This is one of my fondest memories of growing up on the farm.
One hot summer day, my Dad, my brother and I were standing in a field of young corn, which stood about waist high or lower. I was 10, my brother, 5. The air was still and humid.
Suddenly, Dad saw a whirlwind coming our way because he noticed the top leaves of the corn stalks were twisting. Whirlwinds were common in the summer on the farm. We most often saw them as they picked up dust in the barnyards; they looked like mini tornadoes.
On this day, when the twister got close to us, Dad grabbed the straw hat off my brother’s head and tossed it into the centre of the funnel. The hat shot up quickly as though fired from a cannon. And it stayed aloft, floating in ever widening circles at the top of the twister.
I kept thinking that the hat would soon fall back to earth, but it didn’t. It just kept flying and flying until it was hundreds of feet in the air and drifting southward away from us.
My brother started crying, thinking, as it turned out rightly, that he would never see his hat again. Eventually, to our amazement, a hawk joined the hat in the updraft and the two of them floated effortlessly around and around in a circle that continued to grow wider and wider. In time, hat and hawk became just specks in the sky and finally disappeared from our view altogether.
To a boy my age, this phenomenon cemented the conviction in my mind that my Dad was some sort of super genius as well as hero. But he was born on that farm and had spent all his days on it and was as familiar with its environment as the most wily cat or bird would be.
I didn’t think of this aspect of the story till many years later, but at some point and somewhere, that straw hat would have had to have floated to the ground again, who knows how many farms south of ours. What would have been the reaction of another farmer and his sons if they were out in a field somewhere and saw a straw hat suddenly appear hundreds of feet in the air and slowly drift towards them to the ground?
That poor Dad would have had to think quickly to provide the explanation to a couple of young boys wondering why a hat was suddenly descending from the heavens.
I would like to have heard the story he told them.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
