WEEK
34
Blown Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August)

His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.
—William Shakespeare

The threshed wheat and chaff half-filled an eighteen-gallon plastic bucket. But how much of that was wheat? When I ran my hands through it, it seemed to be nearly all light, fluffy chaff. A couple of weeks went by before I had a chance to find out, when I awoke one morning, not to the call of my conscientious wheat-eater bird, but to the welcome sound of wind rustling in the leaves. A cold front had moved in, bringing dry air and a stiff breeze. It was a perfect day to winnow.

Anne (lucky for her) was working, but Katie was free until the afternoon.

“I have a deal for you,” I said as she stumbled downstairs mid-morning. “I’m going to give you a chance to do something that I guarantee no other kids in this town—maybe the county, even the state!—have ever done.”

Katie knew a rat when she smelled it.

“Does this involve wheat?” She had seen how tired Anne and I were after threshing.

“It’ll be fun. Trust me.” For once, I was right.

Winnowing wheat—another chore taken care of by the combine right in the field as it cuts and threshes — is traditionally done by tossing the wheat and chaff into the air with a pitchfork. In even a light breeze, the chaff drifts off with the wind, while the denser kernels fall to the ground.

With the stiff breeze at hand, this looked to be a snap. Katie and I spread out the tarp, stood near the center with our backs to the wind, dipped our cupped hands into the bucket, and tossed the grain into the air like a couple of referees throwing a jump ball.

At that precise moment, the wind reversed 180 degrees and blew the chaff back into our faces. The wind was both erratic and shift ing. When it did strike, though, we quickly tossed handfuls of wheat into the air, marveling as the chaff drifted away. Soon we had gone through the bucket. What fell back onto the tarp was cleaner, but still half-chaff. We broke for lunch.

“This isn’t looking good,” I said over a sandwich.

“We’ll get there eventually, Dad,” Katie chirped, always the optimist.

“That’s not what I mean. I think that bucket is all chaff. We’ll be lucky to get a loaf of bread out of this.”

Katie plucked a few grains of wheat out of her hair and handed them to me, a touching gesture. Truly we had nothing to spare.

After lunch, we continued winnowing, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, as we continued to go through the shrinking pile again and again, each time decreasing the proportion of chaff in the wheat, a small hill of golden grain started to rise on the tarp, covering Katie’s bare feet and reaching to her ankle bracelet.

She giggled. “Dad, we’re making wheat! I’ll bet we’ve got enough for a dozen croissants right here!”

By the time Katie hopped on her bike and headed to her lifeguard job at the town pool, the bucket was mostly clean wheat. Winnowing the last 10 percent, however, threatened to be 90 percent of the work, given the erratic winds. The remaining work was lonely and frustrating without Katie. If I tossed modestly, too much chaff returned to the ground. If I tossed higher, a sudden gust often carried some of the precious grain away with the chaff. Then I had a brainstorm. If chaff is that light, it should float in water, no? Wheat kernels, on the other hand, would sink. Couldn’t I take advantage of this to quickly do the final cleaning? All I had to do was run some water into the bucket of wheat, skim off the chaff, and spread the remaining grain out on the tarp to dry.

Just to be sure, I did an Internet search with the terms “wheat winnow water” and found myself reading the abstract of an article from a scholarly journal. It seemed I wasn’t the first to hit upon the idea. Gorillas in the wild have long been observed separating wheat from chaff by crushing it in their hands, then blowing the chaff away—exactly the same method of threshing and winnowing that the farmer Erle Zuill had demonstrated. What was exciting in this article, however, was that the author had found a family of gorillas who’d learned a new, more efficient method: dipping a handful of wheat and chaff in a stream and letting the chaff float away.

Wow—my idea had been validated by apes! Still, I couldn’t find any mention on the Internet of humans actually cleaning wheat this way, so before proceeding, I sent off an e-mail to Mike Dooley at the mill. A beep on my laptop signaled his reply a few minutes later.

Point taken. Mike suggested I use an electric fan instead to free me from the vagaries of the temperamental wind. I figured that another few hours on the tarp in front of the fan would get the job done.

Except that when I finally got around to doing the last of the winnowing, I discovered that many of what looked like clean wheat berries were, on closer examination, still encased in a thin membrane of husk. It took another full day of rubbing the wheat on an old window screen, a handful at a time, to remove these stubborn husks, leaving my hands raw for days afterward. In the end, though, I had wheat.

From my small planting, I’d harvested twenty pounds of beautiful golden wheat! Yet it wasn’t the amount I’d grown that moved me; it was something less tangible. Nothing I had ever grown in the garden—not corn, tomatoes, leeks, or roses—had given me as much of a sense of accomplishment as growing wheat. I suspected I had tapped into some genomic key, connecting with my agricultural ancestors on the Russian steppe some two, five, even ten thousand years ago.

I’d reestablished a connection I hadn’t known I’d missed. Misty-eyed, I felt as if I’d just done something very important, but I couldn’t quite say what or why. I suddenly wanted to know more about my ancestors—that is, my father’s ancestors, those Russian peasants and coal miners and priests—who had survived centuries of harsh nature and harsher rulers. I thought about how locally grown, milled, and baked bread was almost certainly the only thing standing between life and death for my great-great-grandfather. That wasn’t so long ago, just four generations.

Yielding to a sudden urge, I went out to the garden and, using a hoe, started turning the stubby remains of the wheat back into the soil, giving it a proper burial. As I settled into my to-and-fro rhythm, replicating the survival strategies of my ancestors, I found myself again thinking about why I’d been drawn to bread, to wheat. Was I satisfying some biological or emotional imperative, witnessing the resurfacing of a suppressed primitive urge?

Drifting off to sleep that night, in a state between wakefulness and unconsciousness, I had a kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey experience, feeling myself racing backward through the centuries, seeing my ancestors living in cities, then, moving back in time, in villages, huts, and caves, all the while growing rye and wheat, planting and harvesting, threshing and winnowing. Growing and harvesting wheat had connected me to the ages, triggering an unexpected awakening. And I hadn’t even ground it into flour yet.