donw on the

[ilanarama]

Yesterday, I made hay while the sun shone.

It was actually a fairly boring thing to do, and my heart goes out to the farmers and ranchers who actually have to do this for a living. Me, I'm just trying to be a good daughter-in-law, so I went to the in-law's ranch to help out for a day. (I'll go this afternoon as well).

Hay is basically tall grass. Over the last few days they had cut it and raked it into windrows. Yesterday they had a rented bailer hooked up to the tractor; it drives along the windrows, scooping up the loose hay and shitting it out into nicely tied bales.

My job was to drive the pick-up truck slowly along the rows of bales. The truck pulls a big hay trailer, and the trailer has something attached to its left side called an "iron man", which is a bale-picker-upper thingy that scoops up bales, sends them up an elevator, and drops them to the trailer, where one or two people stack the bales until there is a hugely heavy and unstable load to be taken to the barn.

Then we unload the bales and stack them in the barn. Hay bales weigh around 55 lbs each, so it's a pretty physical job, and itchy scratchy hay gets everywhere. I wasn't planning to help with the stacking, but I got bored just waiting around for the next driving run, so I would climb to the top of the pile and pull bales down to the people loading them on the elevator (sort of a conveyor belt thing). A good workout.

Woo woo. I now know more about rural American life than ever before. I think I'll stick to the 'burbs.

Comments

down on the

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if I ever told you this, but I went to summer camp on what had been, was then, and has since returned to being a working farm. We had a designated Farm Bunk, kids who had volunteered to help Jim Eby (resident ranch hand) run the farm part of camp. About the middle of July or so, we would all be called into service for haying. We had our own bailer, most likely, I swear, inherited from Fred when he sold Karl R. the farm. Those kids who got out of this duty were ill, injured, or allergic. We envied them within 20 minutes of starting. Inevitably, that old bailer would DIE. Jim could only do so much to keep it going every year and sooner or later it would die as we hauled bails behind it to the flatbed truck or stacked bails waiting for our friends to bring the empty truck back. When you got the hay to our barn, we had no elevator. It was all loaded to the top of the barn either by rope or before it got low enough to need the rope and pulleys, we tossed them up to the older, larger boys, and some of the adult male counselors. Sometimes we'd drag a bail or two up the stairs ourselves, just to get it over with.

My best friend in those days was younger than me and no bigger, so we would each take the end of a bail and heave it over to the truck, like trying to run a sack race together. If you looked at all of us, you saw several hauling pairs of the smaller kids, and a lot bigger kids trying to be studly hauling a bail each, and often we ended up heaving the thing UP onto the truck above our heads.

At the end of it, I always thought, after the bailer had broken and we were grabbing tufts of hay to throw towards the truck while trying not to breathe hay into our lungs in the process and with our eyes often closed trying not to get them poked out by the hay, that we would never get all the hay out of our clothes, hair or skin, and the ITCHING would never end. You had to wear long pants and long shirts and most of us really only had our sweatshirts for long shirts. This was less than ideal on those hot, sticky days hauling tufts of hay with bits that stuck to us everywhere. Once we were lucky and it took almost until all the hay was bailed for the bailer to die. I hope your rented bailer held up.

Yes, I'll take suburbia, too. (Provided we ever get sidewalk here.)

-babs