A Beautiful Film On The People Of Kansas

out in western Kansas this feeling still lingers [Music] this is a land of bare essentials inhabited by Four Seasons in the wind under an infinite sky and by little else it is possible here to make a complete circle with your eye and see but one house or one person or nothing at all it is possible to go for days in silence what it is not possible to do here is to live without examining the meaning of your existence almost nothing stands between this man and the relentless winds that blow down upon his home all year long certainly no trees have ever grown here of their own free will for eight years rocky strema has been planting trees the living shelter belt against the wind protection for his family his crops his livestock [Music] there's a reason why this country isn't full of people mostly it's the wind wind is nice a breeze it's nice but when I'm talking of when I'm talking 40 50 mile-an-hour stuff where you can't hardly stand in it in fact it gets so bad here in the wind that I am utterly amazed that there is any animals left live cows horses anything I am utterly amazed that anything is left locked but when the winds are blowing and it's so miserable away from a tree that you you can't hardly stand being out and that you'll walk 50 feet and get behind a shelter belt and the wind's calm and pheasant tracks up and down it and bunny tracks then you remember all the times you sweat it and pull the weeds that it was worth it in it it is serving its purpose 20,000 trees planted watered and cared for by hand where does a person find the patience and the strength to do something like this sometimes I get to thinking we've got such good beautiful buffalo grass but sometimes I get to thinking that that is just what God put there until you could do something else with it he has instructed his people to occupy and to produce and so I guess what I'm doing out here is is taming the ground making this land something so it isn't just a windswept semi-arid rough country rocky and Shonda scrambled beheld in this wilderness a home I used to drive right through this pasture on my way to check cattle so as we were looking we came to this place and we decided this is where our house would be so we took an old laughs and drove it in the ground and hung an old sock or something on it for a flag and we prayed over it and asked God to bless it and there was nothing here but an occasional gopher or a lizard running through the yucca plants but now it's a farmstead now it's a it's a heart before you guys came the only people out here was Shonda and I there are no people I can go for weeks on the roads and between the cattle out here weeks and I may never see a soul so that and you need a friend you need somebody to talk to and that's sometimes it's all we have also we work together a lot I go through Aki and helping with the fireman and we build fins together and check cattle together and and it's so nice to be with somebody that you're friend with you know what I mean there are times when you need to just go and have someone else to tell your troubles to I've just long for some company [Applause] [Music] since your wife or your husband is the only one you see they get everything all your good all your trash everything sometimes it's just too much [Music] to this church that shonda's grandfather helped build families from 50 miles around come every Sunday for the companionship which they all crave and to join their voices and hopes together in prayer hallelujah we exercise patience for a few days and then it begin to rain and we thank your father again that you've caused it to rain we thank you for the abundance of rain you've just again showing yourself strong on behalf of those who will trust you I know when I go to town it's I talk all the time because you know I'm trying to make up for two weeks it seems like the best part of churches after church is when we get doll talk and say how our weeks gone and discuss all our agriculture needs and things that were real close the flame of Fellowship burns warmly but briefly for Rocky and Shonda when it's time to say goodbye and drive the long road home they must take as much of this good feeling with them as they can it'll have to last them oh we [Music] when you consider who you're related to beyond your immediate family you probably think about your culture that unique combination of people in place you'll always feel it home with no matter how far you travel like the way the people at this dance feel about one another having a culture is being able to just look at certain people and know what they've been up against and what they hold dear in life because they're your people you understand them I don't mind photographer Terry Evans loves her Prairie culture she's known throughout the state for her images of this land and its people today she takes her camera into the heart of a prairie family at a gathering at the home of marinelle Reece Terry looks beyond the present she can see a stream of history that flowed into this family from one of the great traditions of the plains strong women who met life head-on whose hands held rifles and plows who baked bread and nursed babies a tradition of women who helped build a civilization coming from this tradition it isn't surprising that the four daughters of marinelle Rees have distinguished themselves in the fields of law the arts business and medicine they've inherited the social consciousness and self knowledge of their Prairie ancestors the Prairie gets to you I love the Prairie and I grew up in the far western part of the state where it's all sky and prairie but you have a sense of both roots and vision and I think that those two things mean a lot to me and I wanted to be sure that my girls or had they been boys boys and