Always Wanted to Know What the View Would Be Like from the Top of a Grain Elevator

Another flashback to Between The Rockies and a Hard Place (amzn.to/2a58Vxy). More when I get back from Scotland.

My usual perspective on the Great Plains - which was why I was so keen to get up that elevator 

The town looked like all the others, except that it had a brick-paved crossroads. I’d paid a courtesy call at the museum, got directions to the library, and after emailing home I’d wandered down to the railroad tracks and the giant concrete elevator. I knew that the Grain Corporation had been run by the same family for four generations, and that a fifth was learning the trade. They’d told me so at the library. As a corporate historian with two studies of five-generation family firms behind me, I certainly wanted to hear the story of the business – but more than that I saw my chance to achieve a long-cherished ambition. 

   At home in England I find it difficult to walk up to a total stranger, introduce myself, and tell them what’s on my mind. I wasn’t raised that way. It’s too direct. Not that my grandmother, who looked after us when I was young, had any other approach to suggest. Her favourite saying was, ‘Those who ask don’t get; those who don’t ask don’t want.’ Work that one out.

   In America, of course, the direct approach is the one most likely to succeed. My most spectacular success in that line was an occasion in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I needed to borrow a bike to get me 600 miles from one end of the state to the other. True, I had turned a tenuous family connection with William F. Cody into one of those airy ‘I’m related to Buffalo Bill’ pitches. But the point was, I had been direct, bold, and unafraid.  The bike-shop owner liked my story, loaned me a $400 machine without batting an eyelid, then got on with running his business. If there’s one thing Americans admire above everything, it’s enterprise. It was, after all, an American President who reminded the people that ‘The business of America is business’.

   Plucking up my courage, I headed towards the elevator, hopping across the puddles and the railroad tracks, and entering the dusty little office that overlooked the weighbridge. There were five or six guys sitting around in overalls wearing baseball caps and clasping cups of coffee in broad, weathered hands. They looked up when I entered, but said nothing. ‘I’m looking for the boss,’ I said. One of them raised a stubby finger and pointed to a tall, slim man who might have been in his sixties. 

   He didn’t need much encouragement. As soon as I mentioned the word ‘historian’ he was off. It wasn’t just the way the guys rolled their eyes, drained their cups and returned to their various posts that gave me the impression they’d heard this before. The story tripped off the boss’s tongue as if he’d had to learn it for a high-school presentation. Our town. Or, in this case, Our Elevator.

   By the time the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad came through this part of Kansas, the boss’s great-grandfather had already opened a feed-store and found himself trucking grain to and from a wooden elevator just a few yards from where we were sitting.  After a time the owner approached him, and said that since neither of them was making much money, why didn’t he buy the elevator?

   As the boss was telling me this, a huge truck had pulled up outside with a sighing of air-brakes, but he continued with his story as he waved the driver up to the mark, then started up the machinery to load it with milo, having first run a computer check on its moisture content. 

   The business knew good times in the early part of the twentieth century, but, like the entire agricultural sector – the single exception being tobacco, he believed – fell apart after the World War One. The Roaring Twenties may have been boom-time in urban America, but back on the farm they had a solid decade of getting used to the economic slowdown that was just around the corner for the rest of the country. In the Great Depression, the widespread drought and the cataclysmic dust storms that characterised the Dirty Thirties, things got even worse. To add to their particular woes, the old wooden elevator burned down. Then, during World War Two, the boss’s father, who’d taken over the helm, died suddenly. With most of the men-folk away, Grandma ran the operation. By the time the fighting was over they were $20,000 in the red. ‘Doesn’t sound much now,’ the boss remarked, ‘but at today’s values it’s around  $300,000.’ By hard work and good management they pulled through, and today they’re a thriving operation. The elevator under whose shadow we were sitting has a capacity  of 1.1 million bushels – that is, over 60,000,000 pounds, or 30,000 tons of golden grain. It’s a lot of cattle feed – and quite a few burger buns, for that matter. And it takes up one huge storage facility.

   The details were fascinating, but I had a sly little question to put to my host. ‘So,’ I asked, as the truck driver baled out of his cab and came inside for a drink, ‘how far is it to the top?’ It was an unnecessary piece of guile on my part, because the boss was already a jump ahead of me, leading me out of the door, across the loading bay, and turning to tell the guys he’d be back in a few minutes. Inside the elevator proper he ushered me into a wobbly metal cage, a wire-mesh cocoon, squeezed in beside me, and pressed the button. There was a sudden hum of electrical machinery and we were away – my first trip to the top of one of these cathedrals of the Plains. 

   The cage was clearly designed to take one slim man breathing shallowly, but my host pressed gently up against me, holding his breath and arching his back inwards as each successive concrete floor drifted past. ‘Used to be ropes, of course,’ he said, nodding towards the oiled cables snaking past us.

   On the top floor was a row of dusty windows, a smooth concrete floor, and the casings that covered the tops of the separate elevators that fed each of the concrete bins. ‘Just so long as you don’t get your milo mixed in with your maize,’ I shouted above the roar of fans and the shushing of grain as it poured in through the metal conduits. ‘Oh, we’re real careful about that,’ he said.

   I couldn’t wait to see the view, and I almost tripped on a piece of discarded cable as I made for the nearest window. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, however: there was little to see out there but the grid-pattern lines of the town way below us, and the vast spread of prairie, mostly dun-coloured, reaching out to a distant, blurred horizon, where it merged into a grey sky. I’d been told it before, and now I was learning it for myself: there’s only one way to view the Plains, and that is on the ground, at sundown or sun-up.