The Old Saw Mill

So I've slipped again on my silly ass country musings. But a thing I saw the other day has prompted me to relay another little portion of my upbringing.  A notice about child labor laws made me laugh, as a number of things it stated weren't proper conditions for folks under the age of 15 aren't exactly adhered to on most farms and ranches.  Further if such guidelines were followed, young would be farmers would never learn a goddamned thing.

That brings me to the specifics of this post, the old saw mill. Working around a saw mill is a massive no no for kids, as far as labor laws are concerned.

Witness the hipster farm boy. I was rocking the hipster sunglasses way back in the early 90s.  Oh yea and notice the huge dangerous apparatus behind the old man and me.

So when I was a real little kid there was this old saw mill, from like the 1930s, tucked back up in the timber that was once used by dad and grandpa when they wanted lumber to build a barn or what have you.  It was just this old rusted bunch of iron to me at the time.  About the time I was 14 the old man wanted to resurrect the derelict contraption.  And so we did.  Dad hauled it out of its hole and parked it out behind our house and set about putting it all into working order.

I'll try to explain how this death trap worked.  Its rather simple, not exactly easy mind you, but simple. Once you have your log you had to wrestle it up onto a sort of trolly (you get a good idea of that in the photo above). So the first danger is getting crushed by the log before you have it secured on the carriage, or just smashing a finger or 5 while hoisting it into place.  Once secured to the trolly you're ready to start cutting.  Now you need a tractor to run the mill, both turning the blade and trucking the trolly back and forth along its 40 foot long track.  There are a myriad of little levers and pulleys and gears, all of which are just open to everything.  Like I said the thing was built in the 30s or 40s and there wasn't much thought back then to protective guards to save fingers and such.
(Back then they required you to respect your equipment, now we just try to make everything idiot proof. An idiot probably couldn't run that old saw mill.)
Where was I, oh yea onto the blade. This thing is similar to like what you'd see on a circular saw or a table saw, but its like 4 feet tall. No guard on it either, its instant maiming or death if you slip up around it.  And you're gonna be inches away from it while you're cutting, that's just the way you've got to do it.  Now then there's one big lever that controls this whole mess. Push it forward and the trolly moves forward passed the blade, pull it back and the trolly returns to the starting position.

There's other stuff like constantly turning the log on the trolly to get your boards like you want them and getting the speed of the trolly right depending on how hard the wood is, but the basic operation is running the log back and forth along the stationary blade.

Based on dad's face in this picture I reckon I made a suggestion he thought was fucking stupid and he's telling me why it was so.

The saw worked, but it had its drawbacks too.  We cut a fair amount of lumber with it to build all sorts of things, but you couldn't really aim for perfection with the machine.  You might be wanting to cut some good 10 ft long 2x4s, but we'd just take into account that one end might be an inch and half wide while the other was a good bit over two inches.  The blade never ran true as it were, but it still cut and as the old man would say, it was good enough for government work.

The old saw mill has since been retired permanently, and dad's got a newer homemade saw mill that is just as ridiculous for it's own reasons.

Next time I might talk a bit about something we built with the old mill's product.

Jake Up a Tree

It's been a little over a year since I wrote the first of these farm stories, and about six months since I posted the last one.  Hopefully I can get back on track here.

I’ve yet to mention the sale barn, which is odd as it served as a major focus of my life from the time I can remember up until I got out of high school.  Now when I say ‘Sale Barn’ I mean a livestock auction.  You’ve seen it in a movie or somewhere, hell you might have even been in one.  There’s a ring and auctioneer, stadium seating for buyers, sellers and other rural folk just there to pass the time.  On sale day, which is Monday by the way, Grandpa would usually make his way to the sale barn at some point and when I was little I would obviously be right at his heel.  When I was real little like that my favorite thing about the sale barn was the bubble gum man.  Now he was an older dude who hauled cattle to and from the sale barn for other folks, but he always kept a variety big bucket of Double Bubble in his truck and a bunch in his pocket, and was always just the bubble gum man to any of the younger set who happened to show up around the auction.  But moving along…

My story for today stems from my many years working at the sale barn (I’ll probably have a few more stories to remember from the place).  Our old man worked at the auction as well as both my brothers and this particular event has me and Jake, my older brother, trying to entreat a cow to return to her assigned corral.  I started working at the sale barn during the summer I turned 14, but this event I reckon was a few years after that and I figure Jake was around 20 at the time so I was 16 or so.

Cows can be crazy, if you didn’t know, and they’re really dumb to start with so a crazy cow is a mess to handle.  They’re unpredictable cause of the natural stupidity and they don’t even know what they want to do.  Well there are dozens of pens and stalls that the livestock can go in and then two large pastures at the far back of the sale barns property.  What transpired that allowed this particular crazy cow to find her way into the back pasture I’m uncertain of. Figure she broke through a gate or something.  Regardless Jake and I were tasked with getting her out of the pasture and back into one of the smaller pens near the front, an easy enough task on the surface.  But remember now she’s batshit insane.

