Bucking the System

The Source

Somewhere between 1 a.m. and when I finally got to sleep a few nights ago I saw a Facebook post showing a New Holland hay baler at work with the caption, “You don’t know the meaning of hard work until you spent a summer baling hay.” The picture included two young men pulling off the alfalfa bales and stacking them six high on a flatbed wagon behind the baler. The picture was accurate and I guess I can claim authenticity to my farm upbringing to know that the bales were alfalfa. And although I’m sure that there are many jobs that are equally as tiring, dirty, and hot as baling hay, I can see the author’s point. Once you’ve spent a summer bucking bales every other job in life outside of perhaps childbirth and rhino wrestling seems relatively easy. I’m both proud and exhausted to say that working on hay crews was my main occupation in high school then on through college, and in fact it was the chief source of income for most young men in farm communities up until they invented the machines that swallow the hay then spit out those one ton monstrosities you see sprawling around farmers’ fields today looking from a distance like the Invasion of the Giant Snails. There were several variations on the job of bale bucking . . . You could work the wagon, pick them up off the field or work the hay mow using either an elevator or a hay horse. The standard pay in my hay day was $1.25 and hour or if you were very fortunate, two cents a bale. Yes, two cents went further in those days but it was still hard to jerk a hay bay from the rear of a John Deere sidewinder baler, drag it to the back of a moving wagon, hoist it over your head and then tell yourself, “Sweet! I just earned two cents!” Fittingly, I spent most of my hay bucking days working for a hay boss named “Bucky” Bartlett. Bucky was a fair guy and always made sure we had plenty of work to do once the haying season began. The work seldom began before noon since the dew on an Illinois hayfield in the summertime prevented an early start. That was the good part of the job. You didn’t have to get up early. Of course when your dad saw that you had the morning free you had to get up and run a tractor until Bucky came by to pick you up. No rest for the rural wicked. So what makes it one of the toughest jobs in the world? To begin with, the heat is miserable whether you’re in the hot sun riding the back of a wagon or even worse stuck in a farmer’s hay mow where the temperature goes up another twenty degrees. Hay is hot. Barns have been known to explode when wet hay is piled tightly into the oven of a barn’s loft. I was never in one when it exploded but I often came close to exploding while in one. And it’s dirty. . . damned dirty. There’s no such thing as clean hay. The standard procedure is to cut the hay on day one, turn it and let in dry on day two then bale it up on day three. The trouble comes when it rains on any of those three days thus putting the baling to day four or five or six, giving the alfalfa or clover stocks time to disintegrate, and when you lift that 60 pound bale to the level of your head to hoist it to the top of the pile the thousands of little dust and plant particles come flowing down toward your sweaty head, neck, arms and back, and you come out of the barn looking like one of those fuzzy little Chia Pets that you order from the back pages of comic books. It’s a biology lesson in itself in that you’ll find sweat in places that you’d never even imagined harbored sweat glands. You’ll feel strained muscles the next morning in locations that you’d formerly not even known were locations. A day of gripping baling wire will lead you to discover that even tough teenage fingers must be pried apart to eat the next morning’s breakfast. And then there are the upsides . . . One thing for sure, you’ll never have a better meal than the one you eat after a long day of haying. Even baloney sandwiches become a feast and take on the ambiance of caviar and foi gras. Heck, I’ve tasted water from a haymow thermos jug that would rival the finest Champaign. Some of your best friends will be made on the bed of a moving wagon, for if the field is especially rough, even brawny men will end up hugging each other for dear life in order to stay on the wagon. The world’s toughest job? Maybe. But I know that every job you hold for the rest of your life will be easier. I guess that’s a good way to start.

Baling the Hay, Part Two, The Perils Since some topics are just too darned exciting to be limited to a single column, I’ll toss it a bit more about the great agricultural tradition of bucking hale bales. I forgot to mention that haying is dangerous operation. Our grandfathers had it even worse, standing atop a load of loose wheat and forking it into a threshing machine. One slip and you became a part of the harvest, causing the appearance of a great many one-armed farmers at the turn of the century. But even in my haying days of the 1960’s and 70’s there seemed to be danger lurking around every corner of the clover field. A young teenager had to master certain skills that the public school system had failed to cover in their classes on practical living.

The fine art of riding a moving wagon over uneven ground carrying a sixty-pound bale with a hay hook in your right hand. You don’t need to have farm experience to understand a hay hook, just think of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook. They come in various shapes and sizes but all share one thing in common: a large, dangerous and often sharp-pointed hook designed to grab bales of hay. And of course if it can stick deeply into a bale then it can also end up in your foot, your leg, or any other appendage that might get in the way. You can imagine the scene. . . sixteen-year-old boy, moving wagon, hook in hand.
Bombs away in the hay mow. Here’s the setup: one man down on the ground feeding the bales one at a time onto an elevator that carries the bales up to an opening at the top of the barn. The snout of the elevator is positioned just above and sometimes as far as thirty feet over a crew of young men or women waiting for the bale to drop so they can carry then stack the bales neatly against the far wall. This all works fine if you are indeed looking up and expecting the bale to fall. It works not so well if you’re already bent over a bale of hay when the next one comes flying out of the sky. Normal bales may way around 50 pounds, but sometimes the hay will be wet or the farmer is a cheapskate wanting to reduce his 2-cents-a-bale cost and the missile headed toward you may way upward of 100 pounds. That’s 100 pounds on a thirty-foot drop . . . on a burr haircut.
The hay horse can kill you. Actually, by the time I began bucking bales the horse was a tractor but the principle is the same. The fellow on the ground sticks four large tines into a stack of hay and the entire bunch, perhaps eight bales, are hoisted in the air at once, all powered by a horse or tractor on the other side of the barn. The load goes up and up and up, then takes a 90-degree turn into the mow and cruises on a steel track down the length of the barn until someone pulls the trip rope and the entire thing comes crashing down. It’s an admittedly majestic sight to see this veritable cloud of hay come floating along the ceiling of the barn, but if a sixty-pound bale coming off an elevator is dangerous then eight of these monsters dropping on your head from heaven above is . . . well . . . memorable.
Snakes like barns. Enough said.
People who throw snakes at others are fair game for murder.
Teenagers are dumb. At least my crew was. In between loads of hay we’d come up with the most dangerous games you can imagine. Anything with any weight can be thrown and without any responsible adults around to slap errant hands, there’s been more than one farm boy who’s been cold-cocked by a dirt clod thrown the length of a barn. And I can remember times when we’d run out of objects to throw around so we started tossing the smallest members of our hay crew. Of course sometimes these little rascals grew to a much larger size and they had memories.
Food poisoning is a possibility. If the haying job required us to work through a mealtime then we’d have to bring our foodstuffs in a paper sack. Despite modern scientific and gastronomic advice, you can place a mayonnaise-laden baloney sandwich in a hundred degree hayloft for four hours without suffering any ill effects come lunchtime. I don’t know how we survived, but unless you count brain damage, we did.
Slip sliding away. For most of the day you’re not walking on a board floor but a carpet of hay bales, and if you step between the cracks you’ll need retrieving.
Bumble bees love to nest in barns and are extremely unhappy when awakened.
Did I mention the snakes?