More Photos of Tractors and Corn

30-some-odd years ago, Ronnie came into our lives. He’s my stepfather, my mom’s third husband, the father of my sister Ali. I was, technically, an adult* when Mom and Ronnie married, and not sure I needed a stepdad, but Ronnie was from the very beginning a good, even a great presence and influence in my life. He was and is a country boy, who grew up and still lived on a farm, owned farmland in Missouri and worked at the local Farmer’s Co-operative. When Ronnie came into our lives, so did his brothers and their families, his wonderful parents Scottie** and Grandma Dorothy, his farm, and a new set of family traditions. One of those traditions has become the one event I look forward to more than anything every year: our annual Labor Day Hog Roast.

_{* Mentally I had a long way to go. Sometimes I think I still do.
** Everyone called him Scottie, even the grandkids.}

Back then, Ronnie kept pigs out at the farm.*** Ronnie loves pigs–both for the animals themselves, and the delicious pork that they’re made from. When he was younger he took an interest in whole hog barbecue and, over the years, built himself a series of large cookers out of various metal barrels and anhydrous tanks he’s acquired through his work at the Co-op. Using these cookers, Ronnie taught himself how to cook whole hog, and cook it well. Several times a year someone will hire him to cook a hog or two for an event–a local county fair, or a big country wedding, or an anniversary celebration. People know Ronnie, and they know the quality of his work, and while he doesn’t make a living from it–at least not enough to give up his day job–he loves doing it.

_{*** Years ago, a nasty storm blew down the barn where he kept the pigs, killing them. Ronnie was heartbroken. He sources them from a local supplier now}

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend every year, though, since well before he ever met us, Ronnie has cooked a hog for himself. He strings up lights around the farm, sets up picnic tables, and invites a bunch of friends to come over, bring their best covered dish, and enjoy the fruits of his labors with him. For 30 years now, I’ve been fortunate enough to merit one of these invitations. My kids have grown up with the Labor Day Hog Roast firmly implanted in their lives, as important a family holiday as Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Mostly, the fields around the farmhouse alternate between corn and soybeans, like many farms in the Midwest do. Some years there’s soybeans, which might, if they get really tall, come up to your chest. The farm feels wide open. With the bowl-like shape of the little valley the farmhouse sits in, you can see folks coming as soon as they start down the hill. I’ve always liked it best when there’s corn though. This late in the season, in early September, the corn stalks tower 7, 8, or 9 feet tall, creating a kind of enclosure around the farmhouse, the outbuildings, and the lawn. A corn fort.

Like any farm, Ronnie’s is given to piles of picturesque detritus, which seem to have migrated farther from the farmhouse over the years. The pig cookers have always been a favorite subject of mine as well, with a patina of rust and soot and grease that has thickened over decades of use.

But I find myself, again and again, pointing my camera at the tractors. Ronnie is always in the process of fixing any number of old tractors. Recently, he’s been restoring them as well, to museum quality, and driving them in local parades.

Some years it rains, and we set up our picnic tables inside the large shed. Some years, we get an eerie fog all around the farm. Most years, though, we have good weather, bright sun, a little breeze, a perfect day to be outside.

The Triple S farm–named for Ronnie and his 2 brothers (the S is for Scott, their last name)–is outside of Durham, Missouri. Durham is a town of less than 400 people, about a 20 minute drive from Quincy, Illinois where I grew up. To get to the farm, there’s about a 3 mile drive along gravel roads. The roads start out straight, then wind their way through trees and around the bend and down into a valley where little if any cell phone signal remains available. More than once, I’ve had a first time hog roast attendee muse aloud whether we were leading them to their demise. Of course not, I’d answer. Nothing to worry about, as long as nobody starts calling you Piggy.

It’s been quite some time since I rode out to the farm with the rest of the crowd, though. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve graduated to helping roast the pig and set up the farm for the party. Ronnie and I wake up around 3am the day of the roast, drive out to the farm, and get the cooker lit.

The pigs Ronnie gets for this roast weigh between 250-300 pounds. That’s live weight–by the time they’ve been processed and butchered, they’re a bit lighter than that of course. Butchered? you may ask, I thought this was whole hog cooking? Having that whole hog in its skin sure does make for an aesthetic presentation. But through trial and error Ronnie figured that having the individual parts separated, so they could be moved around in the cooker and the heat distributed more appropriately, worked better for his kind of cooking. So the hog gets separated into eight pieces–two butt/shoulder/leg sections, two rear leg/ham sections, two loin/spine sections, two rib/belly sections. Ronnie wraps them in foil and uses an injection marinade to get flavor right into the meat, then slow-cooks them over charcoal all day.

