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In the 1950s, in the old days before my father started
harvesting his annual hay crop in the form of compact bales, he gathered the
hay loose and filled the bigger (west) haymow with it. I was too young to help out, but I often went
along for the ride. These farm practices
are long gone (except maybe among the Amish).
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My father used a “buck-rake” bolted to the front of his
pickup truck to scoop the loose hay up off the fields and bring it to the
barn. It was like a huge comb, with many
long wooden iron-tipped pikes as teeth sticking out in front at about ground
level. He could lower it to graze the
ground and pick up the hay, or raise it up a bit for the transport of a full
load, by manipulating a large lever just outside the driver’s side window of
his truck.
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The hay was first prepared by a couple of archaic
two-wheeled machines that were originally designed to be pulled by a horse team
but were now adapted for towing by my father’s pickup truck. First the hay was cut with a two-wheeled
mower contraption that had a seat for a man on it to manipulate the right-side
mechanical cutter blade arm via levers and gears, thus raising it, lowering it,
putting it into cutting gear, etc. The
wheels of the unit drove the cutting blades, which were like a wide giant hair
clipper throughout the length of its long arm.
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After the hay was dried a bit by the sun, a second similarly
wheel-driven, truck-towed unit was used to dry it further. This was the “tedder,” and it went over the
fresh-cut hay to ted it, i.e., to scoop it and fluff it up for better air-drying
with mechanically rising and falling forks that tossed up the hay in its wake. My grandfather Wesley C. Barlow sat on the
seat of each of these machines, controlling their levers and gears, as my
father pulled them with the truck. I
remember in later years playing on and around that old, now-retired, tedder as
it rusted down out behind my grandfather’s old poultry Incubator Cellar. My sister has a photo of her on it as a
little kid.
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Gathering the hay in the field was exciting, and I loved to
ride along. The tedded and dried hay
would lie in rows, and my father would collect it into bigger piles with the
buck-rake on the pickup truck. When he
had a full load all lined up, he would gun the engine and ram the pile fast –
boom! The impact with the huge pile of
hay was a great thrill! He would then
lever the buck-rake’s teeth upward to transport the hay to the barn, and he
could barely see around the load, craning his head out the window. When crossing highways, he had to ask me,
riding shotgun, if the automobile traffic was clear or not.
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Once at the barn, he would drive into the barn floor’s
center then lower the buck-rake teeth to the floor, and then back the truck
out, leaving a big pile of hay. The barn
had a rail up at its peak, going east-west along its ridge. From this rail a huge pulley system with a
hay-fork array was lowered, a cluster of big hay blades that were driven and
kicked deep into the bottom of the hay pile from all sides and somehow locked
to clutch it.
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The barn had a system of ropes (big old hemp ones over an
inch-and-a-half thick) and big wooden pulleys.
The hay-fork with its big load was hoisted straight up by a rope tied
via pulleys to our 1953/4 Chevy automobile, which my mother drove the dozen or so
feet away from the barn necessary to haul it up. My father stood by watching to yell “Whoa!”
at the appropriate moment.
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When the hay-fork had reached the barn’s peak, it then
traversed laterally on the rail over the big mow on the barn’s west side. And there it hung. A smaller rope was attached to the hay-fork
and was its trip-rope. My grandfather
always authoritatively manned this rope.
One yank and it dumped the whole load of hay. Whoosh!
One time I conned my grandfather into letting me pull the rope to dump
the hay. It was a small child’s thrill
to control this spectacular part of the work, and I remember seeing the immense
clouds of hay dust rise in the rays of late-afternoon sun coming in the west
window.
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However, I got carried away by this new-found sense of power. I decided to play a joke on my father
because, after all, he always played jokes on everybody else (and if you knew
him, you know this is true). He would
get into the mow both before and after the fork dump to manually fork and
re-distribute the hay. I thought it
would be great fun to dump the load on him when he was under it. (In the years since, every single time I
think of this episode, I am aghast: I
could have killed him, broken his neck!)
Eagerly anticipating, I timed it until he was right beneath the fork,
and I tripped the rope. My grandfather,
who was standing right beside me and who had given me this job, was
aghast.
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My father emerged from under the pile of hay looking, not
quite angry, but a bit embarrassed and uncomfortable. That job of working the trip-rope was my
first experience of being fired from a job.
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One more early memory from those long-gone days of loose hay
gathering stays with me. It has to do
with a frightening lightning storm and the entrance on the scene of a local
hero who was mostly a stranger to me before.
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My father was out in the field across the road, picking up
hay with the buck-rake, and I had wandered up the street towards town. It may have been one of my early runaway
exploits or just an example of my curious rambling nature; I cannot remember my
motive. But I was a little guy who was
blocks away from home when this tremendous thunder and lightning storm
blackened the afternoon sky. I had never
seen anything like it and was frozen in place with awe. A big storm was
coming in fast.
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The older kids in town, those old enough to ride bicycle,
decided that someone should take me home.
Ray Abbott didn’t hesitate. He
told me to sit side-saddle on the cross-bar of his bicycle (first experience of
this for me) and hold on tight to the middle of the handle bar, and he pedaled me home. I remember looking straight upward as we went
down the street, and I saw brilliant, flashing, intertwined forks of lightning
in a display like nothing that’s ever impressed me since, followed by deafening
cracks and booms. Chilling cosmic
chaos! Ray saw my father about to leave
the field with his last load of hay and rode me right up to the truck. Safe inside it, I was still mesmerized by the
storm.
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Years later, Ray was also known as the bravest diver in town
at our old swimming hole, “The Willow” on Stillwater Creek, and he mastered the
art of the high shallow dive off a tree limb.
The control and raw courage he showed in his dives was awesome to behold,
and I never saw anyone duplicate them.
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Ray was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967 serving in the 7th
Marines at An Hoa. This tragedy sent
shockwaves through the entire town. Two-and-a-half
years later I was out at An Hoa with the 1st Marine Division, and it
was still a wild untamed combat zone.
Ray was a few years older than me and very quiet, so I never got to know
him well, but I wish so much that I had.
I will always associate him with those days of old, and he was an early hero of mine.
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That old time era of loose hay gathering ended when area
farmers started baling hay. The solid
square bales stacked well in the lofts, and you could get a lot more hay packed
into the barn. My father’s operation
wasn’t big enough to justify investment in the new baling equipment, so he
hired out that job to neighboring farmers.
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When I came of age for heavy lifting, we picked up the bales
from the field and loaded them on the back of the pickup truck, 45 bales per
load, tied on tight. Then we manhandled
them up to the top of the loft. When the
green pasturing season ended, from Halloween to Beltane, my job was to climb the lofts
and toss bales down to feed the cows. That
seasonal fodder cycle is still timeless.
Only the specific technology changes.
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-Zenwind.
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