by Jerry Nelson
The most efficient way to harvest this hay would be to hire someone with a modern hay cutter thingy. Taking this path would require no more effort than changing channels on the TV.
Being a throwback, I chose a different path. When the hay is ready to cut, I fire up my venerable John Deere A tractor, which was manufactured at the close of the Second World War. I hitch the A to my No. 5 sickle mower, a machine that bears a patent date of 1936.
Then I mow our farmyards and our road ditches, jostling over the innumerable humps and bumps. The A has Armstrong power steering, so every little pebble is telegraphed through the steering wheel to your hands, up your arms and shoulders, and into your brain. This is why we throwbacks tend to have a subpar IQ.
The sickle inevitably bites into something that doesn’t agree with it and it loses one of its triangular sections. Cutting hay with a busted sickle section is like eating sweet corn with a missing front tooth: neither pretty nor efficient.
The sickle must be removed so that a new section can be riveted in place. The art of riveting has been around for several thousand years, which makes it a favored activity for us throwbacks.
Flattening an iron rivet with a ball-peen hammer is extremely satisfying—as long as your fingers don’t become part of the flattening process. Percussive maintenance is a tremendous outlet for frustrations.
“Here’s for being forced to change that tire in the rain!” you mutter as the hammer mashes the rivet. “And here’s for the signal dropping out during that important call!” you grunt as the rivet squashes down even farther. A bad day frequently leads to over-flattened rivets.
One must often adopt a Zen attitude while working with old equipment. When the mower broke and needed a new part, I didn’t become irate upon learning that they didn’t have the part at the dealership. I instead celebrated the fact that the part actually existed and would arrive in a few days. The mower may be slow, but the grass is patient. And becoming impatient with the parts guy wouldn’t help.
As I mowed, the neighbor across the road was harvesting his alfalfa. Comparing his rig to mine would be like comparing the space shuttle to a sparrow. He was buzzing along at speeds normally associated with NASCAR.
I could have hired him and he could have done the job in two minutes instead of my two hours. But what would I learn from that, other than how to write a check? I would like to avoid practicing that particular skill.
Once the hay has cured, it must be raked. Again with the bumps and the jostling. Paint could be shaken.
After the hay is raked, I call my neighbor Ziggy, who rolls it up into big round bales. Putting the hay into small square bales would be more retro. But I’m somewhat of a lazy throwback.
Moving the big round bales involves hitching the A to a two-wheeled cart that was constructed from old oil pipe by a local machinist. The bale is lifted via a hand-cranked winch—a word my Norwegian grandfather pronounced as “wench.” I imagine a really strong wench could also perform this task.
Squirreling the hay into storage evokes a deep sense of satisfaction.
“Look at that!” I exclaimed to my wife, indicating the hay. “Those bales mean we won’t starve!”
“What, are we going to eat hay soup?”
“No, the steers will eat the hay and we’ll eat the steers. We have it made.”
“You are such a throwback,” she replied with a shake of her head.
It’s not often that I receive such high praise. •
Silo Time
Questions commonly heard at our house during a particularly long winter might include “Will this winter never end?” and “How far is Key Largo?” and “When’s the next flight?” and “Tell me again: WHY do we live here?”
Regarding the “why” part, I patiently and repeatedly explain to my wife that we endure these winters because it keeps out the riffraff. A person has to want to live here. Plus, beastly winter weather filters out those silly folks who believe that man can live on salad. Here in the frozen North, it’s survival of the fattest.
Back when I was a kid, every single winter—without exception—was like an extended stay at the North Pole. I recall chest-deep snow, howling winds, and temperatures normally associated with Siberia. And that was just in my bedroom. Conditions were much harsher outside.
And outside is where we spent most of our time. This was an era when conventional parenting wisdom held that children were invariably better off out of doors. Are the kids fighting? Put them outside. Is your child convulsed by the croup? Send him outside. Does your teenager have what appears to be a terminal case of zits? Get him outside!
And since they’re outside, they may as well be doing something useful, such as chores. At least that’s how it worked at our place. Everyone at our dairy farm—all eight kids and both our parents—participated in the family activity called chores. At chore time, we swung into action like a well-oiled machine, albeit one that revolved around a fleet of rusted and dented five-gallon buckets.
At about the age of ten, the task of muscling the silage out of the silo fell to me.
Throwing out silage involved shoveling silage out of our silo, a concrete cylinder that’s fifty feet tall and sixteen feet across. It was the first measurement that made this chore such a chore.
Unlike with most jobs, a person who unloads a silo begins at the top. The unloader (me) had to first climb up the claustrophobia-inducing tunnel-like galvanized chute that ran the length of the silo. The most crucial component for shoveling silage was the silage fork, a hand tool that is essentially an oversized garden fork. Scooping silage with the more common four-tined pitchfork would be akin to trying to empty the ocean with a teacup.
