Driving through Iowa
As my husband and I drove through Iowa farm country this week-end to see his mother, I marveled, as always, at how different the land looks from the farm country where I grew up. In Iowa, I always see black earth, rolling hills, and odd-shaped fields, some of the rows even circling around hills. In southern Colorado, I always see pale, dusty earth and rectangular, flat fields with perfectly straight rows stretching far into the horizon.
And then there's the part I always forget until my husband reminds me: Iowa farmers don't irrigate.
It's astounding to me. It's so astounding that I have a hard time getting my mind wrapped around that fact. "So the farmers just plant the seeds and then just stand around waiting for them to grow?" I always ask. "What do farmers in Iowa do all day, anyway?"
My husband, a former Iowa farm boy, just rolls his eyes and give me a mildly dirty look. He knows I know that Iowa farmers have just as much to do as Colorado farmers, but it's hard for me to imagine a life where water just falls out of the sky onto whatever you want to grow.
Where I grew up, farming centered around water—or, rather, the shortage of it. We would periodically get a short phone call with an announcement like, "The water is coming tomorrow at 7:30 a.m." That meant that, for a certain period of time, we were allowed to draw water from the canal about a half a mile from our house. Headgates would be opened, dams set to direct water to certain areas, and siphon tubes set to bring the water over the top of the ditches and into the rows. Then, some hours later, everything would be moved to a different spot. And then again, and again. It was hard work, and we did it all ourselves. (Okay, my dad and brothers did most of it. My sister and I only set siphon tubes. Sometimes. The rule in our house was that women did women's work and men did men's work—unless the men needed some help. Then women could do men's work. Sigh.)
Of course, if the family had something special planned, that was the time we would "get the water." It was frustrating, but it was a farming fact of life. Water was and is a valuable resource.
So my husband always has to forgive my fascination with this subject as I rediscover it on every Iowa trip. As we drive along, I try to imagine what it must have been like on his farm. I try, but the idea of not having to worry about water just isn't something I can grasp. It seems like something from a science fiction to me—impossible but intriguing to think about.






