So Much For Summer - and a long detour through the summer of 1989

Just looked at the calendar and realized that this is my last week of summer vacation. Next week I begin teaching the second summer session at the Area Learning Center. I have three weeks of that. Then I have my week long MNHS history class. When that is done, football begins. Soon our inservice days will be here and so will Labor Day. End of summer.

Whatever happened to days on the farm when summer seemed to last for six months?

Of course, I was marooned on my family's small farm - nearly ten miles south of town, so days would naturally go by slower when I couldn't see my friends or get caught up in the hi jinx they were taking part in (really, they probably lived as boring of an existence as I did, but I never envisioned it that way when I was stuck atop a tractor or a lurching hay rack).

I know that I have romanticized my farm days. There were plenty of days when Mom and I just lounged around the house reading (to say that we were both voracious readers would be an understatement).

-- and here begins a bit of a detour through that summer of 1989 --

One of the best summers occurred between my freshman and sophomore years of high school - the summer of 1989 - for I found a list of 100 important horror novels in the appendix of Stephen King's Danse Macabre and decided to ready as many as I could that summer. This was long before the convenience of ebay, so I had to rely on the inter-library loan system. Readers of this blog know how fondly I remember Mom and I piling into our rusty old blue Silverado and heading into town when we got the call that our new order had come in. Of course, I strayed quite a bit from the list. I'd read one book by on the list and then end up reading several others by that author. Or as I was reading a book, I'd see an advertisement blurb about another book, and I'd be ordering that one. What a way to spend most of a summer. This is how I came across Rice's Interview With the Vampiree, Matheson's I am Legend and The Incredible Shrinking Man, Farris's All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Barker's The Books of Blood, Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother, King's Pet Sematary, and Straub's Floating Dragon. Just to name a few.

And what an education I received. I've maintained that the best education is often the one we give ourselves. This perfectly reflects all of the work I put in that summer. Though I had learned it (and promptly forgotten it) in school, point of view was driven home to me from Lestat's first person narrative in Interview with the Vampire. Lovecraft's power of suggestion drove me mad as I read At the Mountains of Madness. Something my Sci-Fi students and I still discuss today. I realized then that a writer didn't have to show everything. In fact, it was often more effective if you didn't show much at all. Matheson's resolutions (if you can call them that) in I am Legend and The Incredible Shrinking Man struck me as amazing. I read those novels in a blind heat, feeling that there was no way Matheson could write these characters out of the predicaments he had placed them in. Yet, Matheson did. King showed me what it was like to read a great story and to get caught up in character. Reading King's best work (and Pet Sematary has to be up there) is like listening to one's grandfather talk about the Old Days. And somehow King gets the reader - even a naive 15 year old - to care about Creed's, particularly their adorable son, Gage, who meets a very grisly demise. I learned that if you care enough about the characters, you will receive a greater shock, one that still resonates whenever you think of that book (here, I'm reminded of Kristie reading Les Mis, The Kite Runner, or The Giver), than any shock created by a fantastic plot or conflict. Barker, and his amazing Books of Blood, was the first writer, that I can recall, anyway, to really show me the power of language. He was the first writer that made it seem like the words he chose were really meant to go together. I get that impression when I read really great poetry. The best of Barker's writing is like that too. You get the sense that not only could you not have written it, but neither could anyone else.

Of course, with any great education, I didn't get the sense that I was really learning anything. I was just soaking it all up and enjoying every last drop. I think I learned more from that summer of reading than I did in many of my classes to come. Only I didn't realize it then. But I do now (which, I think, is another tell-tale sign of a good education).

-- end of detour now --

Outside of reading, though, the only real escape from the farm came in the form of Babe Ruth baseball. That got me off the farm and into town at least several times a week for our games. Yet, even that season seemed to grind on for quite some time. And trust me, if you want to see time slowed to a crawl, just sit through the last game of a Babe Ruth double header. For this is when the teams tend to make liberal substitutions (however, we really had such a small team that we all ended up having to play most of the second game anyway, though we'd usually play out of position - though I always caught because that was all I could do - I had made a mess out of playing right field earlier that year and was promptly put back behind the plate permanently). So you'd often get a kid pitching who had never done it before, and you'd get innings that would last half an hour because of the walks for errors. Mercifully, the thing would end - sometimes by the ten run rule if you were lucky enough - in the mid afternoon (despite starting the first game starting before noon) with a score something along the lines of 23-15.

If a Babe Ruth game seemed to drag on forever, just try baling alfalfa. Unfortunately, 1989 also happened to be one of the last years of the draught in north western MN. It had been so dry throughout the state since we moved to the farm in '84 that the state decided to allow farmers to bale hay on CRP land. This wouldn't have been so bad, except Dad had a friend who seemed to have his whole damn farm in CRP (which I was all for having Dad do, but then how would he feed his herd of sheep, which at the time was in the hundreds).