A little more on the setting, along the fence of this pasture there’s a stand of trees that hang out from the fence about forty feet or more.  And the cow, showing a semblance of intelligence is hiding back in the trees.  As we're stomping across the pasture she comes to the edge of the clearing and gives us a glance.  We had been warned she was a handful, but in that little instant we saw that, yep she was crazy.  Before we even got to her she rushed out and headed up toward the open gate to the proper pens, and for a second we’re happy cause she’s gonna remedy this problem all on her own. Wrong!

She gets almost out of the pasture and wheels around and runs full steam back to the trees as far from the gate as she can.  This is when we formulate a plan.  Jake will go into the trees, get behind her and flush her out, and I’ll flank her guarding against her angling back away from the gate.  Now there are only two of us and we have to wrangle her through an area the size of a few football fields, but cows are stupid and usually are very obvious in their intentions so you can stay a step ahead.

As Jake gets into the tree line I set up out in the middle of the field as a deterrent from her looping back once he gets her moving.  I’m waiting for her to come busting out into the clearing, and waiting and waiting, and just as I’m about to start yelling after Jake to see what the holdup is, I see the top of a tree start to shake.  When it dawns on me that she must have chased Jake up a tree, he starts to yell out to me, confirming my thought.  Obviously I start to laugh at the notion of a crazy cow running my brother up a tree, but that humorous thought lasts all of about two seconds as she steps out from the trees.

There’s a good fifty yards between us, but as she stops and stares at me, with dumb cow malice in her dull eyes, I start to realize I’m pretty vulnerable out in the middle of the field.  And then she just starts to barrel right at me.  I’ve got that fifty yards between us, but I’ve got double that to the nearest batch of trees or the closest fence, reckon she would have got me if I tried for either of those.  And getting waylaid by a thousand pound cow isn’t exactly like a shiatsu.  My best bet was a small brush pile out in the middle of the field maybe fifteen or twenty yards from me, so I turned and bolted.  I could hear her coming up behind me, gaining ground, but I was pumping my legs and not risking losing a step looking back to check my odds of survival.  I reached the little island of branches and thorns and dove head first to safety, with maybe a couple yards to spare.  She didn’t follow and veered off swinging back towards the trees and away from the gate.

Jake stepped out of the tree line just as I was untangling myself from the brush pile.  We tried twice more to flush her out of the trees toward the far off gate, but to no avail, mainly because we ourselves wouldn’t stray too far from the protective trees or brush pile thus giving her ample room to get between us or around us.  We gave up and opted to let her ‘calm down’ some before trying again.

There’s no real moral to this story, except maybe to say that no matter what you’ve heard know that cows are incredibly dumb creatures.  That doesn’t mean I don’t respect that I tip the scales at a buck seventy-five and most cows got ten times that on me.  I’m not dumb, well at least not as dumb as cattle.

The nastiest smell I've ever encountered

On the farm there is a never ending array of foul scents that can and will assault your nose. A cow lot kinda smells, a hog lot is worse. Noxious weeds find their way into hay and can catch you by surprise with their odor. The same goes with snakes and other small animals, who weren't quick enough to get out of the way of the hay baler. When you come by a few hours later or the next day and pick up the bale it smells like dead. That's a common phrase where I come from, 'smells like dead'. No further description needed, it never really matters what's kicked it, it all smells the same. The smell of death plays a factor in this story, but scale and time augmented the odor me and my brother came across. First...

Molasses is used as a supplement for cattle and you can present it and a host of other minerals and supplements to the animals in a variety of ways. Hard little blocks they lick, lapping up small amounts of the stuff with each pass. A slightly less dry version of the little blocks which comes in what amounts to like a ten or twenty gallon little tub. Or you can opt for a liquid form that comes in a big plastic tank. The liquid tanks are pretty inventive, as they have a lick wheel. The cow licks the wheel, it turns and the sticky molasses clings to the wheel and the wheel remains covered in the stuff. That is until the tank runs empty and you have to refill it. The idea of refilling the tank is where my older brother and I come in here.

An old busted lick tank.  You can't verify this, but it's sitting in about the same spot where this little story takes place.

A guy in a truck comes by and just fills it up, but our tank had sat empty for a long time and filled up with twenty or thirty gallons of rain over a period of... I don't know how long. Well our old man tasked Jake and I with dumping the water so he could get it refilled. From a technical standpoint this is a simple task, and we set about it without knowing what we were in for. We got over to the barn lot the tank was in and popped off the top. It's like a big lid. Immediately we were staggered by the smell. There had been a little bit of the molasses mixture still in the tank when it began to fill with rain. This sweet easy to get at source of sustenance was a fly magnet. Alas flies are stupid and while they found their way into the tank easy enough a great host failed to exit. It's hard to say, but I honestly think it might have been into the tens of thousands range on how many flies made up that foul soup that rippled in the bottom of the tank.

