I hope that this find you doing well. I am fine. The
Sharritt household is a bit on pins and needles today though. You see. I mistimed
the start of this series of blogs recounting memories brought about by tearing
down an old timber frame barn from my childhood. The series has stretched into
the Super Bowl festivities. First hand knowledge of Super Bowl week is a target
rich blogging environment.
Bev is my biggest fan. She likes the blogs that touch on
memories, relationships, or peonies. Actually, she likes any of my blogs where
the creative process does not include me hunched over the keyboard typing
feverishly, a maniacal look in my eye, and my ears turning red from an elevated
blood pressure. As fan numero uno, she believes that my best blogs stay away
from ranting and should never stray into the land of raving. So this week, she
has been encouraging me to stick with the discipline laid out three weeks ago.
It was a good plan. And to cover what encouragement can't persuade, I suspect that
Bev has been sprinkling my cereal with ground up beta blockers.
As described in last week's blog "Make Hay While the
Sun Shines" the old timber frame
barns were designed to hold enough hay to keep the livestock, living on the
first floor, in clover, so to speak from late October through early to mid-May
depending on the weather patterns of any given year. The perfect year would
have five days of hay left on May 10th. This would have given the new spring
grass enough time for a good head start allowing the herd excellent grazing for
the next 5 to 6 months. Every evening through the fall and winter, we would
scramble up a rickety ladder and remove the summer's work one row at a time,
constantly doing story problems. If it is January 10th, and you feed 10 bales a
day from a haymow; the haymow has 12.3 rows left and each row has 103 bales,
when will you run out? The cows had more than a rooting interest in the outcome
of the mathematical gesticulations. An answer of May 20th could mean a bit of
gluttony, May 5th, however, some belt tightening.
In a good year, with good drying conditions, pulling the
bales from their place released that smell of new mown hay that Jim Nabors is
so fond of singing about. I always imagined that the hay was so well insulated,
packed tightly in row upon row, that a little bit of the summer heat was
released in the uncovering. That may have been internal body heat generated
from carrying thirty pounds of wool coats, long underwear, double layers socks
and Wonder bread (see Wonder . . . Bread? the December 4th blog) sacks up a
rickety old ladder thirty feet. This was long before the days of thinsulate
when the theories of body heat regulation revolved mainly around lugging heavy
cloths around to keep you warm.
It was the loading of the haymow that provided the most
vivid memories though; the most vivid memories and a life-forming lesson that
has shaped me and is still one of the major forces that shapes my life and the
way I see the world. If you were to look in the table of contents, the chapter
would be called "Teaching the Concept of Certain Ambiguity or Ambiguous
Certitude."
This lesson was taught and re-enforced each summer for ten
years; taught until its lessons became part of my DNA. As mentioned, the very
tip top of the haymow (capacity 1500 bales) was 30 feet off of the ground.
Being mere mortals with limited strength, we used an old Kewanee elevator with
a Wisconsin motor that always required two
pulls on the starter rope whether the engine was hot or cold and a quarter choke
to get it started. The elevator was 80 feet long. One end sitting out in the
barn yard, the other disappearing into the barn, it would take the bales of hay
one at a time from the wagon on the ground up to the crew in haymow, who would
take the bales and deposit them tightly in their heat holding, aroma saving,
storage place until winter.
The elevator would elevate (imagine that) as the barn would
fill. Following the laws of Pythagoras, the base would shorten while the
vertical would lengthen maintaining that sum of the squares ratio of the eighty
foot hypotenuse. There was a rhythm to be maintained while loading bales onto
the elevator: every five feet, place another bale on the conveyer and it would
be transported to my father who would be waiting at the end taking every bale
from the front edge of the mow. He would take that 50 lb bale and propel it up
to 30 ft. at the feet of one of three teenage boys on the haymow crew. He would
direct them where to put the next bale, admonishing them to keep the stack
tight, and patiently waiting for the next row. Sometimes his hollering would be
punctuated with a yelp from one of the boys, when they sank to their knee into
the hole that their sloppiness left on the previous level.
He would grab another bale every ten seconds for the 20 minutes it would take to unload the 120 bales and then walk down the elevator at the end followed by three bedraggled teenage boys wondering how they would last until 6:30 that evening when the approaching dew would start to make the hay too damp to keep well in the barn. This rhythm would repeat itself all afternoon; twenty minutes to unload, ten minutes to retrieve a filled wagon from the field. Over and over, the only change to the rhythm would be to crank the elevator a little higher as the stack grew.
This barn had an unusual feature in the form of a straw loft
that protruded out into the middle part of the barn when the elevator would
travel its Pythagorean progress. When the barn became two thirds full the hay
mow would start to become constricted by the roof. This was always the last
setting for the elevator. The laws of geometry made it impossible to get under
the straw loft and any higher before reaching the roof line. It was always a
tight fit. In fact, if the front edge of a bale popped even a little bit of a wheelie
it would hit the floor of the straw loft and if we were lucky tumble off of the
elevator and hit the ground with a thud. The unlucky ones would get stuck on
the elevator causing the drive belt to slip and smoke or worse cause the chain
to break. Heaven help the wagon unloader (me) if the chain broke.
At the angle that the elevator went into the barn on this
last set, physics took over and all of the forces of nature tried to get the
nose of those bales to pop up. The elevator was so steep that Evil Kneval could
have used it to jump Snake River canyon. However,
dad had a plan; simply set the bale on the edge of another bale, push down on
each end of the bale making a nice little bow, put the bale on the elevator with
the ends down; one every 5 feet. The arch would keep the nose down. The bale
would slide under the obstruction and make its way into dad’s waiting arms.
That obstacle overcome, Sharritt Farms would forge ahead for
the next 360 bales with no issues or problems. Then the fourth load would come
and the lesson in certain ambiguity would begin with my father its Sensei.
Everyone knew that the mow would not hold the entirety of load number four. How
much would it hold; 40, 50, 110 bales? It was very important to fill it to the
certitude of full. That 60 bales could be the difference between May 5th
or the 11th. The barn had to be full. Instructions to the unloader;
pay attention you’ll know when its full.
“How?”
“I’ll yell.”
“Okay.” But I thought; sure you’ll yell. You are eighty feet
away, there is an old Wisconsin engine
screaming because the muffler was broken off last year when a bale got caught
on the straw mow and fell off the elevator, there is a two foot window that is
blocked by a bale of hay every ten seconds. You’re going to yell. You’re going
to yell at me when I don’t hear you yell.
“How many bales do you need?”
“I don’t know. Some. Just pay attention and I will let you
know.”
“More that 40; more than 80?”
“I don’t know. Just pay attention. I am certain that you
will know.”
He didn’t know. I kept thinking he could have known.
However, his mind was elsewhere. I yearned for the certainty of a story problem
made just for this occasion. There are 5.3 rows, each row holds 11 bales. How
many bales do you need to fill the haymow?
The answer, written in the ambiguity forced by his strong, but weary shoulders: May 12th.
Take care,
Roger
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