The Dog Days and Hay Days of Summer

You know- I never understood that phrase, “The dog days of Summer.” For me it calls monotony to mind, those days that all blend together. Just uneventful and dull. Or when it is hot, the image of a poor dog laying there in the shade, panting relentlessly when it is just too blasted hot to do anything else. But Pa calls this good haymaking weather and seizes the day with joy and gusto. He frolics about on a wagon load of perfect bales with a passel of dogs and you would think he was a six year old at a waterpark. “Mmm mmm. Good hay, eh’ kid? Isn’t this lots of fun!?” He says to me like it isn’t a hundred degrees in the shade and I’m not standing on this hay wagon in the sun wearing the heaviest pair of jeans I own. Mama glances back at us from the tractor and smiles. It is hot there too. 

The year I was born there was a drought. Right in the middle of the “dog days.” It was a hundred degrees the day Mama and Papa brought me home from the hospital. Or at least that is how the stories all go. Nothing grew - except for a thistle in the yard that got quite tall because there was no need to mow the dead lawn. Mama carefully cut the brilliant purple blossom and put it in a vase in the house. It was beautiful and it also kept that thistle from going to seed. Lord knows we don’t need more thistles in the lawn. Heat has never really bothered me as much as it seems to bother other folks. At least not until I was expecting our second child. It usually has to be at least 80 before I consider putting on shorts and I don’t like to get in a pool unless it is 85 or higher. I do wonder if that has had something to do with how hot it was when I was brought into the world. However, haymaking is hot, sweaty business no matter what the thermometer reads.

In the beginning, haying was done with the horses. Pa cut with the team, then raked with the team, and then put up loose hay in the mow with the team. Nowadays we use a tractor with a haybine and rake that most farmers would now consider vintage. Mama does some of the cutting and almost all the raking. No matter the equipment, the real challenge is choosing the best days to cut and put it up in the barn. Just like with planting, I used to tag along while Pa strode to the field to check the hay. He would pull a handful from various places in the windrow; a little from the edges, a little from the center. He twisted the stems back and forth a bit, checking the moisture. Sometimes he would nod and head to hitch up the horses. Other times, he’d look annoyed, shake his head and head back to the house. If the hay had too much moisture, it needed another day of good, hot sunshine. If there’s one thing my Pa truly dislikes - it is poor hay. 

When my folks bought the farm, we did not bale our hay. We made loose hay like they did in the old days. The sort of hay all these old barns were built for. Hay was cut, dried, raked, and then loaded onto flat-rack wagons with standards on both ends - all with the horses. I was too little when we made loose hay to remember much, but when I look through the old box of photos, it looks far less strenuous than making small bales. Pa informs me that this is indeed true. You just push the hay around with a fork to balance the load out. In the mow, the sling does most of the work for you. Not like with small bales where it is a continuous cycle of moving a sixty pound bale of hay from one place to another.

Cutting hay with horses is sneaky and methodic business. After a few rounds, the horses just know, and they work their way around the field almost on their own. The driver runs a little foot pedal with his right foot to raise the sickle bar a bit for the corners. Many a wayward animal has lost its legs or a tip of the tail to the horse drawn hay mower because they are so quiet. All you hear is the gentle swish of horses plodding through the tall hay and a quiet whisper of the sickle blades on the McCormick #6 or #7 mower, depending on which model Pa was sitting on. High from the adrenaline, the injured animal sprints off on stubs. We had a cat once, the sort with nine lives, that had a poor relationship with the mower. Poor Petunia lost the end of her tail and a few toes to the hay mower. Petunia was a very special cat for our family and lived a remarkably long life.

Raking with Dude and Rusty

After the hay has been cut and dries for a bit, Pa set out to rake the hay with the team, windrow after windrow to dry in the summer sun. When it was fit, the flat-racks were spread with slings made from rope and slats of wood. The hay loader was hooked on behind the wagon. Dude and Rusty plodded down the windrows of hay, baked dry in the hot summer sunshine, making their winter’s meals. The hay climbed the hay loader and was spread out over the slings. After a good thick layer, another sling was laid down, and when the wagon was full it was off to the barn to unload.

Some of the best family stories come from making hay on the back field, the only field we have on a good-sized hill. I spent years of my childhood hearing the line about the time we ran a bee hive up the hay loader, but never knowing much more than that. Finally I asked Pa what the rest of the story was. Bumble bees had a nest in the ground in the back field that year, unbeknownst to us. Unfortunately, the windrow had been raked over the top of the nest. So, imagine hundreds of fat, fuzzy bumble bees crawling their way through a foot or so of hay to find their home. Along comes the hay loader pulling the windrow up, and along with it, a nest full of lost bees. Nothing sets a man to hopping about like a kangaroo on top of a load of hay like a swarm of bees. Pa sent out a sting of expletives, and a command to get the wagon moving, and they trotted out that situation. 