We stepped back to compose ourselves. Jake's plan, which was a good one, was simple enough, get under one side and dump it over away from us. Side by side we grabbed the lip of the tank and hefted it up off the ground, the brown rather thick liquid pooling at the far end. It was heavier than we thought and our leverage on the tank wasn't as good as it could have been. We dropped our edge and in a rush the water rolled back to our side of the tank splashing up into our faces. I gagged, turned made it a few steps and let loose whatever was in my stomach. I was a bit preoccupied, but I think Jake managed not to throw up. The smell was... well it's hard to describe; stagnate water, pounds of dead flies, mixed with what was left of the sweet smelling molasses, all fermented nicely in the tank for weeks if not months.

It was heavier than we initially thought, but we could dump it over, we knew that much. Jake got a little angry at me cause it took me a few minutes to settle myself enough to walk up to the tank alongside him. We had stirred it all up and now the smell was constantly emanating from the mess inside. I gave up about halfway through our second attempt, which really pissed Jake off. After another few minutes of pacing around I finally walked up to the tank and we upturned the damn thing. I can still see that shit spilling out onto the ground, uhhgg.

Promptly we got back over to the house and I jumped in the shower. It's been probably damn near twenty years and there has yet to be anything I've encountered that rivals that unholy stench.

The high cost of child labor

I've already talked about being designed to work on the farm. A farmer has kids and while they get to be kids often enough they put them to work. And as one of those kids you're willing to drive a tractor, stack hay or feed the cattle whenever you have to. You might bitch about it sometimes, but adults gripe about working just as much if not more. The inherent problem of being the farmer and putting your young'n to work is that they aren't exactly what you'd call a skilled laborer yet.

Me and my brothers cost the farming operation thousands of dollars over the years. At fifteen or a little older your ability to really think ahead and see potential problems (or just your surroundings) isn't fully developed. My brothers might claim they didn't rack up that big of a damage bill, but they're liars if they do. I myself can remember a number of instances where I tore the shit out of equipment, or didn't pay attention to what I was doing and wasted a days work doing something that would mean I'd have to redo it all the next day, or worse the old man would have to fix what I screwed up.

A small example, I was going to clean out the radiator on the tractor. This is a simple task, you just take a little air jet valve on the end of a compressed air hose and blow the dust and debris out of the radiator. The pump for the air tank was in this little shed and so I pulled up to the shed and was going to stick the front of the tractor just inside the door. I pulled a little too far in and the tractor's exhaust pipe caught the top of the door and broke right off. It's a simple mistake that a normal person would make, but a teenager is a bit more prone to such accidents. And it cost dad a couple hours trying to weld the exhaust back on.

A more costly example which I think cost nearly a couple thousand dollars to fix involved me, a hay mower, and a manhole cover. I was mowing hay in a small field that was sort of in town. So there was a sewer line that ran under the property. Now I knew the manhole cover was there, I was shown where it was. I just misjudged how far away it was from me and the tractor. I figured I'd hit it on the next round, but I caught the end of the mower on the heavy metal disk and it wasn't pretty. This is a sophisticated piece of machinery that costs tens of thousands of dollars and I quite nearly broke it in half.

In both of these and every other instance where I cost time and money, dad never got mad. I mean I was always aware of his dissatisfaction with having to deal with whatever the hell I broke, but besides a heavy sigh and an undirected 'what the hell, boy' he never gave me too hard a time about these things when they happened (after the fact he'd talk a lot of shit though). And while mom and dad's bottom line was aided by having three able bodied sons to put to work, their profit margin was constantly being undercut by our youthful inadequacies. And I suppose if those unexpected costs of child labor were too much they'd have gone about their business another way.

Hound Dogs: A photo essay

This is my second photo essay (I'm not certain how many of these I'll do, but my family has plenty pictures of the hounds) and dogs comprise a number of my childhood memories so here we go.

WARNING: Some of these photos have raccoon hides prominently displayed. These dogs are made for hunting what do you expect. Plus children with guns, we learned responsibility early on in our life.

This is me and my first dog Curly Tail. She isn't a coon hound, but I'll get into that at a later date.

Seems like most folk have read or heard of Where the Red Fern Grows. In a way my brothers and I grew up in that world, Jake and Abe gravitated to hunting a bit more than myself, I'm just not as outdoorsy as them I guess. We grew up with puppies and dogs and learned how to train them and work them and take care of them. Puppies and dogs are fun for little kids, but we learned quickly that the dogs we kept were there for a reason.