Each September, we used a roaring, tractor-powered blower to fill the silo with chopped corn. After the fodder had fermented for a month, I would ascend the chute with the end of a long baling twine in one hand. The other end of the twine was tied to the silage fork, which I pulled up the chute once I reached the top of the silo. The first trip up the silo always had an element of surprise because you never knew how much the silage had settled. The cylinder of silage could have shrunk a foot, or maybe it had dropped ten feet. Opening the silo was like unwrapping a birthday present.
Each evening I would clamber to the top of the silo and crawl into it through a man-sized rectangular doorway. Anyone who has ever ascended a silo chute knows that the wind is nearly always blowing up it. A silo chute is, in reality, a vertical wind tunnel. The turbulent air causes particles of silage to swirl around the climber; itch-inducing silage finds every possible crack and crevice.
When I finally reached the top of the silo, I would often need to pause to spit out bits of silage. I cannot understand why cows like the stuff; silage tastes like pickled bad breath.
Throwing all my weight into it, I would jam the silage fork into the silage, which gravity had packed into a substance that closely resembled concrete. Back muscles moaning in protest, I would pry up a slab of the fermented fodder and heave it through the doorway and into the chute. The wind sometimes worked so powerfully against me that it seemed as though the silage was blowing back up faster than I could throw it down.
I might pause for a breather and mull things over, and it would occur to me that I was responsible for the lives of ten people: If I didn’t throw out silage, our dairy cows wouldn’t give milk and we might all starve.
As the Arctic winter deepened, silage would begin to freeze to the concrete staves. I did my best to keep the walls clean, but a silage fork is fairly feeble in the face of ferocious frost.
A tiling spade then had to be hauled up into the silo. This spade was used to hack a slot that allowed the doors to be removed. As the silage froze inward, the diameter of the silo narrowed. I felt like a prisoner who was digging an ever-shrinking dungeon.
Winter thaws were welcome but also hazardous, as my towering silage walls would begin to weake
n and tumble. Much of the fallen silage was still permafrost, so it had to be hacked into smaller pieces before being sent down the chute.
I would sometimes watch the goings-on at the bottom of the tunnel and try to eavesdrop on the murmured conversations. Hands would scrabble into view as my siblings packed silage into five-gallon buckets. It looked as if gloved spiders were stealing the fruits of my labors.
At such times I might drop a chunk of frozen silage down the chute. The chunk was usually caught by the updraft, causing it to tumble and thunder against the steel tunnel. But sometimes the projectile would fall straight and silent. Its sudden impact would elicit startled mutters down below.
This was all I had for entertainment during my silage-throwing chores. That, and perhaps daydreaming about such places as Key Largo, where, I assumed, silage never freezes to the walls of their silos. •
That Old House
I have two houses on my little farm. It’s not that I am among the wealthy elite; quite the opposite. It’s more that I am a victim of my frugal Norwegian heritage.
My great-grandfather Charlie Sween emigrated from Norway and homesteaded this 120 acres of eastern South Dakota more than 120 years ago. After living in a crude sod shanty for some time, he was able to afford a real house, a house made of wood, with a brick chimney and glass windows. A place to call home.
He spent the next fifty years living in that house, eking out a living and raising a family. One of his daughters, Elida, would eventually become the bride of my grandfather, Erwin. In the mid-1930s, Erwin bought this little farm from his father-in-law. Erwin and Elida’s union produced seven children, one of whom was my father.
In 1963, at age sixty-five, Erwin decided to tackle a crazy project: He wanted to build a new house. Family and friends ridiculed him for taking on such an endeavor. “Move to town,” they told him. “An old farmer like you doesn’t need a new house.” Instead of heeding their advice, he hired a crew of carpenters.
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the old house. It seemed a waste to demolish it, but something had to give, since it occupied the space where the new house would sit. In a moment of inspired frugality, he hired a bulldozer to push the old house far out into our grove of trees. And there that old house sits to this very day.
Erwin and Elida passed away, and we purchased the farm from their estate. My wife and I raised our sons on this place and have lived here for more than thirty years. Our farm is located just across the section—two miles by road—from the farmstead where I grew up and where my parents lived and farmed.
When we first moved in, my wife took one look at the derelict house in the grove and declared it a hazard and an eyesore. I agreed and planned on a colossal bonfire once conditions were right. One autumn day, I thought that perhaps the time had come for the old house to finally have its Viking funeral. But I deemed it prudent to check out the old shack first, just in case something of value was left behind.
Our two young sons tagged along, and we waded through the tall grass in the small meadow where the old house sat. Time had taken its toll. The front porch had collapsed in on itself, most of the windows were gone, and the siding was rotting and falling off. We entered through an open window and got the olfactory impression that skunks had resided beneath the floorboards.
I felt as though I had stumbled onto a forgotten time capsule. Here lay the sundry detritus of my grandparents’ lives: A broken chair. Some old clothes in a gunny sack. A thermometer from a grain elevator. But the thing that drew my eye was a cardboard box stuffed with papers.
