Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

(With much appreciation to my brother Mantel Man for his editing skills, and for his encyclopaedic memory. Thanksthz!)

Read any children's book that mentions rural living and you will learn that a man who has a cow, a goat, a pig, a horse, and a handful of assorted fowl, is a farmer. This oversimplified definition ought to stay in childhood, but, unfortunately, it sticks, and follows people into adulthood. "Oh, you and Chas are farmers!" people say, upon learning that we live in the country, on a ranch, with (until last week) no access to broadband. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

Farmers grow things; Chas and I do not. Oh, I have teased a geranium into submission on my kitchen windowsill, and I have created the first tropical bonsai plant known to man -- and those are just my successes. You should see the hardy plants I have killed! And Chas is no better. Looking out my window in the twilight one morning recently, I noticed that the lawn is largely dead. Sigh. Nope, definitely not farmers.

Even my "animal husbandry" father was not necessarily a farmer. He did farm for several years in the 70s, and I think he did a good job. By farming he achieved a somewhat vertically-integrated dairy operation, and if you thought a 24/7, 365-day-a-year dairy was an involved pursuit, try adding farming on top of that -- living at the mercy of weather and time on a grand scale.

When a farmer has hay down (hay that's been cut and is lying in neat little rows to dry before it's pressed into bales and bound with twine), black clouds on the horizon are scarier than the Boogeyman. Hay that gets rained on mildews or molds, and if there is too much moisture it can't be baled, or the forces of heat, moisture and pressure inside the bale will combine, combust, and burn your barn down.

(Photo stolen from Michellepio124 on Flickr)

If you've ever wanted to feel the grandeur of Nature, to be inspired by Her power, don't go to Yosemite -- just cut your hay and leave it down to dry until a summer thunderstorm threatens. THAT'S Nature's unassailable power -- and that's a farmer's real fear.

Vignettes of Dad's farming period play in my mind, in the grainy golden Kodachrome colors common to both 1970s photography and to hot summer evenings. Dad rented some acreage a few miles to the east of us; 200 acres, which, in a burst of ingenuity, we dubbed "The 200." Dad would grow corn from summer into fall, and alfalfa or oats from our mild winter through spring.

My brothers and I had two connections to the farming operation. First, when it was time to plant the corn seed, Dad would take two of us to The 200 to help him mark out the field.

Mom had bought several packs of white paper lunch sacks, and these were our responsibility out in the field. We'd walk with Dad along the long edge of the fields, following the irrigation ditch that delivered the water down the rows, and carrying the white lunch bags. We'd fill the bags with large dry dirt clods, both to weigh the bags down and to make them stand upright, and then we'd set each one on the spot Dad had indicated. The bags, white against the turned dark soil, could be seen all the way across the field; they provided visual markers to the guy who would, a few days hence, drive a tractor across the field pulling a special plow. Tractor Guy would drive straight from each white bag at one end of the field to its counterpart at the other end, and the plow would create a long berm of piled dirt. The parallel berms would be spaced at regular intervals across the field to match the spacing of openings (the "checks") in the irrigation ditch. So, we kids weren't just stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags; we were creating order. AND stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags. It was hot, dusty work, and, being the little weasels we were, we mostly hated it. Well, I did anyway.

(Photo stolen from silent encore on Flickr)

The second connection my brothers and I had to The 200 and all of its charms was silage. If this word is unfamiliar, let me explain. Silage is like a big chopped green salad which is aged and fermented and then fed to cows, who like it more than I like ice cream, and that's saying something. Dad mostly made corn silage. The corn was mowed down and sucked into a powerful machine (called a "chopper," probably by the same clever person who dreamed up the name "The 200") which chopped the stalks into a fairly fine mulch. This mulch was blown into the back of a specially-designed silage truck. When the truck was full, the chopper would cut power, and the truck would drive off, back to the dairy to dump its load at the silage pit. And that's where my brothers and I would come in: we'd ride with the silage trucks, at least once a day, until all the corn was chopped. We'd stand beside the road, the truck would stop for us, we'd climb into the cab (usually one kid per truck), and ride to the field for the slow and tedious filling of the truck. Then we'd ride back to the dairy, watch the truck dump its load at the silage pit, and that was that. Thrilling, right? Well, it was -- to scruffy farm kids like us. We couldn't wait for silage season.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

Some day I may tell you about packing the silage with huge tractors, to press as much air as possible from the pile so that the fermentation didn't become a conflagration.

Nahhhhh, I won't.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

I will tell you, however, about how we teased my baby brother Bocci for years after the farming years had come and gone: 6-year-old Bocci would eagerly climb aboard the silage truck, and within about three miles every time Bocci was sound asleep in the cab. Drooling. Bocci was so famous for napping that once one of the hard-bitten truck drivers actually brought a camera with him to capture the moment. He had to climb up onto the cab of his White Freightliner to get the shot, but he got it, and somewhere in Mom's cedar chest is a picture of Bocci drooling all over his striped little boy shirt.

Lovingly preserved in 1970s grainy golden late afternoon Kodachrome, of course.