girls my children had roots and a love for what they came from because that meant a lot to me and it had influenced my life the neighbors I knew the Prairie I grew up on the ancestry I had and I wanted to be sure that but I didn't want them to limit their horizons I'm hoping that some of this will come through this kind of I don't know it's like this this kind of wholeness that in your in your family that you reflect perhaps a hundred years from now in a Kansas we can only imagine a young woman will look into this portrait of marinelle Reece and her daughter's seeking inspiration from her own past a little bit but more kind of circle around your mom let me see how it looks with your hand the environment of Kansas tends to support visions I think it's a visionary state that we're not often thought of it's that way but you can't see beyond your bars and that plus the wide spaces the open sky the tendency to dream to look ahead it's had an effect I think on lots of Kansans I think deafness had an effect on me and probably through that to my own daughters Kansas has always produced strong visionary women who could see beyond their borders think about a little girl from Atchison named Amelia Earhart who followed her vision and became one of America's greatest pioneering aviators even today 50 years after she vanished somewhere over the South Pacific the memory of Amelia still has the power to inspire dreams in it was dreams of flight that transformed Wichita Kansas from a cow town into one of the Centers of the aviation industry today 60% of the world's general aviation aircraft roll out of the hangers at Cessna Boeing Lear and beech corporations that quest for flight took man to places he'd never been before and [Music] showed him his old familiar home in a brand-new way to fly over the ground and see all of this natural graphic imagery that the people who work the land have carved out of the ground without even realizing the aesthetic appeal or aesthetic value of it but here on a 20 acre field a young Kansas artist has etched a different sort of image the product of his own monumental vision Stan Hurd discovered that paint on canvas just wasn't enough to express his personal experience of the Prairie I have always had a sense I think as a young man on a tractor of the feeling of what it might look like from the air the fact that I was on the earth and that the birds flying over would look down and see me and see this you know this strip of land I'm laying and if I shagged out and fell asleep at the tractor you know how visible it would be or the jet airplanes flying over what they might look and see stan has the eye of a painter and the soul of a farmer his tractor is his brush his colors the delicate hues of prairie grasses your average artist steps back a few feet to view his work but when your canvas is a half-mile-wide you need a bit more distance when I did the first field work I got the feeling that a lot of people considered it on the level of trying to get 15 people into a phone booth you know this was another Guinness Book of World Records giant fantastic thing and and and it was it was a very serious thing for me it was a very serious art form one of the revelations was my feelings on the immensity of a field and the size of a state in the size of the globe and I would work and work on these 160 acre 1/2 mile by half mile portraits and then fly over at 10,000 feet and it was a spot it was like somebody dropped a postage stamp on the floor and realizing you know just how small we are like many artists standard has patrons but his aren't the fashionable types that stand around at cocktail parties they're people of the earth farmers like Butch and junior nice who helped stand out because they really do understand this unusual young man he's one of their own their minds are open to the meaning of his art I've used their equipment I've used their fuel I've used their labor I've taken up their time it's kind of hard for me to keep coming back to these folks and asking them you know let's grow another season I mean this 20 acres here would be tall and soybeans in about two weeks if it wasn't for this project so it's taking money out of their pocket in a sense butch and jr. know it takes a real Prairie man to even think of something like this let alone to do it at this point it will be impossible probably to keep me off the ground in some sense I don't believe that I can stop it if I wanted to what I have done will change the face of this little patch of planet probably for many many many years [Music] you know there's a message in Kansas that speaks quietly to our space age is that we humans we're still very much a part of the earth and the earth is still the mother we return to at the end of all our travels always there has been a part of our earth that's been in the custody of families who've lived close to the seeds they planted and reaped who passed on the knowledge of a lifetime to their children but fewer and fewer people are able to live that way now that ancient system of stewardship the family farm is passing out of existence Tom Geisel is exhausted he and his brother Jay have worked into the dawn trying to get their hay off the wet ground they're getting just a bit nervous because if this hay doesn't get raked pretty soon it could rot and there'd go months of work you know we go out and we're going all night there's a tremendous physical burden that's part of what makes a little more difficult with a situation where it is and with agriculture today you have to push yourself to the absolute limits physically mentally emotionally you cannot make the wrong turn you can't plant the wrong direction you can't sell the wrong bay you do any one of these things wrong any little thing wrong you're out well let's take a look at that