DRIVING AROUND THE old hometown can make you feel old. Gone are the days when the food in our markets was raised just down the road and out in the endless fields watered, weeded and cared for by generations of farmers.
Nearly all have been replaced with a new crop of subdivisions that cover the verdant soil with layers of asphalt and concrete that will not grow food. That’s evolution for you, but there was a time when a kid could make a buck working on farms. That was back in the last century, when kids were considered farm machinery.
We couldn’t wait to get started at the many fine careers available down on the farm. Beginning in June when the strawberries ripened. It was a dream job where you could choke down all the delicious ripe strawberries you could possibly eat until suddenly you couldn’t eat any more. That came with the sullen realization that you only got paid for the berries you picked and put in a box and not for the ones you ate.
That was the bad old days before the more enlightened parents gave their kids debit cards.
Being patriotic American kids, we would spend a good part of the summer getting ready for the Fourth of July. These preparations were limited to getting fireworks, and plenty of them, and that meant we had to work.
Once the berries petered out, we were forced to move on to more lucrative careers. There’s nothing like an honest day’s work, they said. Whatever that meant. We thought there was nothing like an honest day’s work to make your knees and back hurt. We were just learning.
You could get on bucking hay bales if you were lucky. Early on a sunny summer morning, we’d trot across the fields, bucking bales of hay into the back of a truck where some ’backy-chawin’ foreman stacked them in a special way so they wouldn’t fall off. Which they sometimes did anyway.
Often the crew would engage in impromptu boxing matches to settle minor disputes in bale stacking theory.
“You boys work it out,” the old farmer chuckled. We did.
Sometimes during the day, the farmer gave us pop at breaks. At some time around mid-day, it was time for lunch. If we were lucky, we got hot dogs.
One time, the farmer’s wife cooked a noon meal with fried chicken and mashed potatoes. We didn’t care what was for lunch. After a morning haying, we’d be hungry enough to eat the shingles off the roof.
The farmer would be more than happy to feed us since haying is a risky business where you have to get the crop in the barn before it rains.
Once the bales get wet, you are playing with fire. Wet hay stacked in a pile can generate enough heat to burst into flames — burning the barn down with it. Once, we were bucking bales as a lighting storm approached. The booming of the thunder and crackle of lighting really motivated the haying crew.
After lunch, we might have another boxing match to see who drove the truck. That was the payoff, to drive to the barn at the end of the day with the truck piled impossibly high with hay. Then pop the clutch at the crest of the hill. Dump the crew under half of the load. And keep driving.
Those days are gone now.
The hayfields are mostly covered with dream homes to the point where I can get lost driving around my old hometown, but that, they say, is progress.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.