Forty years ago this summer, I was physically as buff and fit as I would ever be. A relatively well-muscled 165 pounds, I spent my days 30 to 50 feet closer to the sun, a confident Icarus with hammer in hand and a couple of galvanized roofing nails hanging like unlit cigarettes from my 18-year-old lips. Nailing asphalt shingles onto the roofs of sturdy pre-Depression, eastern Iowa barns was one of the few ways a young man could make a good income.
It was my final summer before diving into the abyss we like to call higher education. Now here's the part where we get serious, where we talk in hushed tones about why it's important to send our children off to classrooms to study arcane topics taught by puffed-up academics who adamantly insist it all means something.
Higher education was supposed to be our ticket out, the longed-for endgame, the dream of mothers for their errant children. Back then, with a degree in hand, one could fully anticipate a salary adjustment, from $10,000 per year as a roofer to $8,000 per year as a teacher. And for many of us, the biggest advantage of higher education may have been avoiding the job of unloading an M-60 machine gun as a door-gunner in a helicopter.
It's difficult to imagine a time 40 years ago. It would be four years before I owned a car, a 14-year-old Mercedes-Benz diesel with a broken heater and windshield wipers that were simply there for show. My girlfriend's mother gave me a blue and white striped blanket to wrap around my legs in the winter when I drove to visit her daughter. With over 300,000 miles on the engine, I traded for an old Triumph Spitfire. Even in a lifetime of stupid moves, that one ranks near the top.
Summer 2010 has arrived, and the Midwest is a glorious ocean of green thanks to more than enough rain. On sunny days, I'm often piloting a tractor, ears plugged, engaged in that airless inner world one encounters when external sound is blocked. All around me, blue-grey swallows perform amazing aerobatic acts in their quest for the airborne insects my cutter stirs up.
My skull buzzes as I sing tunes from the Beatles' "White album" in full voice while crisscrossing my small fields. "Well you know, we all want to change the world …" and the words cause me to consider a forthcoming high school class reunion. No longer wanting a revolution and no longer wanting to change the world, my contemporaries have shown a great interest in calling a halt to their own development, instead choosing to spend the rest of their time on earth tending to grandchildren. Spare me.
I should be happy about classmates having children and grandchildren. Many never had the chance. Forty years ago, a weasel named Nixon looked down his nose at the rest of us and didn't seem troubled that young men my age who hadn't given up roofing for higher education were dying horrible deaths in the godforsaken jungles of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. I didn't understand war 40 years ago, and I understand it even less now.
Outside my window, the sun is shining on a doe and her new baby fawn nibbling their way across my lawn past the house toward the trees. It's a gentle scene, one to which one should not attach a greater meaning. Much like summer, it simply is what it is, something pleasant to behold and remember, whether 40 years ago or now.
Kurt Ullrich is a writer in Maquoketa, Iowa. His e-mail is whisperhollowfarm@msn.com.