After the pork goes into the cooker, we head into the farmhouse. Ronnie takes a recliner and I take the couch. He puts something on the TV–it might be a John Wayne movie marathon, or it might be an eight hour block of Bonanza or the Andy Griffith show. We doze in front of the TV until sunrise, when we can get started setting up the farm.

We string up the lights, arrange the tables, clean out the shed if it’s raining, get the kegs iced and the portable sink flowing. We set up a wind break all around the fry station, where my mom and some friends will be making fresh fried potato chips and fried biscuits later. We get a 18 foot flatbed trailer in place–that will be our buffet table. We prep the onions and the cabbage and the beans and whatever other side dishes we’ll be setting out that year.

At some point, usually around midafternoon, we’ll realize that we have everything ready, and there’s really not much left to do until the pork is done, or people start showing up. Mom will have arrived with Ronnie’s keg of Miller Lite in tow; I will have tapped the keg for him; and Ronnie will have provided constructive criticism after a judicial sampling. This is around the time when I sit down and get into the refreshments I’ve brought along. For a time, I was putting in the effort to brew my own beer for the hog roast, to share with anybody who cared to try it. The past few years, I’ve just been picking up a few cases from our friends at Blue Island Beer Company.

One thing leads to another. One beer leads to another.

T I M E P A S S E S

Then other folks start showing up. First, around 4:00 or 4:30 pm, a couple of Ronnie’s old pals from town roll in. They volunteer to shred the pork every year. In exchange, they keep the bones, which they take home to their dogs. Lucky dogs.

By 5:00 or so, the rest of my immediate family will have arrived. Mindy, with the kids in tow. My brother Eric. My sisters Bridget and Ali. My best friend Mike. At this point, I’ve been mostly awake and working for 14 hours. I’m tired but pretty alert, and while I might have a 2 beer head start on the newcomers, they’re eager to catch up.

We invite… everybody. Mom invites her friends from her aquajogging classes, and the folks whose kids she’s had in her daycare over the years, her Ladies’ Night Out cohort. Bridget and Ali and Eric invite their friends. I invite a ton of people-old friends from high school, from previous jobs, people I’ve met along the way; I invite newer friends, friends of friends, people I barely know from Facebook, “cool guys from the Internet,” foodie friends from Chicago who I know will never make the trip but I hope one day will come anyway; aunts, uncles, cousins. I invite my vegetarian and vegan friends, not to gross them out but because I hope to see them, because I hope that we can make the experience welcoming and fun enough and the variety of dishes accommodating enough that they’ll enjoy themselves anyway. It’s not usually a terribly diverse crowd, I’m sorry to say, but we try to welcome as many people as we can.

Usually we get things officially rolling by around 6:00pm. The pork is served, and piles of fried biscuits and potato chips, roasted cabbages and onions, and Ronnie’s bacon-heavy baked beans with it. The kegs are flowing, the cans are cold, and there are plenty of 2-liter bottles of pop for the teetotallers. The flatbed trailer we use as a buffet table is loaded to the gills with food, all manner of covered dishes and desserts brought by our guests nearly eclipsing the great piles of meat and fried things we’ve laid out. Mom’s friend Sayan, originally from Thailand, usually brings a spicy chicken salad that she knows I love. Sometimes she’ll make Pad Thai instead, which is another crowd pleaser. Everything’s delicious–the macaroni and cheeses, the potato salads, beans, beans, and more beans, the pies, the jello molds, the cookies–oh my god, the cookies!–but I keep a special eye out for what Sayan has brought.

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The line for food gets serious right away, and I’m usually too busy saying hi to people, not to mention a bit full from all the calories that I’ve had to drink by that point in the evening, to grab a plate immediately. Still, eventually I’ll make my way to the buffet, where my eyes will inevitably be too big for my plate. You’d think I might make a sandwich of the pork. I hardly ever do. I don’t even sauce it. Ronnie’s pork is delicious on its own. Ronnie tells me there’s no real secret to what he does, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give it away. You’ll just have to come try it some day.