This meant spending the early part of the summer baling the first cutting. But it was never that easy.

If we could just have come in with the baler and baled the hay, it would not have been so bad. But no.

We had to first cut the hay. Now truth be told, this wasn't so bad. Dad did most of this. I was still too young to be trusted with the mower (I never bothered to lift it for such things as gopher mounds, ruts, or rocks), so the blade would often break under my watch. However, Dad still had to have me out in the fields with him whenever he was mowing the alfalfa. Why? Who knows? To torture me, I suspect. But on the good days I'd be able to scurry into the Silverado and do some reading or listen to my headphones. On the worst days, he'd have me out raking what he had just cut into swaths that we would later bale. Now this would not have been so bad. But Dad was a stickler for work. So if he thought a swath was becoming too dry, he would send me out on the John Deere A to flip it. Or sometimes, the top would be dry but Dad would walk over to a swath and dig through it (this was never a good sign) and decide that the bottom was too wet and needed to be flipped. Again, this is where I came in.

After all of this preparation - which by the way - made little sense to me. My brother in law, who did things the way I liked to do them -- fast and easy (which was the exact opposite of Dad's way - slow and difficult) -- often just ran a swather through the alfalfa. This way it was already placed into swaths, so one didn't have to waste time raking it. Then he ran it through some kind of crimper that crushed it so the moisture would be exacted and one didn't have to spend time raking it a second time. Arnie, my brother in law, always seemed to be on the cutting edge - and remember, given Dad's way of doing things, a tractor with a cab or a combine one didn't have to pull behind a tractor or a tractor that one didn't have to pull start, was cutting edge!

Arnie had two of the greatest inventions when it came to baling hay. One was a hay stacker. This was some sort of metal contraption that one pulled behind a tractor. It would organize - or stack - the bales into sections of six or so. Then one would go around with a loader (another sign of technology) and go about stacking the bales onto a hay rack. This was perfect. After all, it meant that I didn't have to spend all day stacking bales - the loader did it. I'd much rather sit on a tractor than handle bales. Of course, this new contraption wasn't without its drawbacks (I once was riding on it - as Arnie loves to tell whenever we talk about baling CRP - and forgot to lift my legs up when the stacker had reached its quota of six bales. Well, Dad, who was driving the tractor, pulled a rope, which tripped the stacker, sending the bales shooting out the back. As I said, I forgot to lift my legs up. They became tangled in the bales and I went out the stacker along with the bales. Well, actually I got caught half way through the end of the contraption and had to have Arnie lift if off of me before I could climb out).

But Arnie's second purchase was his best. He bought an automatic stacker. All you had to do was pull it down a row of bales and it would pick them up and stack them for you. I thought this was a gift from the Almighty Himself. All you had to do was fill it up, drive it around to a hay shed or where you wanted your haystack and then the automatic stack would drop its load of 50 or so bales right where you wanted it. Perfect.

Now I should mention here one thing that I really despised about our time baling CRP. We only had one really operational hay rack. We could use a second one if we had to (again, I was jealous of Arnie, who seemed to have an armada of hay racks) but it was quite treacherous since there were numerous holes in the boards and you had to be careful where you stepped. So we rarely used that one.

Well, now that I think about that, we had two decent ones. But one had no back to it. It was actually hydraulic, so one could hoist it up. I always thought this was a perfect way to unload bales, but Dad thought it was unheard of.

So what made baling so torturous was the fact that as soon as we filled up one hay rack with bales, we promptly had to unload it in the corner of a field, and fill it up again! Of course, when that one was full, it too had to be unloaded. The final load was the only one that wasn't unloaded in the field.

That last load was hauled home and then unloaded into the hay shed. This process was then repeated until the first cutting of alfalfa was finished. But it was all repeated for the second - and sometimes - third cuttings.

(And what I hated most was that handling the bales didn't end with summer. No! Because we had this huge reservoir of bales stacked in the CRP field, we would routinely return there - in the fall, winter, and spring - to get pick up load after pick up load of bales. Of course, then they had to be unloaded into the hay shed then too. So by the end of a hay bale's life -and nearly the end of mine - it had been handled all of five times! This was particularly painful when I knew full well that over at Arnie's place they were handling bales once or twice!)

Finally, though, captains practice would start that first week of August, and there would be a halt to the work (for Dad took football very seriously). Then two a days would kick in and I'd be in town for a good portion of the day. Dad did manage to grow a little grain, but for the most part, I was not involved with the combining.

However, whenever he wanted to bale straw, I was put into service. Believe me, I was never so happy to see the combine set to chop of the excess straw instead of shooting into rows to be baled.

Now after all that reminiscing about past summers - and this one quickly dwindling away - I think I need to enjoy this one while I still can. Time to do a bit of reading (Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front) before taking a nap.