Some guys go to the beach. Some guys go camping in the mountains. I just keep on spraying.” Jeff Hanson was talking to himself as he walked out to the dugout to load the sprayer at 4:30 in the morning. Ever since the Hansons finished seeding, anytime it wasn’t windy, Jeff or the Hansons’ employee Mark were either in the sprayer or standing beside the dugout or the water truck loading the sprayer.
“We should paint a beach mural on the side of the water tank,” Mark had suggested. “We could pretend we’re on vacation.”
On the Hanson farm, 2022 was the worst of both worlds when it came to crop protection, and the sprayer was definitely the most-used machine on the farm. Rainy weather encouraged crop disease to the point where they needed to use fungicides. But grasshoppers, usually scarce in wet weather, were still thriving after last year’s dry weather.
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“It wouldn’t be so bad if we were starting to see some progress,” Jeff said. “But every time I spray I see more of the damn things. When you look down from the cab you can see them down there, jumping around.”
They could spray the fields for grasshoppers, but there wasn’t much they could do about the yard.
“I give up,” Elaine had announced one hot afternoon in late June after she’d stomped from the garden to the back of the yard where Jeff and their 12-year-old son Connor were washing Elaine’s SUV. “These grasshoppers are eating everything. The marigolds I planted by the house. The sunflowers out by the yard sign. And now they’ve invaded the garden. They’ve eaten holes in all of the beet and corn leaves. And look at this,” she said, holding up a spindly green stalk. “They stripped every single leaf off this zucchini plant. I’m not spending hours out there weeding and sweating all summer just to feed a bunch of bugs.”
As if she’d been listening, Flora the German shepherd found a grasshopper in the weeds. She lunged down at it, bit, then spit it back out.
“Grasshoppers are jerks,” Jeff had said. “But are you sure you’re ready to give up on the garden?” Elaine loved eating food she grew herself.
“There’s nothing left of the spinach,” Elaine said. “Unless you can make a scarecrow that works on grasshoppers, there’s no hope.”
“Okay. But we’d better keep the weeds down so you have a fighting chance next year,” Jeff said.
“Can I mow it?” Connor asked eagerly. Connor hated everything about the garden, from weeding to eating spinach.
“You might as well,” Elaine said.
“You can rototill it,” Jeff said to Connor. “That will help keep the grass and weeds out so we can have fresh spinach next year.”
“Alright,” Elaine said. But from the look on her face, Jeff wasn’t sure his wife would be ready to fight the bugs again for a while.
Jeff and Elaine weren’t the only Hansons facing a summer disappointment, but Jeff’s parents’ trouble wasn’t related to grasshoppers. When Jeff’s sister Trina had her first baby in Germany in the spring, Jeff’s parents had decided to visit in the summer. But when it came time to book the trip Dale was reluctant. “Jeff’s going to need me here,” he’d said. But Donna was relentless. “Trina’s your only daughter,” she said. “We spend almost every day with Jeff’s kids. We have to make time for this new one too.”
But then Donna had started seeing travel news in her Facebook feed. What if she dragged Dale off the farm only to wind up stuck in Toronto for days, waiting for delayed flights? They were guaranteed to spend hours in security lines, and the odds of actually getting to Germany in July seemed low, especially with their luggage.
“I should quit using Facebook,” Donna mumbled to herself, browsing through her feed.
Donna finally gave up on a summer trip and they resorted to getting to know their granddaughter over Skype.
“I can’t tell one baby from another anyway,” Dale told the guys on coffee row on Tuesday morning. Everyone there, including Dale, knew he’d never have the nerve to say that anywhere near Donna.
Since he was home, Dale took his turn on the sprayer along with Jeff and Mark. But it was Jeff in the cab on the day in mid-July when he got a text from his friend Greg.
“It’s grim here,” the text said. “No rain on our farm since April. I can’t watch these crops for another day. Meet in Saskatoon for the farm show?”
“As if I could,” Jeff muttered to himself. He put his phone back in his pocket, then pulled on his respirator and gloves and climbed down from the cab to fix a plugged nozzle.
Jeff knew Greg had been having financial trouble even before this year, the second dry year in a row in southwest Saskatchewan. It would be nice to see him, Jeff thought. Elaine and Greg’s wife were good friends, and the two couples had kids about the same age that got along well together.
“With Dad home all month, maybe we could get away for a couple days?” Jeff said to Elaine when he parked the sprayer and went home after dark.
“It’s not like I have any weeding to do,” Elaine said. “And the kids don’t have swimming lessons this week.” She went through the rest of the list in her head. The farm accounts were up to date. The ag board she was on didn’t have any summer meetings planned. A lot of people she’d met through her board work would be at the farm show, either as farmers or employees working booths. Finally she grinned at Jeff. “How often do we get a tax-deductible holiday? And we have enough travel points on our credit card to cover a hotel with a waterslide.”
For Jeff, Elaine and the kids, this was the best decision of the summer. Jeff caught up with a group of his friends from university. Elaine finally met up in person with people she’d only gotten to know online in meetings during COVID. The four kids were thrilled to have waterslide races at the hotel pool.
On their last night in the city, Elaine and Greg’s wife went shopping while Jeff and Greg took the kids to the new Tom Cruise movie.
“I’ve got as many controls and monitors in the cab of my sprayer as those guys do in their fighter jets,” Jeff said.
“They should make a movie like that about farming,” Greg said. “It’s just as exciting.”
“We need more special effects,” Jeff said.
The exhausted kids were asleep within minutes after everyone got back to the hotel. “This was a good idea,” Elaine said to Jeff as she got ready for bed. “I’m glad we got away from everything for a few days.”
Then she shrieked, waking the kids and scaring Jeff.
“What? What is it?” he asked.
She pointed at the bedspread. And there it was. Right in the middle of the bed on the white duvet. A grasshopper.
Jeff shook his head. “I guess we can’t get away from everything.”