I dug through the contents of the box and was instantly transported back in time. Numerous items begged my attention. A tax return from 1957. An aunt’s first grade report card. Canceled checks from June of 1962. Greeting cards from old friends and relatives, now all dead and gone. An uncle’s third grade spelling book.
I spent most of a pleasant hour going through the contents of that cardboard box. All the while, I had to answer a stream of questions from my sons about the old house and who had lived in it. They were amazed that nine people had once occupied that tiny structure, and that they did so without running water or electricity. I related to them how my father remembered that on cold winter mornings, a pail of water would be iced over even though it sat right next to the cookstove. And they shivered when I told them that in those days the cookstove was their only source of heat.
So it was that the old house was spared the torch. A few times a year I would feel the old house calling, and my sons and I would venture in once again. We felt like archaeologists investigating the ruins of a lost civilization. We were never disappointed; each time, we would retrieve new treasures: old farm magazines, a 1949 calendar, antiquated school textbooks. And one special time, I uncovered an old Bible, written in Norwegian and set in Gothic type, that had “Charlie Sween” handwritten inside its cover. Such a find could have no price.
The years passed, and our visits to the old house became less and less frequent. We were too busy, it seemed, and the old house once again enjoyed the lonely solitude of the meadow in our grove. As we hurried through our lives, I might catch a glimpse of the old house through the trees and wonder: How did they manage? How did they survive the dust storms and the floods and the blizzards and the Great Depression? They must have been made of sterner stuff than me.
I remember how, as a child, I would struggle to walk in my father’s footprints. Even then, I could imagine no nobler calling than being a farmer just like Dad. As a man, I was afforded the opportunity to enter into a partnership with my father on his dairy operation. Daily, we toiled side by side through drought and deluge, through good times and bad. And, despite it all, we somehow managed to survive.
Then, one April morning, my father was felled by a massive heart attack, at age sixty-eight. The entire family was shocked by his untimely passing, none more than me. Dad was not just my father, but also my coworker, my business partner, my trusted adviser. And now he was gone, so suddenly gone.
I found myself thrust into a new position in life. Mine was now the last word when it came to farming decisions, and I had abruptly become the eldest male in our family. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with either.
There are some things in life that are unexplainable. Why I ventured out to that old house on that day shortly after my father’s funeral is still beyond me. It was as though it were calling; even the trees seemed to whisper an invitation to come, to visit, to tarry awhile.
As I stood once again on that ancient linoleum, my eye was drawn to a jumble of papers on the floor. An envelope, yellowed with age, lay on top. A blue stamp on the envelope read “Cleared By Military Censors.”
How could have I missed this artifact? My father had served aboard the USS Washington during World War II and had written home whenever he could. My grandmother had saved all his letters.
I carefully removed the letter from its envelope. It was dated September 1944. My father would have been somewhere in the South Pacific at that time and all of eighteen years old. I studied the familiar scrawl. Dad wondered how the oat harvest had been and how his uncle’s new team of horses was working out. He supposed that his youngest brother was starting first grade and imagined that he was becoming quite the little man. He asked his mother to greet everyone and said that he missed them all.
It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. Here was a homesick young man, a kid, really, who had spent his entire life dwelling upon a sea of prairie grass. Now he was on a different kind of sea, an ocean that was being roiled by the thunder and the lightning of a world at war. Until then, his life had been focused on nurturing and caring for life. Now, he had been schooled in the fine art of mayhem and had become a cog in the wheel of a world-class killing machine.
At the bottom of the page, in underlined print, my father had passed on one last message. Tears burned my eyes as I read those words he had so carefully emphasized: “All is we
ll here. Please don’t worry. I am doing fine.”
As I left the old house that day, I took one last glance back at it over my shoulder. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I decided. That old house gets to stay there until it rots into the earth. •
The Modern Marvel
The other day I was watching the Discovery Channel when a program came on that purported to be all about mankind’s technological progress. They talked about stuff like space travel, the polio vaccine, and the discovery of the element “spandex.”
Shows what they know. They didn’t even mention the calf puller.
For those who may be unfamiliar with this device, here’s a brief description: Remember the medieval torture apparatus they called “the rack”? It was used chiefly to extract “confessions” from the “guilty.” This was accomplished by tying your arms to a large, winch-like machine. Your legs were chained to something massive and immovable, like the footings of the dungeon. If you were a particularly tough customer, more extreme measures would be taken, such as locking you in a room with Justin Bieber.
Your cheerful host would then crank the winch until A) you could slam-dunk without even jumping or B) you would shout, “I admit it! I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby! And I left the toilet seat up! Just don’t make me listen to ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow again!”
Now imagine such a contraption shrunk down and modified so that it can be used to help a cow who is having trouble giving birth.
Calf pullers hadn’t yet been invented when I was a kid. If a cow’s delivery was perceived as being overly difficult, Dad would summon us eight kids to the barn.
Dad would tie a baling twine to the calf’s front legs (we were so poor, we couldn’t afford to buy a real rope) and tell us kids to grab on. Dad would situate himself next to the cow so that he could observe the proceedings and give instructions.