As a boy I spent lots of time in the hay field in summertime. We always had cows, so bringing in the hay was important in getting ready for winter, when hay would be a major part of the cows’ diet. I wasn’t always a willing and enthusiastic hay field worker. Sometimes I was wishing I could be back at the house listening to my favorite radio program, like Sky King. But as you gain a little experience in putting up hay, you realize that there are tasks needing to be done even if you are not in the mood at a given moment. You have to be an opportunist to work in the hay, as in get it done right away if you can, because later may be too late.
It has been years since I was really involved in putting up hay, but this year has called for me to be involved. It has refreshed several memories for me, especially of the sort that involve things that can go wrong and problems of trying to work with the weather. One of the going wrong things is machinery that malfunctions at just the wrong time. That is like tractors that don’t want to start, mowers that don’t want to stay adjusted, balers that don’t want to roll bales and so on. It is a reminder that the technology that ordinarily is a great help can in a moment turn into a problem that stalls everything.
On our farm we have been handling and moving some old hay equipment that we used back in the early 1950s.
It has been a nostalgic job, bringing back memories of when I enjoyed some of the work, especially when I thought I was getting good at operating the machines. I especially relished finding our old dump rake. I first began operating that old rake when we farmed with horses, back in 1947 and 1948. We had no tractor before then, and didn’t convert the rake to be tractorpulled until years later.
As a horse-drawn dump rake, it had a long tongue between the two horses. The wooden tongue allowed the horses to steer and maneuver the rake as the operator guided them with the reins.
The gang of rake tines that picked up hay were curved in a C shape, and the dry hay was gathered in a bunch inside the curved tines. When you saw that your rake was “full,” it was time to dump.
You did that by pressing a foot lever which latched the rake tine frame to the moving wheels. The forward movement of the wheels lifted the rake tines up behind the seat, dumping the hay on the ground.
Then you wanted to get the tines back down to the ground quickly, so you didn’t miss a patch of hay. Therewas a hand lever that helped hurry the return of the rake tines to raking position. Later, when we changed over the old dump rake to work with a tractor, we tended to go faster, so hurrying the return of the rake to raking position was even more important. We even sometimes pulled that old rake with our ’47 Chevy, with my brother Ben at the wheel and me on the rake. I thought I was getting good at raking when I could time the dump just right and dump my hay in line with the pile left on the previous round, forming a neat row. It was a dependable old dump rake.
It seldom gave any trouble so long as we kept the mechanism oiled.
In going through Dad’s hay barn, my brother Ben and I came across several old pitch forks, as we called them. To us, if the hay handling fork had three or four tines, it was a pitch fork for hay. If it had five tines, it was a manure fork. I’m pretty sure that none of the four pitch forks we found were the originals that we used in the ’40s, but they did have the same look and feel. I could imagine myself walking ahead of the hay wagon, opening the row of hay for the wagon to pass through, then gathering forkloads of hay to toss onto the wagon. Actually, as a young boy, I spent much of my haying time on the wagon, driving the horses, arranging the hay on the load and tromping it. Tromping a load of hay means packing it by walking it down. That’s where the clover leaves fly and get into your shirt, and where the stickers get into your socksand shoes, and the sweat bees sting and your eyes smart because the sweat from your forehead is running into your eyes. That’s about the time you wish you were at the house listening to the radio.
But with hay, you are always trying to get it in before it gets rained on. Trying to anticipate what the rains will do has been a guessing game for the past several weeks, and some of our hay got rained on. On the farm you learn that sometimes in life your parade, or your hay, gets rained on.
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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.
net, or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 06/23/2010