?  Walking beans was hard. 

Unless you live near an organic farm, you most likely don’t see people walk beans anymore.  Some of you might not even know what walking beans is, but many years ago, before the advent of Roundup Ready seed, soybean fields were full of weeds, and about the best way to get rid of them was to grab a weed hook, walk the rows, and then kill them one by one.

            The first thing to know about walking beans is that it was good to start before the sun got too hot. This can be hard to do in July, though, and especially hard to do when your crew consisted of sleepy children and teenage boys.  Still, my dad tried.  He would have the thermoses full of ice water.  He would have the weed hooks sharpened and laid out across the bed of the pick-up truck like spears.  We would meet out back by the shed at dawn, choose our weapons, pile into the trucks, and begin the day’s march. 

We often walked beans down in the river bottoms.  Here the Kaskaskia, its banks hidden a half mile behind us to the north, snaked its way to the Mississippi in a jittery, south-west crawl. Around us on all sides stood the three shades of green of my childhood:  tree-line, soybean, corn.

Back then soybeans were planted in thirty inch rows, twice the width of today, making a suitable path for a boy to walk down with a weed hook slung across his shoulders like the weapon it was.  Usually weeds could be cut up at an angle with the hooked edge of the blade. Thicker stalks made a satisfying “thwok” before lurching to the ground.  Smaller weeds often needed stabbed to death with the straight-edge top of the tool.  Some weeds could even be pulled up by their roots and tossed toward the brother or cousin in front of you, dirt clods exploding off of it like tiny bombs.

Despite this violence, though, I don’t truly miss it.  I miss the water breaks, I guess, and the miracle of how cold water on a hot day can make you feel truly alive.  Regardless, I can’t say I would volunteer to do it again.

To help us, my dad often hired some of our neighbors, fascinating young men in their late teens who lived in a haunted farmhouse down the road.  These boys shot each other with B-B guns for sport; they drank, smoked and cussed.  They also lived with their girlfriends and a newborn baby that was treated like a last-minute birthday doll.  When dad asked them how they would spend their bean-walking wages—a few hundred dollars, probably—they quickly told him about a new video game called Super Mario Bros.  Mario, they explained, was the plumber-hero from Donkey Kong.  Dad suggested they spend their money on more sensible things, like baby food, but I think he eventually gave up.

Bean-walking was a hot, wet job.  Despite the heat, you had to wear long pants because the leaves scratched, but then the dew soaked through your jeans.  By mid-morning things below the belt were pretty rough, a bad combination of water and sweat.  If you were lucky maybe you stopped for the day around noon, sometimes later if it wasn’t too hot.

The first hour, though, despite the dew, could be rewarding.  Once the sleep had been walked off and you had conquered a whole long row, once you had accomplished something of market value, once you had rescued thousands of beans, but before the sun had really warmed things up too much, bean walking, then, I guess, could be OK. 

Still, I can’t say I actually miss this part of growing up.

I do miss riding in the back of the pick-up truck, I suppose, down the hill past grandpa’s house to the creek bottom, down the road toward the river.  I miss working with my brother and my dad on something simple, tangible and profound.

I miss being very, very young and the feeling that comes with being very young, when the future is opened so big and broad it feels like you’re standing on the edge of a sun-soaked prairie.

But I don’t think I would really want to walk beans again.

Sometimes, though, when I watch my own kids play their video games, and I tell them to go outside and they look at me like I’m crazy?

Sometimes I do wish they had beans to walk.