This essay first appeared on OrionMagazine.org
My dad was a crop duster. I was his flagman.
The plane flew a wide arc through the pale sky above the horizon. It took about a half mile to turn around. He straightened out the wings as he headed back toward the field, the plane wobbling slightly while he found the next rows of corn. Sometimes he put the plane in a slip, which was more like falling sideways than actually flying, until he got it lined up. Then the wings leveled out and he headed straight for me — engine howling, prop whistling, tank filled with 150 gallons of broad-spectrum insecticidal poison, coming my direction at one hundred miles an hour.
My arms were waving over my head, my right hand holding the wooden shaft of a white flag. He hit the button and the spray flew out, fogging the horizon behind him. The mist would undulate and settle on the cornfield like leaves falling on a calm fall day.
As soon as I was sure he had the right rows of corn, I would quickly turn and march off the next fifteen, three-foot-wide rows to be sprayed. Time slowed. Then the roar would pick up again as the plane rose and turned, and a few seconds later, I was once more the target, as if a giant insecticidal bull’s-eye were marked on my fourteen-year-old chest — a scarlet “I.”
Come and get me, Dad. Come and get me.
Back at the airport before we left, he reminded me, “Now, when you see me lined up, get the hell out of the way. Don’t let the spray get on you. It’s poison!” No matter how many times he said it, he always said it loud — Poison! He’d have a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, its crimson point bobbing and dipping as he spoke. Sometimes the words came out garbled until he grabbed the cigarette between two thick fingers and pulled it out. Poison!
Again and again the red-and-white plane would roar toward me, the whistle and the howl and the hissing of the spray combining in a mad furor. At the ends of each wing, the mist whipped into a vortex, dancing and curling before falling onto the green corn leaves. One second before the plane passed the end of the field, Dad would click the spray off, and the hissing immediately stopped. I would hear the insecticide sprinkling down like the lightest of spring showers. Sometimes I would close my eyes and turn my back as the mist settled. Depending on the wind, I could taste it.
Mm dad had a little black book, and at the end of the day we would sit in the pickup and he would jot down the day’s take. He’d keep the cigarette in his mouth as he scribbled, the smoke rising to the top of the cab and working its way out the window. Each entry would start with the farmer’s name and move to the right, something like, “Jim Eagleton, 8/1/1975 . . . 240 acres . . . Malathion . . . $4.50/acre.” Dad would pull out a little calculator and punch it with his stubby fingers before he wrote the last item: “$1,080.00.” It had taken about an hour to spray that farm.
On a good day in a hot, bug-infested summer, we’d work sunup to sunset. In a good season, this might go on for fifteen days straight. One good month and the year’s work was over. Simple, back-of-the-envelope math.
“It’s an ill wind that don’t blow somebody some good,” the farmers would say. They knew that if they didn’t hire my dad, their crop was ruined.
We lived in a new house with a swimming pool. All through school I had new shoes, new clothes. My parents always had new cars. Later, Mom and Dad paid for all three of us kids to go to college, the first generation in our family to do so.
Money bought speed, too. The garage at home often held race cars, stock cars, Harley motorcycles, and racing boats. Dad would say, “If it’s loud and goes fast, I want it.” Even the “family car” went fast. I remember one of them, a red Ford Torino GT with a 428 engine and a black Cobra Jet scoop sticking out of the hood. Dad would pop the car up to a hundred miles an hour on a jaunt out for dinner, and I’d listen to the Cobra Jet whistle as it sucked in air, the unending corn and bean fields of central Illinois blurring past the backseat windows. He said it would go 145, though he never did it with us kids in the car.
Dad had his own airport with three small hangars filled with planes and a couple more staked out on the grass. In addition to the crop-duster, he always had a few other airplanes, sometimes a helicopter or gyrocopter, and often a powered hang glider or two. My granddad also kept a plane at the airport.
I remember one particular plane, a bright red Midget Mustang that Dad called the Red Rocket. It had only one seat, short, stubby wings, and a huge engine. He would take off on the half-mile grass strip, and the very instant the plane took flight, he would point it into a near-vertical ascent. After leveling out, he would circle high for a few moments and then make a long, swooping dive for the airport. The engine would whine in a shrill aerodynamic pitch just like in the war movies. Dad would level out about thirty feet above ground and buzz the airport, Granddad and I staring as he raced by. He flashed us an A-OK sign with his right hand, his thick thumb and middle finger curling into a perfect O, the other fingers straight up, taut and proud.
A moment later, he would land and taxi back up the runway. By the time he got to where we stood, he already had the canopy pulled back and a cigarette clenched between his teeth. Then he’d stop the engine and just sit there looking at us. On one occasion he said, “Two hundred and twenty-two miles an hour. New record.” As the cigarette smoke curled up out of the cockpit, he grinned with a “look at me, ain’t I something” expression. Which he was.
My granddad saw it differently and would say back, “It’s a flying fucking coffin, Sonny. You’re gonna kill yourself!” At which my dad would grin wider. Then he would stand up in the cockpit, pull that cigarette out of his mouth, and flick it ten yards across the thick grass, a wisp of smoke flip-flopping and trailing through the air.
All paid for by poison.
It came in jugs, barrels, cans and bags delivered by all manner of shipping companies. Sometimes the chemical company itself would send a truck by with three pallets. Other times the UPS man would drop off a barrel or thirty jugs packed in six boxes. He unloaded his cargo quickly, an anxious look on his face.
Once we drove fifty miles to a warehouse and picked up a truckload ourselves. As we walked into the plant, the smell of insecticide and herbicide was overwhelming. Near the back of the warehouse sat two hundred pallets of powdered poison. I remember watching the guys load our truck, their hands, arms, shirts, and faces covered with white dust. On the way home my dad said, “Son, don’t ever work in a place like that. Those guys won’t make it to forty. Cancer.” Then he paused, and said a mantra I must have heard at least fifty times. “Don’t do what I do. Get the hell out of here and go to college.” Then another little pause. “Me and your mom will pay for it.”
Dad had a boisterous personality. He was loud and filled with enthusiasm. He never wrung his hands, never gnashed his teeth. He’d talk a little about what he was going to do, and then he’d just goddamn do it. To hell with self-doubt. He could build anything, drive anything, fly anything. And he’d do anything for me. I had a go-kart and a minibike and then later, car after car.
If I even hinted that something wasn’t running right, within an hour or two he made sure it was.
Gary Wockner, PhD, is a scientist and conservationist based in Colorado. Follow him on Twitter, @GaryWockner. Learn more at savethecolorado.org