Sharing The Burden -- Neighbors Harvest Crop Of Farmer Killed In Fire

RITZVILLE, Adams County - In a small town, when the hurt is very big, there is only one way to carry the burden.

And that is together.

And so it was yesterday, when a convoy of combines stretched to 30-plus long down farm lanes dusted with wheat chaff as more than 70 neighbors left their own harvests to bring in Bob Heider's wheat.

Heider's neighbors worked in a scalding mix of dust and chaff and 104-degree heat. While they worked, the wind ripped over the fields, reminding them of the freakish gusts that whipped a wildfire through here last week.

The fire killed Heider, 64, as he maneuvered his combine through the wheat fields that grace the 4,500 acres he called home.

The fire burned telephone poles to the ground, reduced the combine's giant tires to ash and burned the seat Heider rode to twisted, bare metal. All told, it burned 20,000 acres of wheat and prairie in western Adams County.

The blaze began beside the railroad tracks near Tokio. In these dry fields of ripe wheat, winds whipped it into an inferno that charged toward Heider. His 14-year-old grandson, Gavin, and Gavin's 13-year-old girlfriend escaped the fire, leaping from a combine they drove just 100 yards ahead of Heider.

Heider's family and 600 neighbors buried him Monday.

Two days later, they did what people here do when it hurts: They pitched in and helped out.

They made baked beans and homemade sausage, scalloped potatoes and baked ham, pot roast and deviled eggs and cabbage rolls. There was coconut cake and pecan pie, German chocolate cake and brownies, cherry pie and rhubarb crisp topped with Cool Whip.

The food came from the local Congregational church, from workers at the county courthouse, from neighbors and friends and farmers for 20 miles around. There was enough to stuff a hungry harvest crew of 70 and put on a formidable spread for a good-sized chunk of this town of 1,775.

Families left their own wheat standing in the fields to donate their combines, trucks and sweat to bring in Heider's crop in a harvest bee.

The wind battered the farmers in their feed caps and T-shirts and whistled through the teeth of the combines. It blew over the empty husk of the combine Heider died in, which still sits in his field, a grim reminder of where, but for the grace of God, they could have been.

Their mammoth machines bucked and chewed through the fields to harvest 60,000 bushels of Heider's crop in a single day - hard work and necessary work. But not work for Heider's family to do alone. Not now.

Heider would have done the same for them, they said. And so they worked carefully, combing the fields as if they were their own. They took care even on the tricky slopes, and on the patches where the wheat was blown flat and a man has to go slow and lay the combine header down just so to get up every golden grain.

Evelyn Heider, Bob's wife of 43 years, watched it all and wept.

Hers were tears of grief and gratitude.

From the windows of the home her husband built, she looks out now on bittersweet fields. Each time she leaves her driveway, she weaves past the scarred ground.

When she speaks of her husband, she puts one hand to her throat, as if to push the pain back down. She fingers a tiny gold necklace given to her by a granddaughter after Heider's death. It reads: "He loved. Was loved. And is missed."

Evelyn Heider, 61, lost her father in a farm accident, too. She thought maybe, just maybe, when she eclipsed his age of 57, her family would be safe. The fire proved her wrong.

"We both just loved the farm," she said, sitting in a living room crowded with the scent of funeral flowers. "We worked side by side for 43 years to build the farm up. Everything was so perfect; we had just gotten it the way we wanted it. Bob was so happy."

Pink roses and tomatoes flourished out back. The day Heider died, Evelyn had made his favorite hot-dog casserole for lunch, and said a cheerful "see you tonight" as he headed to the fields. "I just never knew that when he got up from that table I wouldn't see him again."

They met when she was in first grade and married when she was 18. She picked up a recent photo of them at a dinner party and said: "You see the way he looked at me? We were still so infatuated with each other."

They raised four children, and built their farm up from 500 acres to 4,500, a few acres at a time, taking smart risks and working long hours. Their son, Jim, 41, groomed for years to follow in his father's footsteps, will run the farm with Evelyn now.

She says she can never leave this house that is packed so full with memories. She is strong enough to face his empty chair in the living room, his clothes still hanging in the closet, the king-size mattress they both thought was too big.

"I feel so empty. But I have to go on because I know he would want me to."

And so Evelyn Heider stood watch as the tractor-trailers of grain roared past to store their crop at the grain elevator. She watched the armada of combines and was buoyed by love manifest in work, done together by people who cared about her and her family when it mattered most.

"I've been friends and neighbors with the Heiders my whole life. So I had to make sure I got in on this," said Don Dirks. "I've got to drive past that burned field every day, and it feels terrible.

"Today, doing this, I feel a little better. We are doing this harvest bee for ourselves, too."

Neighbors there for each other

Erin Weber, 18, watched golden wheat disappear into the teeth of her combine and thought about why she came. "It makes me feel good about myself to know they need us and that we are here for them."

Howard Reimer, who helped organize the harvest bee, estimated that $4 million worth of equipment was mobilized, including 38 combines and 28 tractor-trailers.

"It's just good people doing a good thing," Reimer said. "This is rural America, and it's one of those things we are good at. . . . We would not have thought of not doing this. It's how farm people are."

When the work was done, the harvest crew and dozens of friends, neighbors and relatives gathered at the local Grange Hall in the long shadows of the evening. They laughed, bragged on their kids, hugged and cried. Drank cold beer, passed a whiskey bottle. Ate homemade food and remembered their neighbor.

They also remembered doing this before, for the neighbor who had a car wreck during harvest, another neighbor who had cancer. They hoped they would never need the same help themselves, but also knew it would be there for them if they did.

And that Bob Heider would have been one of the first to help.

"The bottom line is that if it was one of us here today who needed this, he'd have been part of this group helping," said Bob Schoessler, whose family has farmed here for 130 years. "You know these days, in most places, if there's a disaster people just say, `Glad it wasn't me' and go on.

"But that's not how it is here."

He looked once more around at his neighbors, then walked off to his truck, heading back to his own farm as the sun stretched into gold ribbons. His own work waited, on his own place.

"Got to cut wheat yet," he said.

Lynda Mapes' phone message number is 206-464-2736. Her e-mail is lmapes@seattletimes.com