The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

I was sitting on the south side of the little—and old—granary here on the farm the other day. It was midafternoon, the sun was shining on me, it was one of those perfect early summer days. Not too hot; not too cold; just right.

Off to the north, I could hear the rhythmic thumping of the neighbor’s hay baler, as it was pounding out small square bales of hay. Small square bales of summer, really, or so I have always thought, because when you break one open in the middle of winter, what else can it be but a captured moment of sun and summer and, best of all, a darned baler performing as it should have. Which they don’t always do.

Listening to that hay baler reminded me of the first few years here on the farm, starting a small beef herd, farming this small farm, and baling my own hay. This of course was before plumbing and heating and refrigeration and a hardware store and teaching became more profitable. Which didn’t take much.

While growing up on a farm in Iowa, I had a different opinion of baling, and although I still have some fond memories of those days, none of those thoughts quite match the treasured knowledge that I got when I did it for myself. When I planted the alfalfa; mowed it; raked it; baled it; stacked it in the shed.

Back then, as a young boy, some of my favorite memories involve sitting under the hayrack during a quick shower, rejoicing in my father’s sorrow that we weren’t going to bale anymore today. No more baling today! 

Another of my best memories involves a John Deere B tractor which wouldn’t start after lunch, which in turn held up everything else. I remember hoping it would never start, and that we could rest in the shade, again under the hay rack. Lying back, chewing on a stalk of timothy, letting the dads involved figure out what was wrong. Lying back, matter of fact, hoping for stuff to go wrong.

A couple of us boys were goofing around on the hay rack one time, the baler having not pushed out the first bale for us to grab with our hay hooks. There were two of us, since neither one of us barely outweighed a bale. Somehow one of us, while we were fake sword fighting with the hay hooks, dropped one of them off the front of the hay rack. I remember watching it go under. I remember the pop of the hay rack tire as it was punctured by the metal hay hook. I remember two things.

One: Oh boy! This is going to hold up hay baling. And two: Oh heck! We’re going to be reprimanded pretty hotly for this dumb stunt.

Apparently, sitting in the sun by my current-day granary, hearing that hay baler and thinking about all my hay baling memories, the best of them involve not baling hay. They in fact kind of orbit around the whole hay baling experience.

Well. I have two orbital memories left to tell. One is being allowed to straddle the front of the tractor like it was a horse and ride down the road, most likely going home with a load. In light of our modern awareness of the dangers of farming, likely some of what our fathers allowed us to do would put us in child custody and them in court today.

But we didn’t know that, I guess. Really, how dangerous could sitting up there be? Nothing to hang on to.  A hot muffler right behind you. A radiator fan ready to eat your foot off beneath you on one side. Spark plugs ready to shock you on the other. Several wheels to squash you if you fell off.

But I didn’t fall off.

One more memory. We farmed some land a couple of miles away on of course gravel roads, and discovered that as young boys, we could grab the hay rack, that dad was pulling with the Allis Chalmers, from behind and ski behind it. We weren’t going that fast, I suppose ten or twelve miles per hour. That was really fun!

We did it several times that day. It was great fun. Until ma saw that night that there were no soles left on our shoes. They had been ground off by the gravel road.  That meant buying new ones, which was supposed to only happen once a year, when country school started in the fall. Ouch. Got scolded for that.

So. It seems all my best memories of baling hay don’t involve baling hay, just trying to bale hay.

Sitting in the sun reminiscing about it is much more fun.