afraid I know what's gonna be well that's all for Agee it takes such a long time to learn to be a farmer and not much time at all to lose a farm what do you think tell you what why don't we try to get a little bit of sleep there is no doubt that we have went farther than just teetering with the idea of losing a generation of farmers I can think of a half some of my friends that I went school with better out this year alone and that is an extremely serious problem family farming isn't just an occupation it's a calling a commitment to live your life a certain way that's how it is inside the family farm home to no separation between life and work Tom's ready for some well-earned rest but his wife Cheryl's day is just beginning how's my kids today forget a bale last night tried to do a little raking this morning we just finally gave up well it's sort of like having two marriages one to your husband and the commitment that's involved there and went to the farm are you gonna be here for dinner because there's just certain times of the year that's a farm and it's demands are gonna come first you know I should have known when we tried to set our wedding date that there might have been some question here just about what came first and when because we kept moving our wedding date we had to wait till the wheat was planted and we had to wait till the Milo was in and we had to you know it just kept pushing it off here and I'm going now are we getting married or what diesel are you going to Tom what happened krempe bearing on the swather I was not raised on the farm don't look like that looks like I should look like anyway yeah I know it's been a learning experience but it was something I had no idea I was getting into I thought I was marrying a rich farmer too that was another misconception you have to feel for a young farm family there's so much to think about so many dangers and pitfalls and you never know what's around the corner oh good he's been laying pretty heavy for me today Arthur sale has been around the block many times and there isn't much that worries him he's seen the worst this kind of life can dish out and he's lived long enough to enjoy the best of it you know there began to talk a lead a bit about hard time and I said a lot of times if there's going to get terrible hard times I hope it's now some of us old boys are alive yet that went through the depression I think I think it needs some of it's around because you know reading something that don't that's not good at having somebody to tell yes this old man's been through things most of us can't imagine he remembers the 1930s in the days of the Dust Bowl six years of drought and despair six years of no crop no money and almost no hope he just looked like a cloud you know my training it was just it was black it was solid dirt a person to be outside you know and and see a cloud coming like that why he just knew you know it'd just be a little bit until a thing got here good lands a living and naturally everybody towards the house it really was terrible just you know just blow all the topsoil off and a guy kind of bringing a new wife out from Wisconsin that made it worse yeah well I wasn't thinking of anything I loved him and I was glad to come but when I got here this is where I live now this is my home was I foolish to come out here in these wide open spaces I lived in the Hills it was an entirely different country and you just adjusted to it Arthur lived here all of his life didn't know anything else he said stick it out and with him you've got to be proud of the place where you live and I suppose one thing I thought all the time it might be one reason that I'm as optimistic as I am about everything is because she is pessimist that's a suit and not hold up hold up the word farmer is a masculine sounding noun in the singular but really a farmer has always been two people a man and a woman partners in the labor of bringing food out of the earth together for better and for worse throughout the cycles of life not too long ago a family lived on this farm and this now empty house was filled with the sound of their voices but now they and thousands like them are gone from here swallowed up somewhere in America now the fields of this farm are for rent Tom and Cheryl are thinking about taking them on really building some pretty good shape yet you can tell they were taken care of yeah and you got some usable stuff to here with the barn what to do yes stick with what you've got or do you take yet another risk it's a big decision and like Geisel says you make that one wrong move and you've had it it's this quarter and that a deer out west of it I don't know honey you guys are putting up so much hay now that's quite a commitment well as close as this is to home I think your life will be turn out some other things so it it'll work out I really do I think to be a farmer today you've got to watch where you spend your money and what for that that's that's my opinion well I know that's the way that I made a go of it well I'm 78 years old you're here in all times my that old boy lived a good long life and one thing another but I just I just hope that I could just keep on few more years than I exactly the way that i'ma doing Arthur sailors earned the right to speak he's fought many battles and he's won is peace the Geisel family is surviving to their hay crop is in and for the moment there's a sense of completion a feeling that life on this farm at least is good you just don't look now let's just go on we we can have some pretty good times out or couldn't we won't be long and be combine time 1 yep yep this is our week what kind of proud of it aren't we out on the plains of western Kansas is a fast rough game being played called the oil and gas business no matter how that market jumps around there's