The Rice We Dug Out by Hand

And a lawsuit does not dry a field. The rice did not have a month for papers to go back and forth. It had days.

So I called the care home and told my charge nurse I would not be in. She had grown up on a farm out by Almyra. She said, “Is it the rice?” and I said yes, and she said, “Go.”

Wes went to the shop for shovels. He came back with every one we owned, and his daddy’s old sharpshooter, and a pair of post hole diggers I never did figure out what he meant to do with.

I want to explain how a rice field is laid out, because it matters for what we did.

Our ground is flat, but not perfectly flat. It falls a little from the top corner to the bottom ditch along the gravel road. The levees run in long curves across the field, following the fall of the land, every couple of inches of drop.

Each levee holds a paddy of water during the growing season. In each levee there is a spill, with boards you add or pull to hold the water up or let it go down to the next paddy.

When you drain for harvest, you pull every board, and the water steps down paddy by paddy and goes out the bottom into the ditch. We had done that in the middle of August. Our boards were already out.

The trouble was, a spill box is maybe two feet wide. It drains a field slow and steady over a week or so. It was never built to move a flood coming in from the top all at once.

So the water from Dwight’s field was coming in faster than our spills could pass it down. It was stacking up behind every levee, paddy by paddy, working its way across our ripe rice.

Wes stood on the levee and figured it out loud. “We can’t stop what’s coming in,” he said. “Not today. So we have to get it out faster than it comes.”

That meant cutting the levees. Opening a wide notch in every curve, at the low spot, so the water could run straight down to the ditch instead of creeping through those little boxes.

There were thirteen levees between the top of our field and the bottom. Some of them ran nearly half a mile. Every one would need more than one cut.

“Start at the bottom,” Wes said. “If we open the top first, we just move the flood down onto rice that’s still dry.”

So we drove to the bottom of the field where it meets the ditch, and we started digging.

A rice levee is not much to look at, maybe two feet high and wide at the base, all buckshot clay.

That clay is sticky as tar when it is wet and hard as brick when it is dry. Ours was in between that morning, which was the worst of both.

You cut down through the top with the edge of the shovel, then you have to pry it loose and throw it off to the side, every shovelful, because if you drop it back in the cut it just melts and plugs it.

By eight the sun was full up and the heat was coming off the water in waves.