A city dweller follows the harvest

One hundred years ago, my grandfather left his home in Ohio to follow the Kansas wheat harvest. For restless Amish youth like him, joining a harvest crew promised a jot of adventure and tittle of cash, all within the safety of their known rural world.

To “follow the harvest” sounds implicitly spiritual. It’s as if the land, like Jesus, sets the agenda. It’s as if men with machines are under the thrall of grain—which, of course, they are. From my grandfather’s team with its horse-drawn threshers to custom harvesters today with their half-million-dollar combines, harvest crews begin their patronage in the south and crawl slowly northward as fields ripen. Geography and weather make it clear that the farmer is a disciple of the field, not the other way around.

“Joining a crew” sounds faintly theological too, as we also speak of joining the faith, joining a church, joining ourselves to God. So when writer Marie Mutsuki Mockett joins a crew that follows the harvest, it is fitting that religious themes fill the pages of her memoir. American Harvest is a sprawling story of pilgrimage, spiritual and personal and cultural, and Mockett’s gaze is both penetrating and sweeping. She reports on everything from the religion to the culture to the history to the geology that together form the Great Plains. As my mother would say, she doesn’t miss a thing.