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Hands, Health, Heart, Head ...But No Arm

The Source

When the boy had his arm torn off it nearly spelled the end of our 4-H club. Lost limbs will do that. Actually, we weren’t sure who he was or where he was from or that he even lost his arm, but the story was gory enough for our 4-H leaders to consider cancelling our club’s annual hayrack ride. Perhaps it was an urban legend although I’m not sure if urban legends are possible in rural areas. The pre-Internet word had it that somewhere a teenage boy was taking a midnight hayride with his friends when the guy driving the tractor swerved too close to an approaching semi, the kid was just about to put his arm around his girlfriend and Zoom! Blam! Whack! There goes the arm! It must have made it a pretty lousy night for everyone and a missing arm is hard to explain to you date, much less your mom and dad when you get home. So even though no one could actually verify that such a tragic thing happened, the rumor was enough to make 4-H leaders, church youth pastors, and Boy Scout troops all over the nation start cancelling their hayrides. You wouldn’t think that this could kill off a 4-H club, but doggone it, the annual romp in the hay was one of the major reasons we joined 4-H and stayed until the age limit kicked us out into the hoary world of Rotary clubs and PTA meetings. There were a great many things about the Extension Service’s 4-H program that did not appeal to the average teenage boy. Like record books. Once a year we were forced to sit down and make note of every nickel we spent raising our 4-H heifer including the cost of mineral oil to make her Angus coat shine, feed pans, ground corn specially designed to stay with her and not shoot through the bovine system in the form of kernels, and exact amount spent on the proper boots for the show ring… I wore the boots. My cow went barefoot. The annual record book orgy was something we dreaded and my God-awful handwriting made the task even more painful. 4-H had other drawbacks…early morning hours at the fair after a night of losing water fights with the sheep people, weeks spent training a cow to follow at the end of a halter, the taste of manure when she’d decide to whip her tail on your direction while combing her flanks, the excruciating pain of having a 900 pound Angus step on the toe of your new (and flimsy) boot, and the exquisite agony of knowing that you’d have to do this all again next year. If it weren’t for the hayrides I’d have considered joining the Girl Scouts. You see the cool thing was that if you weren’t in 4-H you couldn’t go. We farm boys could milk a hayride for an entire week of prideful braggadocio at school as our city cousins had to listen to the tales of what girls….usually theirs…we’d be taking on our after-dark tour of the county roads. Hayrides were better than parking in the cemetery, better than drive-in movies, better than prom, and had Spin-The-Bottle beat by a country mile. You’d ask the most gorgeous girl you could find to go with you on this night of hay allergies and passion, you’d climb into the back of a wagon filled with loose straw, build your self a little nest beside your buddy and his girl, then the wagon would fill with adolescents about to take the ride of their lives and who had no idea what they were doing. It was better that way. Ignorance is highly underrated when you’re fourteen and the moon is shining bright. The fellow driving the John Deere would sternly admonish us to stay in the wagon, not throw straw at the passing motorists, and to keep seated at all times. We’d often go an entire block without breaking all of these rules. The object of the game was to come back with taller tales and more fabrications of romance than the kids in the wagon behind you. The wagon with the most kisses was deemed the winner and it was a score we didn’t have to put down in our 4-H record book. Squirt guns were mandatory and if you could steal of couple of your dad’s cigars to bring along, that increased your wagon’s score. By the time the tractor pulled back into the 4-H leaders driveway there was very little straw in the wagon. We didn’t need it. We were making hay on our own. Come to think of it, I’ve lied so much about what I did on hayrides that I can’t actually recall what did happen or who I took along as my romantic partner. I think I once took my cousin. I don’t think that counts. But…the tales of that darned one-armed boy…imaginary or otherwise…pretty much put an end to our frolicking in the hay and I was left with an Angus heifer. Somewhere there’s a one-armed 62-year-old man walking around somewhere who has a lot to answer for.