Here is a generic hound dog as it would appear outside my Grandparents house. There were usually at least four or five at any one time. Dad never really had coon hounds, we always had a lot of dogs at our place, but like Curly Tail those dogs will wait for another photo essay.

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This is me and Freckles, who looks like a Plot hound pup, sitting on grandma and grandpa's back porch.

There are a lot of different types of coonhounds we had over the years, Plots were probably the breed we had the least amount of. Mainly it was blueticks or black and tans (which were really leopard curs, but that's hard to explain, and irrelevant). And the only real hunting the dogs were used for was coon hunting.

Abe and a batch of pups, though I'm not certain which litter this is. They are of the line of Bob though.

Bob was one of our grandpa's best dogs and grandpa bred him a couple times. Bob was called Bob because he had a naturally nub tail. And I think my older brother has had pups that are three generations beyond him and the bob tail still shows up in a couple pups. And they're still really good dogs.

Here's another litter of pups with my brothers. Note the little guy in the foreground with the short tail, These are Bob's grand-kids.

I'll be generous and say Jake is fourteen (he looks younger) with the .22 here. And that looks like a possum the hound is sniffing at. Possums are vile little creatures, we did the forest a favor removing it from the ecosystem.

We hunted and killed things, that how it works, and if you don't like it tough. Granted the possum above didn't serve as anything other than target practice, which could have been accomplished in other ways. Did I mention possums are nasty little bags of mean though.

These walls are after two separate hunting seasons. Abe in front of the one and Jake and Dewey in front of the other. Dewey was our grandpa's close friend and hunting partner. Those are some blueticks they've got there.

The hides on the wall aren't trophies, they're money. Coon season takes place in the winter, after the momma coons have cut loose their young ones. They typically move at night so you hunt at night, it ain't an easy time trudging around the woods following your dogs on cold winter nights. It's done for a reason. Grandpa was a farmer. Not a lot of money comes in on a farm in late winter and so you find other ways to earn some cash. A typical coon season they'd wind up with a hundred hides or a few more. And when you'd sell them they'd average twelve bucks or so. That's over a thousand dollars that Grandpa and his pal Dewey relied on year after year.

Here is Jake and a few of his dogs taken over a decade after the previous picture. That black one on the right is Ace, he's got a long tail, but he's still got a lot of Bob in him.

My older brother still hunts and works his hounds. He hunts year round, but only shoots the coons out during the season. He enjoys training the dogs and seeing a hound progress. The money from the pelts is nice as well. I could claim it's a heritage thing and that he's keeping this old way of life going in these modern times and all that bullshit, but it's better to just say the truth. Hearing a dog you've trained catch coon's scent and bellow as he tracks it through the timber is rewarding and walking up on it as it barks up a tree is one of the purest forms of teamwork between you and the dog.

For me personally it's cold in the Missouri woods in January, which is why I never cared for it all that much.  But I'll defend the reasoning.  If you've never hunted you probably just don't get it, but trust me it's rewarding.

Abe can't let go. One of the funniest things ever.

For most folk this would be a horrific story about the time their little brother damn near broke his back. That is not how it played out in front of my twelve year old eyes. Every escalation that occurs in this story only made it funnier to me. For the briefest moment I was kinda scared for Abe's life, but only briefly. First a picture, taken a few minutes after the story. I show it first so that you can get a feel for the players involved, save Grandma, who took the photograph.

So we're all pulling stoic faces here like we're in a god damned tintype. The big fella in the cowboy hat is Dennis, my old man's friend. Then his son David, who is not dressed for hauling hay. Then Jake, me and Abe in descending order. And the old man, note his and Abe's faces.  Abe is frazzled, and I get a hint of relief in Dad's expression.

Look at the photo again, see the hay wagon and the layers of bales that rise out of frame. The top of that stack is where our story starts.

So we loaded the wagon, this was later in the afternoon and I think it was the last load of the day. Now to get to where we unloaded the hay we had to drive between these two sheds which had a low hanging electric cable strung between them. We had taken the tractor and wagon through here a number of times and it required someone on the stack to lift the power line up and over and guide it back until the wagon was passed (it didn't have juice running through it or the rubber on the tires kept us from grounding, I don't know). I had previously done this without fail, and on this last time also handled the task. This time though Abe had ridden in from the field with me on top of the stack. And as we approached the wire everything seemed fine.

The tractor was inching along as the wire reached the stack and I reach down and pulled it up above the first row. Now then the tricky part here (I say this for Abe's sake) is to step over the wire as it skids along the top row of bales. I do this easily, as I've already done it before, Abe on the other hand latches onto the thick cable. Again the tractor is moving very slowly so he's got time, with about ten or twelve feet to go before he gets swept off the back of the stack, but he won't let go of the wire. I'm yelling at him, from the ground Dad is yelling at him to just let go, but he couldn't. He did attempt to step over once or twice, but the movement of the wagon and the wire and everything must have been too much for Abe. Look at the picture again, look how old he was; he's a little kid and for whatever reason he got scared in that moment. I can't fault him for freezing up and just hanging on.

