Thomas Alan Orr

Crop Duster

Like sentries, maples flank the narrow lane
that curls past corn and beans across the bridge.
A rusty gate hangs by a single hinge.
The barn stands on a swell of land behind
the brick foundation of a house long gone.
A grassy airstrip running from the barn
three thousand feet is overgrown with weeds.
He steps out of a rusty trailer, smiling,
to greet the ag reporter keen to learn
a bit about crop dusting with a plane.
A lean and grizzled man, he has a limp.
“I’m slow,” he says. “And that’s a story too.”
 
They swing the barn doors open, stepping in.
The sun through cracks illuminates the dust 
and glances off the windshield of the plane,
a Piper Pawnee, made in ‘sixty-six,
a single-engine, low-wing, prop-driven craft.
He brushes dust from off the fuselage,
revealing “Queen Bee” painted there in red.
“We called ‘em dusters back in the day, but
they go by aerial applicators now.
Ask me, it ain’t so colorful, know what
I mean?” He spits some chew and laughs.
 
“Been doin’ this since I was just a kid
but not much now. My age is catchin’ up!
How it works is first you lay down smoke
to see which way the wind is blowin’.
Then come in low about eight feet above
the field to dose the crops and pull up fast
to miss the trees. You gotta be alert!
When I was in the air we worried most
about the power lines. You’re flyin’ low
and hit one at a hundred miles per hour
and it’ll cut your plane in two. No lie!
And now there’s towers and windmills stuck 
in the middle of farmland everywhere!”
 
He pauses, gives the plane a winsome look.
“Good days, the Queen and me, we danced up there.
She never failed. My first old duster crashed.
A ground thermal turned us upside down.
I crawled away before it blew apart.
My leg was broken bad. That’s why I walk
like this. God’s ways are strange. My wife died young,
but I survived the crash to tell about
it now. Things happen flyin’ low like that.
I heard a guy got killed in Arkansas.
Two dusters hit each other in the field.
It kinda makes you think, but then you do 
stuff anyway despite the risk, you know?”
 
“The boy was tellin’ me about a strain
of marijuana called Crop Duster. Hell!
At least it ain’t called Aerial Applicator!”
He laughs again, his chew refreshed. “What’s that?
No, haven’t tried it. Used to take a shot
of bourbon when the Queen and me went up.
I’d probably lose my license now.
It won’t be long, I guess, before
the drones take over. Then old boys like me,
well, we’ll be done. The Queen? I s’pose she might
be fighting prairie fires somewhere out
in North Dakota or Saskatchewan!”
He blinks and thumbs his eye. “It’s just the dust!”

Thomas Alan Orr raises Flemish Giant rabbits on a farm in Indiana. His most recent collection is Tongue to the Anvil: New and Selected Poems. His work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He has work forthcoming in the Merton Seasonal and the Midwest Quarterly.