always someone willing to gamble on drilling a deep expensive hole in the ground out here because there's more oil under this Prairie than in all but seven other states for many Americans the workplace has become a civilized and tastefully carpeted environment but not the drilling rig it's still the same screaming dirty and dangerous monster that has been for 60 or 70 years few men quit this work with as many fingers as they started with this kind of work isn't just tough on the Roughnecks though it's also pretty tough on the nerves of Randy Hutchinson and Jim Hardin two young Wildcat oil men this is not a game for the squeamish the oil and gas business it's a game for people who do have confidence in yourselves in your decisions one mistake you know and thousands and thousands of dollars down the drain anything can happen one day we're depressed and the next day we're happy buying champagne yeah or vice versa we've got champagne one day and then the next day we have absolutely nothing it took Jim and Randy a long time to find this spot they covered a lot of ground and read a lot of maps and surveys c'mere any now they read the Earth's layers and each one yields more information right in there yeah okay okay they really make me feel I feel better about this whole time more like drugs but it takes more than a college degree in a microscope to find oil you're calling it here yeah you also need quite a bit of that good old-fashioned mystery ingredient the sixth sense it takes to be an oil man I think a lot of that is something called luck and if you're lucky whether you're drilling wells or shooting dice then good things will happen to you yeah dissolved there's a lot of complete saturation on these samples which I didn't expect out of a gas the area that's right you know we could easily pull some oil on this test so far everything is looking good [Music] in a business that's known more than its share of desperados a man's lucky to have a partner he can trust are they granny and I complement each other real well we're watching one another and that's yeah and we get along good enough to where if I tell him hey I think you're doing this wrong he doesn't get offended and vice-versa he can do this how did you know it's not only your partner's trust you need you also need to convince a bunch of other people I'll let you use their money Jim and Randy's investors are the proverbial just plain folks mostly local business people a few friends and even a relative or two this morning be cutting into they all have two things in common a little extra cash and a lot of confidence in Jim and Randy happy Father's Day present yeah that'll be a nice deal we don't have any Wall Street brokers in on this stuff there California realtor's it's just a bunch of good people but there's a backbone of the business backbone so we've got to look at all those investors or we would have no business there's a lifeblood of our business that's right now I'm as confident as I could ever be right now [Music] 6:30 the next morning the bit finally breaks through the arbuckle zone the pipes coming back up to the surface with the answer everyone's waiting for [Music] this is essentially I would say at this point a dry hole 100 world's not an old man make one don't put us out of business so every good oilman knows you can't possibly win them all the best thing to do now is just pick yourself up and try again suzan Koger is another self-reliant young native of western Kansas her home is 10,000 acres of rangeland called the broken heart ranch and she's been running it by herself since she was 18 years old let's go for we get right now [Music] my operations had a little trouble being accepted you have the first strike against you because you're young and second of all I happen to be female but I've been here 11 years going on 12 and I'm here to stay [Music] Susan was born to this way of life operating a big outfit like this is second nature to her yet she is the kind of person who needs to test herself and take risks so not long ago she expanded the ranch into a new business the training and showing of performance cutting horses Susan spent many years in the saddle but she'll be the first to tell you these horses are a whole new experience the breed goes back to the days of the open range when ranch has needed cutting horses to separate their cattle out of the herds today the precise moves of this one's essential working animal have been refined into a highly competitive sport if you ever feel him going out for word set him back get a hold of breaking into the elite world of performance cutting horses isn't easy but Susan thinks it's worth the effort first prize that the big show in Fort Worth is a quarter of a million dollars yeah I started putting this operation together about two two and a half years ago and I got halfway into it and started to get scared because it is a big a big step it's a financial step and emotional step to take act like this is a show pianist and Duncan we're going for the check right here okay but you know it's not just the money she's after it's the whole challenge of the thing any questions don't get to going too fast Jeff he starts run and take that black pull hit pull him back to a cow don't let him lead I have never in my life been so close to a way of horse the banks good trusting hand alone the intensity that horse has on that cow it is awesome and I've never done anything so awesome in my life and watch your cow never take your hand off the cow leave your hand alone I have never trusted another human being or another animal as much as I trust you start to feel the difference yeah the feeling after you get off the cutting horse it's almost to the point of falling in love cold sweat butterflies and the only thing you think about is getting right