The evening wears on. The same people gather in the same groups, family groupings, friend groupings, year after year. Some folks come early, eat, chat a while, and then leave. Some folks come a bit later and stick around to shut the joint down. Many of my friends fall into the latter category. By the time they arrive, 8pm, 9pm, 10pm, I’ve been awake for perhaps 18 hours, and I’ve had too many beers, I’m exhausted yet exhilarated and running entirely on adrenaline. Old friends meet old friends. New friends meet new friends. The groupings shift and mingle. Things get progressively weirder.

Eventually, we’ll all disperse, more often than not agreeing on a secondary location for an afterparty. The secondary location is usually mom’s house in Quincy–she stays at the farm that night. Many people will leave with a freezer bag or foil packet full of leftover pork–a 280 pound hog feeds a lot of folks. I usually, despite my best efforts, end up bringing some beer home as well.

As often as not I stay up even later at the afterparty, playing inappropriate card games with friends old and new, laughing as if I were 21 again. I pay for it the next day. But it’s worth it. Our family hog roast is the absolute best time I have all year, any year, bar none. And it’s all thanks to this guy, Ronnie. My stepdad. Probably one of the best people I know. Definitely one of the best mustaches I know.

Only three times, in the past 30 years or more, have we called off the hog roast.

The first time was in 1993. That year we had the “Great Flood,” the kind of flood they call a “hundred year flood” even though it seems to happen every 20 years or so. It all seemed almost manageable, though, until the levee broke, or was broken. I happened to be out of town the weekend the levee broke, but I watched it on TV from a cabin in Wisconsin, and many of you may have seen it as well. Water poured into the bottomlands on the Missouri side, flooding West Quincy. Gas stations were destroyed, restaurants drowned. Many businesses closed and never opened again. The flooding caused the bridges at Quincy to close for months. Ronnie stayed at the farm during that period, since his work was nearby and commuting was impossible. Nobody even thought about having the hog roast that year.

The second time we had to cancel the hog roast was 20 years ago, in 2000. Just before Labor Day, on August 30th, we lost Scottie, Ronnie’s father. Scottie–that’s what everybody called him–was the patriarch of the Scott family, a beloved figure around town, and the heart of the Triple S Farm. Scottie didn’t come to the hog roast–he was a religious man, and didn’t care for the drinking, so he stayed away that one evening of the year–but the Triple S Farm was his home. He and Ronnie built that farm house together. It was a hard time, for Ronnie, for everyone. The hog roast could not go on that year.

The third and final time we’ve had to call off the hog roast was this year. Yet another reason to hate 2020. It was the right call–having a party of that size would have been extremely irresponsible even if everyone was maintaining rigid mask and social-distancing discipline, even if we had sanitarily packed individual plates for everyone instead of serving food potluck-style. As it was, with the cavalier attitudes many people still show about mask use, seeing the effect of other superspreader events in the news, and seeing people I otherwise respect and love and admire espouse strange borderline-conspiracy views about COVID-19, we simply could not in good conscience have this kind of gathering.

I was sad about it all weekend. Even drinking a prodigious amount of beer and making many delicious tacos couldn’t quite snap me out of it. I’m going to apologize in advance to my in-laws right now, who read this blog, and don’t care for the kind of language I’m about to use.

FUCK 2020. FUCK COVID-19. Fuck the whole bunch of raving maskless Yahoos making it longer and worse. I’ve been relatively fortunate though. So far the only things COVID-19 has taken from me have been the fun things I wanted to do this year. RIP Vietnam trip. RIP NYC trip. RIP Nova Scotia Trip. RIP Labor Day Hog Roast 2020. I know many people have had it much worse, seen their loved ones suffer and die. I know my complaints are petty. But that doesn’t make them suck any less.

I expect we will one day again be able to invite people out to the farm for our Labor Day shindig. I hope it will happen next year. I hope that on Labor Day weekend in 2021 I will be cooking massive piles of pork, and cabbages, and onions, drinking too many beers, and taking more random photos of tractors and corn. I hope that I can see my friends, and my family’s friends, and the random people who show up every year whose names I’ve never learned, and that I won’t have to worry if one of them coughs. I hope that I can again invite large swaths of my Facebook friends without fear of disease or judgement, knowing that nearly none of them will accept yet wishing they would. I hope that some of them are reading this now, and lamenting having missed out all these years, and resolving to make the trip next time. And if you are, I hope to see you all next year at Triple S Farm, where this man will be waiting to welcome you.

I will be there too. I may be slightly deranged by the time you show up though.