But hanging on meant he was about to get yanked off the back of that wagon. Perhaps I froze too, as I didn't reach him before we completely passed under the wire and he slid off. What happened in the next thirty seconds comprise one of the most vivid memories in my little pea brain. He slid off, but he didn't come free of the wire instantly, he bobbed twice. He was about right in the middle of the span and it had some spring to it. He sank then sprang up and sank again. When the cable tried to pull him up a third time he lost his grip and fell. We'll say it was ten, at best twelve feet to the ground, but again he is tiny. That's a helluva fall for a seven year old.

We're in an old barn lot and the ground is pretty much just dirt, there are rocks here and there, but luckily where he lands is just solid earth. Abe fell for what seemed like minutes to me as I watched from the hay stack. And he landed flat on his back, sorta spread eagle in the dirt. This is bad, right? It was all kinda funny to me up until he hit the dirt. It was odd that he wouldn't let go of the wire, he looked funny getting drug along the top of the stack, and then it was funnier watching him flail as he bobbed up and down in the air. When he hit the ground though it was hard, and it looked bad, and for an instant I was scared shitless he was really hurt. Then he moved.

He raised his head, which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He's flat out spread eagle and completely motionless and then his head tilted up, just his neck his shoulders still firmly on the ground, and seemingly expels every ounce of air in his little lungs in one long exhalation. In that moment he was a Loony Tunes character, he was the coyote falling off the cliff. Just the look on his face and that forced exaggerated breath puts a smile on my face every time I think of it (I'm a dick of a brother I know this). All he needed to complete the scene would have been for his feeble little hand to raise one of those wooden signs with OUCH! painted on it.

But he didn't raise a sign, he just lay there in the dirt, motionless. Dad stood him up, which Abe managed rather well, and proceeded to check him over. Abe could stand, he was fully aware of everything, and besides his eyes being the size of saucers seemed to be in working order. Something wasn't right though as a long moment stretched with the old man kneeling in front of his littlest. Abe seemed incapable of drawing a breath. His little feet began to shuffle in place as he tried to gasp for air, but his lungs wouldn't work. Simply put he couldn't breathe. As a parent in this situation you want your kid to start breathing again, so Dad shook him a little and gives him a couple good swats to the back. Sorta knock the wind back into him.

Now this is where Grandma comes into it. I'll be honest I was climbing down off the hay stack when she reached the situation, but as I came around the side of the wagon she had slid in front of Abe and was coaxing him to restart his lungs by grabbing him by the shoulders and yelling 'BREATHE' into his face.  It's her youngest grandchild she was rather concerned, but it was funny to see.

Finally he sucked in a huge gulp of air and began to breathe regularly after a second. The fact that he couldn't breathe does seem alarming in hindsight, but the scene was funny. The adults yelling at him, his failed attempts to do something so basic, and the whole while he looked in perfect working order. I was twelve, he didn't look in pain so I figured he was fine, obviously there are innumerable things that could have been wrong, but I didn't know those things at the time. In the end he was fine, and as soon as we got home we relayed the story to Mom, my version considerably lighter than Abe's and Dad's.

Guest Post: A hired hand's musings

As I mentioned before I was designed to be a hired hand, but my parents were inclined to sometimes hire additional help beyond me and my brothers.  And in keeping with the summer hay work run I've had on the last couple farm stories I've got a guest post from an old high school buddy of mine who was recruited one summer to work with me out in the fields.  Nathan gives you a damn good overall sense of how our little lifestyle plays out.

It’s been fourteen years since the summer I worked with Zeb putting up hay. Hands down it was the greatest summer of my teenage years. Filled with the freedom of driving, beer, and puppy love. Although the things that stick out most are ones that happened while working with Zeb. When I look back at it I remember almost dying on a tractor, jumping off a cliff that seemed to be fifty ft. high but was probably closer to thirty, a juggling hobo, the sale barn, and hay, lots of hay.

My day started at 10 a.m. getting to the house to find Zeb fresh in from mowing. We would rake and bale in the mornings go in for some grub and Kool-Aid. Then the real work started. One of us would drive the tractor while the other stacked, we would switch from load to load. While one of us was driving, the other one would stand in the trailer while a big green machine would pick the bale off the ground and put it at about eye level on the trailer (hard to explain what the pop-up loader is with out seeing it, might do a post on hay equipment at some point). This was nice on the upper tiers but when it’s over 100 degrees out and the loose hay sticks to you like glue, pulling them down was a chore. Zeb has told you about the beloved lofts so I’ll spare you with those horror stories. One day while heading back to the barn with a full load on I noticed a train coming so I hit the brakes and nothing happened. While holding back the urge to shit myself I went through the crossing, the train missing the back of the trailer by a few seconds. I’d like to tell you something like I never felt so alive, but the truth is I was just happy as hell I wasn’t dead.

