It’s a muggy hot July afternoon, but inside Dick Guckeen’s Buick it is cool.

Corn and soybean fields are a blur. I have to ask my friend what my dim eyes can’t see. The retired Mower County Highway Department employee politely answers all my questions as he drives me across the county to visit a friend.

We stop first at Bubble’s Cafe in Adams for lunch and find the place crowded.  Bubbles, aka Jan Heller, is working the lunch crowd by herself.

Every stool as the counter is filled and there is but one empty table. We grab it.

Bubbles greets us like she does everyone — smiling — and making us feel we are the only diners in the place.

She takes our order and disappears to the kitchen. Dick strikes up a conversation with a customer and I do the same with guests at a table nearby.

When Bubbles returns with our food, she has a question to which she already knows the answer. “You’re going to want a piece of pie for dessert, aren’t you?” she asks. There’s no arguing with that smile or the reputation her homemade pies have for excellence. We order lemon and banana cream slices.

When we pay the check and prepare to leave there are new arrivals standing in the doorway waiting to be seated.

Back in the car and on our way again I have to remind myself of the purpose of this road trip — the prairie poet is waiting.

I have eight copies of poems written by Harlan Boe. Three are framed and hang on a kitchen wall.

A poem is a composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines. Harlan’s are nothing like that.

He will never be mistaken for Robert Frost.

He just paints word pictures the way he sees life.

When we are invited into the Boe home, Maggie escorts us into the living room where Harlan is relaxing in his favorite chair watching the television news. He immediately starts talking, telling stories, relating events and registering his opinions. When a detail slips through his memory’s cracks, Maggie corrects him.

Before the afternoon is over, Harlan will also play the harmonica and sing us a song — all the while making me wonder, “Is there a more endearing man than the prairie poet?”

He is 88 years old, one of two children in his family remaining alive today.

The son of Simon and Elizabeth Boe was born on a farm in Clayton Township, six sons and seven daughters in the family.

He farmed literally all his life.  First as a child and on into adulthood.

He and Maggie moved to their farm southwest of LeRoy in 1950.  They raised cattle for a living and children for the love of it.

Farming changed over the years, but Harlan’s love of the good ol’ days and ways of agriculture remained constant.  So much so that he seeded oats, harvested them and started a threshing show in 1981. He bought a steam-powered threshing machine and elevator and a Minneapolis-Moline steam engine.

Each August, while the Mower County Fair went on at Austin, Harlan’s threshing show attracted the curious.

Harlan was the star of the threshing show — bib overalls, straw hat and walking stick were his uniform. He was a P.T. Barnum-like character down on the farm. Not only did he have the threshing show to entertain the crowds, by then he had moved a country schoolhouse, log cabin and the Hambrecht museum from Lake Louise State Park at LeRoy. The attractions fitted nicely with steam engine, hit-and-miss engines, sawmill, draft horses, barns and other buildings filled with antique farm machinery and the showman himself Harlan, entertaining all.

The day after the threshing show — Sunday — Harlan and Maggie hosted an informal worship service on their farm.  Bluegrass-tinged gospel music filled the air.

I’ve heard the stories before, but each time they seem as fresh as the first.

All one can do is listen, learn and marvel at his memory and obvious love of life.

“Let me tell you about my life,” Harlan says at one point.  “Are you going to stay overnight?” Maggie jokes.

Despite the tempting suggestion, it is time to go, although I’m not quite sure why.  But first Maggie serves pie and coffee and Harlan breaks out his harmonica and sings a song … first asking Maggie’s permission. “Go ahead.  You’ll do it anyway,” she says.

At the door, with Susie his dog standing beside him, Harlan says, “I would say I’ve been blessed.  The Lord has favored me.”

My friend, Dick, has endured or enjoyed the afternoon, but I’m not sure which.

Dick points the car westward and home again to Austin.  There’s less chatter then there was driving to our destination.  I am thinking after four decades as a newspaper reporter—24 for the Austin Daily Herald— I have been blessed to meet so many interesting people and hear their stories.

Harlan Boe, the prairie poet, was one of them. Perhaps without equal.