Following the harvest
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
In 1976, Fred R. Harris, former U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, made a quixotic run after the Democratic nomination for president. His liberal campaign, emphasizing redistribution of wealth, failed to ignite, as memories of George McGovern's landslide loss in 1972 were fresh. Still, Harris' grassroots campaign was appealing as he traveled the country in an RV staying nights in the homes of his supporters.
People at the time may not have realized how comfortable Harris was with that rambling sort of life. They didn't know he had spent his teenage years as a custom harvester traveling the plains from Oklahoma to North Dakota. Now we know, by virtue of Harris' book, "Following the Harvest," published by University of Oklahoma Press. It's a novel that draws heavily on autobiographical memory. Harris explains his hometown was Walters, in southwest Oklahoma, and for nine summers he followed the harvest from there to Rhame, in southwest North Dakota.
This gets my attention for several reasons. First, it hits me where I live. I'm a native of Kansas, the leading custom harvesting state in the country, and wrote my first book about the history of custom combining. Second, I have fond feelings for southwest Oklahoma, the country of the Kiowa and Comanche. (Harris was formerly married to a Comanche woman, and the teenage main character in his book has a Comanche girlfriend.) Third, I also have fond feelings for southwest North Dakota, and Rhame in particular. It was a sad day in my life when Hunter's Table and Tavern, Rhame's wonderful watering hole for harvesters, hunters, and all manner of travelers, burned down. Come to think of it, as I recall, it was a Kansas harvesting woman, Marj Diebert, who first told me about the Table and Tavern.
Harris' novel, as you might expect, is a coming-of-age story. His fictional alter-ego, Will Harris, is the driver of a Fordson tractor pulling a Gleaner-Baldwin combine. He and his father and cousins are joined up with a neighbor who also has a combine. Their harvesting itinerary takes them from Walters to Dimmitt, Texas, in the Panhandle; thence to Boise City, in the Oklahoma Panhandle; to Limon, Colo.; thence to Kimball, in the Nebraska Panhandle; and then on up to Rhame.
Along the way there are side trips to Cheyenne and Rapid City. Harris does justice to the Great Plains landscape, describing the travels of the outfit with a keen eye and an appreciative attitude. He also creates vivid characters — a worthless cousin, a solid-top hand, a Jacy Farrow-like girl back home, and a father with a weakness for the bottle. Some of the characters do seem a little stereotypical. I mean, if the story is about the early days of custom harvesting, then of course you have to have a drunk in the outfit.
Some of the turns in the plot you can see coming from as far away as a country elevator on the high plains. The story — involving various love interests, considerable highway travel, and yes, a little bit of wheat cutting — is comfortable, not compelling. The romantic interests of the crew are, I would say, a little more tangled than those of the typical outfit.
The one thing not credible in the book is the inner life of the main character, Will Haley. Young Will, although plagued by teenage insecurities, spends a lot of time thinking about his family responsibilities. He also is liberal in social and environmental matters; at one point he becomes the apt pupil of a Lakota medicine man who seems to be intent on telling Will what his platform should be if he ever were to run for high office. It would be easy to say that young Will is, in fact, young Fred. It would be more accurate to say young Will is the young Fred that Harris imagines himself to have been.
Harris now is a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. His political papers are in the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma. His fantasy life, though, is out there on the amber plains.