While we worked our asses off most the time, on occasion we would go to the quarry to cool off. This place is like something you might see on a post card…beautiful. Sheer cliffs on one side and crazy scenery on the other. Once we hit the water Zeb started telling us stories of his brother’s friends jumping off the cliffs. Being that I’m scared to death of heights I nodded and smiled hoping it wouldn’t come up that we should do it ourselves. Didn’t work. Zeb was the first to go, went like it was nothing so of course I had to go. That first time it took what seemed like hours to work up the courage to jump. Once I did though it was on! There’s nothing like the rush of falling, smashing into the water and swimming up and up and bursting out of the water gasping for air. This was something that we did a few more times that summer, bringing in some other friends to make the jump.

I’m not sure if he’ll remember this, or remember telling me I was full of shit, but it’s true. One morning while driving to work I crossed a bridge and happened to look over and by the water there was a man juggling. He was sitting on the bank of the creek in a heavy purple coat juggling. This was only about a mile from Zeb’s house so I ran in to tell him. He informed me that I was crazy! We got on the tractors and headed out, passing the bridge where I had seen the guy juggling. In the 10 min that passed he had packed up and left. I assure you there were no early morning drugs involved, the guy was there! (I don't remember this, though there very well could have been a transient moving through the countryside.)

Although my main job was putting up hay, on some Monday’s we would work at the sale barn. For me this involved standing by a gate and giving Zeb hand signs for numbers, so he could put the livestock in the appropriate place. For anyone who has been on a farm you know the smell can be fairly rank. In a sale barn multiply that by 100! Minus the smell this was a pretty cake job. I only seen one guy get trampled by a cow, an hour later he was back at work.

Before this summer I had hauled hay only a few times usually as the driver. This was the first time, and the last that I would call putting up hay a job. Looking back I don’t recall the work being horrible. It was dirty and hot, but enjoyable. I could be off on my calculations and if so please correct this. but that summer we put up around 20,000 bales of hay. 300 a day for three months. How can putting up that much hay be enjoyable? It’s all in who you work with.

His calculations are about right, a 300 a day average is close.  Some days it might rain or we just might not put up any, others we could haul in nearly a thousand from the field.

I don't have much else to add to his recollections. I do want to say thank you to Nathan Lea for taking the time to comb through his memory and write it all down.  I will agree that working in the hay is dirty and hot, but more often than not fun and enjoyable.

Anyone can stack hay. Not as good as me though.

So I've slipped on the farm stories here, but I've got one today and then a guest post next weekend.

Candid shot of me around 17 or 18, with a freshly stacked truck.

Me and that old white Ford moved a lot of bales together.

My last post was in regard to hay and since we're in the middle of summer, barring any rain, every day is a day for hay right now for my old man back on the farm. And the title of this post might be clouded by years of not actually stacking hay, but in my prime, as it were, I fully would have stood by that statement. At twelve and thirteen I was the little guy on the crew, so I couldn't toss the bales up onto the wagon or truck all day. With that physical deficiency I was stuck on the wagon stacking what was tossed up to me. Now whatever I stacked had to travel, sometimes only a few hundred yards others it would have to go miles. It had to withstand rough ass ground out in a field or coming up a steep slope from a bottom pasture. The stack also had to withstand speed out on the road.

Different techniques could be employed to strengthen the stack. Simple things like crisscrossing the layers or stair stepping the tiers as you go up, and then obviously tying down the stack. It all sounds simple, and well it is, still though the ability to stack hay while balancing on top of a moving wagon while it bucks and shimmies across the less than even ground of a hay field is no easy feat. And simply put I was damn good at it. I lost a stack here and there, but when your bale count gets up into six figures you're bound to have a few problems. Plus I can still blame some of that on poor driving and not my stacks.

As I grew I had to step off the wagon and actually throw bales, but I also continued to stack quite a bit. But when you start on the job training at thirteen by the time you're twenty you're an old pro. And all I'm saying is that for a few years back in the day I'd a been starting stacker on a hay hauling all star team, if there was such a thing.

A hayloft is hot

Hay was a big part of my life when I was growing up, as I've mentioned before. And for anyone that may not fully understand the reason for hay it is very simple. Grass doesn't grow very well in the winter, but cows still need to eat, and that's where hay comes in. It's stored grass, and there are different ways to store it. Massive rows of big round bales, which I've touched on before; suppose silage would be another way, but I'm not getting into explaining silage right now; then you have hay barns. These could be large open air pole barns, long machine shed looking buildings, and then of course your old classic looking barn with a hayloft.