back on that horse and going another to work with I believe it takes a certain type of woman to come out here and do this type of work it's very I can't say lonely because I'm not lonely it's quiet you really have to to know yourself you have to be a true friend to yourself the greatest wealth of Kansas lies not in a vault but waves freely and gently in the summer breeze unprotected by fences or locks it is wheat the staff of life of the world wheat as far as you can see across the Kansas prairie and you could get in your car and drive all day in the view wouldn't change drawn by the life force within the ripening wheat an enormous amount of energy converges upon Kansas in the days before harvesting pouring in from all directions is this army of custom cutters these are often man and wife teams working and traveling together on their long migration every summer through the wheat belt of America and Canada now all of Kansas quickens for the harvest you hear it on the radio you see it on the highways and on the long dirt tracks that crisscross the golden Prairie you read about it in the newspapers and on posters tacked on to diner walls the experience of the harvest like that of the Prairie itself is overwhelming and I love it I love harvest you know long ago and when I what just do will you know and attempt summers dawn autumn is here this is the harvest of all the year and I wondered how they got that that must been in these two states for corn isn't like that because here you know it's June it's a harvest here yeah yeah it's just a nice time of year the next few days can make or break the families of Tom and jag diesel their harvest and bring in a great bounty yet there's always the chance that Hale or too much rain might make meaningless their year of toil you know the harvest is the culmination of everything it's the pinnacle of our work we've got a tremendous investment and equipment emotions labor sweat and a family commitment and a family investment and you put all these things together and it's a big deal it's really a big deal I mean we're looking at a seven dated ten day operation that that means everything to us it's a matter of do or die so you hope that equipment holds together you hope your emotions hold together and you hope like the devil your family holds together because you need everybody you got for every minute of every day farmers plan and farmers prepare but then they must sit in their fields and wait they wait for the right time for nature's own good time you cut wheat when the wheats ready not too soon and not too late farmers know this moment farmers know a lot of things the rest of us don't things we wouldn't have any idea about like how to make decisions based on the smell of a summer day the look of a distant cloud or the sound of a kernel of wheat cracked between the teeth looks good boys [Music] [Music] [Music] units having to combine tom yeah are you guys both in there you and Jay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] well our motto is this year it says low and slow some people just want to go along the top you know on her ISA path and the machines are old and and and what's the difference if you don't get quite as much done why in the long run maybe it's a day or two more work but good lands of living the main thing is and the father always said make every lick count and and you know a person might not be a movin too fast but I tell you everything that you do do it so you don't have to do it over again that's when you find when night time comes you've really accomplished a lot the harvest sweeps across the land touching everyone and everything in its path farm by farm county by county the immensity and power of the harvest draws all of Kansas together into one body laboring amidst the engines and the great plumes of dust that rise from the fields once it begins the harvest does not cease until the promise is fulfilled until all that has been sown is reached [Music] sing unto the Lord with Thanksgiving sing praise upon the harp to our God who covereth the heavens with clouds who prepare a Thrain for the earth who make us grass to grow praise the Lord Oh Jerusalem praise thy God o Zion where he has strengthened the bars of thy gates he has blessed like children within thee he maketh peace in thy borders and filleth thee for the finest of the wheat it's just a wonderful time it's a wonderful time mercy when you get a load of wheat sighs here you take it in you know and it tastes good then it's good color and it's nice and clean why can you give you'll get a charge out and say we never cut weed on Sunday never never have cut no we don't Sunday and I said I think I'm just as well off as anybody else's yes yeah we get along differences just as good as anybody else maybe a whole lot better and so another harvest is drawing to a close another ending and beginning in the life of a family in the business of a community and of a nation in the perpetual cycle of growth within the earth and get there before sundown there is triumph in this time of harvest in these days of almost sacred weariness in this simple sharing of food in a loving circle perhaps these are the real reasons why some people still choose to live this way and why some people keep a special place in their hearts for those families who so recently knew this feeling and must spend the rest of their lives remembering

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 6,226

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Kansas, Kansas history, Kansas farmer, farmers, wheat harvest, corn harvest, soybean harvest, Kansas oil, kansas 1980s, dan hurd, pig farmer, pig farm, dustbowl, kansas oil, oil drilling, wildcat, broken heart ranch, cutting horses

Id: F3ovYPoFcJE

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018