Running the Hay Loader with
Dino the Dog Running Along

Another great story was the time the pole broke on the back hill with a full load of hay. It was a testament again to how truly great a team Dude and Rusty really were. The harness that the team wears to work is carefully engineered to push the wagon along through a collar that is attached to the tugs, which attaches the horses to the vehicle. The pole and the britching strap around the horses behind are what allow a team to hold back heavy loads while going downhill. If the pole breaks… well suddenly there isn’t anything to hold the wagon back anymore. So heading downhill with a full load of hay and a broken pole could have very well been a catastrophic situation. Dude and Rusty handled the situation with all the ease and finesse anyone could dream up. The wagon came up behind them and bumped them in the rear ends and they continued their calculated descent down the hill holding the wagon back with just their large

The Hay Loader

Belgian behinds. Pa pulled them up at the bottom of the hill and unhitched. He ground-drove them back to shed for a new pole, and possibly a clean pair of overalls. With the new pole in place, he drove the full wagon into the barn to be unloaded like nothing ever happened.

Ever wonder why there are doors on the side of the barn that drops down into the barn yard? When you pull the load of hay into the barn to be unloaded, the team can get a nice breeze, and some fresh air looking out those open doors while the wagon is being unloaded. In the old days, a second team was hitched to a rope that was attached to the pulley system that moved the hay to the mow. For us this job was done by an old Allis-Chalmers W-C tractor on steel. First, the ends of the sling are attached in place. Then the tractor drives ahead, and the sling lifts the hay all the way to the peak of the barn. Click! It hits the top and a mechanism sends the sling of hay along the peak of the barn through the queen posts and into the mow. Pa takes hold of a rope and sets the sling swinging. The trick is to open the sling at the right moment to make the hay land in just the right spot. Back and forth, back and forth. Click! Wooosh! The hay falls into the mow. A bit of rearranging, and it is back for another sling full until the wagon is empty. Then back the horses out and it is back the field for another load. 

Of course there are the moments when the catch on the track in the peak of the barn isn’t working as it should. In these moments, Pa climbed hand over hand up the smooth, thick, hay rope to flip the catch by hand. Poor Mama was left standing on the barn floor wondering whether to admire this great feat of strength, or chew her fingernails clean off looking at Pa twenty five feet in the air hanging on a rope with nothing more to hold him there but his own endurance and brawn. I bet he could still do it if he set a mind to. 

Unloading Hay in the Sling in the Barn

Another time when the track wasn’t at its best, Pa laid planks across the barn rafters in order to easily access the track for maintenance. There in the peak of the barn, he found a hammer. I see this hammer now and then in the wood shop. A hundred year old hammer some farmer, a few owners back in our farm’s family tree, set down in a safe place while fixing that very same track and forgot where he put it. I bet he never dreamed it would take another hundred years for someone to find where he forgot he put his hammer. I wonder if he missed it. 

I don’t remember much of the old hay-making days. I really wish I did. I love watching the whole process on the old movies Grandma made. The sounds and that dust, I can almost smell what it must have been like to be there. And I was there. I’m in those videos too. A little, adorable, scruffy, and a little dirty two year old or so. Too little to remember on my own. 

What I do remember is the fun we had when we switched to small bales. With small bales, so much more hay fits in the barn. When we switched from loose hay to bales, it meant that a section of the mow was baled and another was loose. Oh, what fun! You just climb up into the bales and jump into the loose hay. A clear, free fall into a big pile of prickly, stems that felt more like a pillow when you landed in it. Over and over again. Climb up, jump down. I’m sure Pa wasn’t very impressed with the mess I made, but it sure was fun.

Hay Wagon Dogs

My folks still make small bales on the farm with the same baler, bought in the early 90’s, and I’m sure it wasn’t new then either. We have always stacked our wagons, that old New Holland baler isn’t a kick baler. Honestly, unloading kick bale wagons is messy, slow business. Avalanches here and there slow up the unloading process. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer the bales to be in my hands and not falling on my head. Stacking wagons had Mama on the tractor and Pa on the wagon. When I was old enough, I jumped on the wagon too. And this is why I never learned to drive a tractor until much more recently. Remember that I mentioned my Mama is of small stature? I passed her up pretty fast, and that meant I was tasked with throwing bales. Now when Pa has other things that need doing during haying, it is just me on the wagon and Mama on the tractor - putting to the test all those tidbits of knowledge I picked up from Pa. I’m not half bad at repairing broken bales. I can’t get them as tight as he can, but I can keep the bale counter on track and save us the time of re-baling.

When we unload, Pa is up in the mow and sometimes it is just me on the wagon. Other times it is me and Mama. By the time we are unloading, we are usually starving and chores need doing. Mama starts in on chores and supper while Pa and I unload. But that is how it is on a farm sometimes, there is no shortage of work to be done.

Even though I haven’t actually lived on my parent’s farm in years, I still go back for haying. It gets to be a certain time of year and I start thinking about it. "You make hay on the 4th of July,"  Pa always says. Even though most folks feel like watching a parade, I still feel like I aught to be on the hay wagon. There are a few reasons for this. The obvious reason is that it’s just the nice thing to do, helping out your folks and all. More subtle reasons, and maybe the bigger reasons for me, include riding around the field with Pa and a few dogs talking about life, animal care, dinner and daydreaming about ice cream. Or the irresistible feeling of a good day’s work. Or even the fact that a glass of ice tea is a million times better when it is drunk up under the maple tree while the sun is going down over a clean cut field of hay stubble. Days later, as the tiny needle point scratches and scabs from the prickly ends of the bales fade away, you smile and count the days on the weather forecast until you can do it again. Gratification has so many forms, but none so great as a hard days work.