A hayloft is a great use of space and convenience, for feeding out the hay. Not so much when it comes to putting the hay in during the summer. You need specialized equipment, not counting the baler, tractors and wagons to get the goods from the field to the barn. Specifically an elevator to get everything from ground level up into the loft. You need at least two people, one putting on the hay at the bottom of the elevator, and one stacking it in the loft, usually you'll have at least two ol'boys in the barn.

Now then all of that is preamble to a specific story. The first time I damn near had a heat stroke. I was twelve, maybe thirteen and we had a full out crew working. My older brother was out on the ground throwing bales on the elevator, and then dad, my uncle Glen (this is I think his first mention, he gets his own whole post in the coming weeks) and myself up in the loft. We had been at it all afternoon and had been packing this particular barn for a few days. It was just about full and we were stuffing every last corner we could right up to the rafters. With me being small, light and all I was perched way up in the loft with dad and Glen tossing bales up from the elevator to me to stack.

This is in the middle of summer and it is hot, we'll say like 90 or 95 degrees outside. Out in the field, or just anywhere outside working in that heat is easy, but being in the loft changes things. First and foremost I'm way up next to the roof, a metal conduit for heat to just build up. It's a damn oven, doubly so because I'm surrounded by hay bales, acting like an insulation trapping in every bit of heat it can. Add to all that the dust and confinement, and oh yea the fact that I'm thirteen and working my ass off trying to keep up with these two grown men.

So I start to feel a little peaked as we're working and I sorta gave up and sat down. And I remember my uncle's face when he looked up at me a few rows above his head. He grabbed my legs and pulled me down off the stack and just said 'let's get you outside'. Apparently I had the complexion of a ghost. I shut the whole job site down as dad and Glen got me down to the ground and shoved the water jug in my hands. About a minute after I was on the ground I started puking, odd that is what folks do when you get overheated. Fairly quickly after that my day was called and I was taken back to the house.

We had just gotten central air conditioning and it felt pretty good when I got in the house, but quickly that change manifested in another bout of vomiting. So I just went back out on the front porch to cool down. I remember there was a discussion about giving me one of the old man's beers, as it supposedly would help in some way. After a while I started feeling better and the episode passed.

Simply put a hayloft is hot as hell.

Redneck boys photo essay 1: Courtesy of Grandma

I requested a picture of me or my brothers on a tractor for the bit a few weeks ago. I get a stack of photos in the mail well after that posted, but I'm one to use the tools in front of me and so the idea for a short photo essay comes to me as I perused the snapshots of my younger days.

This is obviously all three of us with two important things for a country boy to have. A Grandpa and a horse, said grandpa keeps just for you. A note about this moment is that one-year-old Abe does not seem too pleased about being in the saddle with me.

To keep this short I'm going to narrow the focus of the selection to photos relevant to posts I've already put up. Two categories with a picture a piece for the three of us.

I've mentioned they start us learning to work on the farm early. Here is Jake at about two, getting the feel for the old Ford.

Here's me, sporting both the bib-overalls and boots. The levers and heavy machinery there are for a drill, when I was learning how to drill a water well. About four-years-old here.

Another bit of machinery that you ought to know how to run is a planter. Here is Grandpa getting Abe ready to go plant some corn.

We do work a great deal, and begin learning at a young age on how to be of use around the farm, but there is also plenty of leisure activities for young ones on the farm.

We fished quite a bit when we were little. It was one of Gramp's past times for us. This is Jake with what I assume is his first fish.

When you're a boy on the farm and not fishing you might take a goat out for a stroll around the yard. You want to know the most country thing in this pic? It's not the rural setting, the horse in the background, nor the goat on a damn leash. It's the Funk's Seed big G hat on my head, trust me.

And even when you have time off as a redneck boy, the adults tend to keep working. And like Abe here, all you can do is hang-out and watch from afar.

But above all the one thing a country boy needs, as anyone who read Where the Red Fern Grows knows is a hound dog pup.

Grandma sometimes, has issue framing her shots just right. And as a man with a degree in film making it's hard to use such a shot.  But us with our hound pups is about spot on for our childhood, plus Abe's rocking the bibs.

If you notice in the shot with Jake and the fish above, there are dogs in the background. I think my next photo essay will be the unveiling of a whole new level of country, and the role dogs played in my hillbilly upbringing.

Not some high and mighty garden maze

Everyone, I think, has seen big round hay bales. They tend to range in size from abut five feet to six feet around. Most folk see them along the road as they drive through the countryside. They're an easy way to feed a bunch of cattle for a stretch of time, provided you have a tractor with a hay spike to move them. That's an obvious thing, hay to feed cattle, but to a bunch of redneck kids around the world big round bales are so much more.

