As a kid, I didn’t much like April weekends.
As soon as the fields were dry enough, we’d take the 45 minute drive out to the Lyseng homestead farm at Hiterdahl, Minnesota, to help Dad’s brothers, Gilman and Grant.
Each winter, Mother Nature pushed more rocks to the surface. Each April, every able-bodied person in the clan showed up to pick them. Summer trips were fun. April trips, not so much.
The technology was simple. Two mammoth workhorses clumped along pulling the stone boat as we walked beside it chucking on rocks. Kids got the smaller rocks, older cousins got heavier rocks and adults got the biggest ones. Leather work gloves had not yet been invented.
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It never occurred to anyone in the 1950s that you might build a really ultra heavy duty potato picker strong enough to handle rocks. Fast forward 50 years and we see that somebody did precisely that.
It’s ironic to me that the first really ultra heavy-duty potato picker strong enough to handle rocks comes from northwestern Minnesota, just 60 kilometres from the Lyseng farm.
Northwestern Minnesota is also where the Rock Mantis worked the first years of its life, turning thousands of acres of bad, stony land into fields clean enough for soybeans.
My ancestral Norwegian kin would roll over in their graves and stretch their aching backs if they knew the Rock Mantis was working just a few miles up the road.