One round bale out in the middle of a field ain't much good to a child, but a row of them is a country wonderland. In most cases you line them up in rows in the corner of a pasture or lot. More bales equals more fun. The most obvious thing to do is simply to climb up onto them, not an easy task sometimes for a four or five year old. And then once you've achieved the summit the new challenge is to maneuverer this treacherous landscape. Bales stacked end to end are easy enough to run across, but there are the occasional gaps which have to be vaulted over. The stack is never uniform which means there are always fissures scattered here and there. A mean trick is to assist your younger and much smaller brother up onto the stack and them drop him into one of these five feet deep holes. But you must be careful because all these bales are round and can allow for small crawl spaces along the ground that might lead them to freedom.

This brings up a bit of group fun. When you have these bales in large numbers, dozens and dozens of them all stacked together they create a hell of a hide and seek arena. Nooks and crannies abound. Or a rousing game of tag could be played out on top of the bales; they provide a well defined field of play, and the gaps allow for a cat and mouse aspect that you don't get on say a gym floor. A bonus here is that short of falling completely to the ground below you're not likely to get hurt. The bales are like big round soft pads.

Every summer these hillbilly play lands are built for us country rug-rats and then slowly whittled away as the hay gets fed throughout the winter. But while they last they are a simple pleasure all little ones should get to experience.

Riding the Fender; safety is relative

Most tractors have one seat, which you might think would impede two, three or four people from riding on one at the same time. It doesn't. Safety on a farm, in most regards, is a relative term. Is riding the fender of a tractor safe? Most folk would say no, most definitely not, in fact it is rather dangerous. In my experience riding the hub is not particularly dangerous. I'm not saying it's as safe as being strapped into the back of a Motor Trend top safety pick sedan, but I never got ran over by a tractor, nor did my brothers, or anyone else I know. Well I did actually know of a couple old boys who got ran over by a tractor, but the circumstances were different from what I'm talking about here.

So when you're a little one on the farm and the old man is headed out to grind feed or put a bale of hay out for the cows or do something else that you can tag along for you ride on the tractor with him. My dad had this old IH Farmall tractor for the bulk of my youth...

As you can see it's got nice big flat topped fenders. Ideally designed for someone to sit comfortably, though a tad precariously. This is another one of those instances that everyone has, in which you do something and never realize what someone outside your community might find odd or dangerous or whatnot. You always realize there is a bit of danger to it, even as a little kid. Mom and Grandma, or whatever motherly entity might be around at the time, tells you to hang on tight before you even leave the house to chase after Dad. Once you're situated up on the tractor the old man reminds you to hold on. And you do, until you get the hang of it of course.

Very quickly you find you're able to balance pretty well as you're cruising down the road. Then you start exploring your bounds, well at least as much as you can perched atop an eighteen inch wide piece of sheet metal. You don't hang on at all, you're reckless and you ain't gonna fall. Below you there's this massive tire speeding around and around, it's thick tread a blur, and you hang your foot out in front of it. Tentatively you ease your foot toward it and as it makes contact your foot is sent jittering away from the tire. For an eight year old that's fairly exhilarating. Then you reach out with your hand; that hurts, not bad, but it isn't pleasant.

The other main tractor around the farm was grandpa's old Ford.

Accommodating passengers wasn't quite as easy with old blue. Basically you just stood right next to whoever was driving and tried not to accidentally bump into one of the many levers. Unlike the IH, Ford seemed to design their tractor to discourage passengers. Which forces you to consider another option.

On the Ford and also with the International, once there were 3 potential passengers, me and my brothers, you could catch a ride by standing on the drawbar (the little metal tongue on the back that you attach stuff to the tractor by, for those who might not be automatically familiar with the term 'drawbar'). This position was rather dangerous no matter how you saw it. You're standing on a four or five inch wide piece of slick metal, while clinging to any handhold you can manage. Granted you're behind the tractor so if you fall off you won't get run over, unless of course you're pulling a wagon or some other sort of heavy equipment. Odds are you are pulling something, sorta what the damn tractor is for. Even here though you temp fate. You'll lean down and drag one foot along the ground with the tractor going at top speed.

A sort of point I'm wanting to make here is that there are few occupations that might thrust your child into a somewhat dangerous situation, simply because that's the way it is. Riding around on the tractor was a fun thing for me to do as a kid, it'd be a fun thing for any kid. And that opportunity for me to tempt fate by dragging my foot across a tractor tire going 20 mph, wouldn't exist if the old man was a bank manager. Now I suppose there could be fun things for an 8 year old to do if they tagged along with their bank manager parent to work, I don't know what those things are though. My dad's office was a barn yard, to put it in the simplest terms, and a barn yard is a fun and somewhat dangerous place for a child. I reckon mom and dad could have denied me and my brothers the fun of riding around on the tractor, but going back to an idea I hit on in an earlier one of these stories you learn on the fly. You watch dad drive the tractor for a few years, perched on the fender, then one day he wants you to get behind the wheel. And guess what you're a natural at it.