a roll in the hay.
[transcribed from journal, 7.13.08.]
Today I lived an Andrew Wyeth painting.
I hung onto the tractor fender as my cousin Tim took me up into the hilly fields above the red barn to meet up with my uncle, running the baler. "How does he get the bales into the wagon?" I asked. "And you call yourself a farmgirl," Tim sneered.
A rotating combing wheel scooped up the piles of dried hay laying in a line; an auger squished it back into a cubic hopper, where it compressed until the spring tension signalled the tying mechanism to wrap the cube with twine; and the newborn bale inched its way out back like an animal's solid waste until it reached the end of the flat metal spatula, which then gave a sudden, violent flick. From afar, one could only see the tractor assemblage moseying through the hayfield, and every minute or so a tiny flying bale would arc upwards, landing gracefully atop a growing pile in the red rickety wagon.
I hopped down from the fender when the wagon was full, traded out pins and hitches, and clambered back on to let Tim expertly guide us back down into the valley, across the road to the half-empty wooden barn where my other cousin and her husband waited to unload.
We unloaded a total of five wagons that afternoon, which doesn't sound like a lot, although my back would say otherwise; except I had a dawning suspicion of they do this regularly; my uncle does this every day. What was simply a one-off family activity for me, this occasional hard manual labor that makes me feel achingly satisfied, is in fact a way of life. I will go back to my office desk job; my uncle will stay in these fields, only without someone to hop down and switch out the wagons for him.
I brag about my rural heritage: I have no idea what it entails. I feel ignorant and frustrated with how much I don't know. My scheduled regular reminder that the simple life is not so simple.
*
The previous evening, I had chosen a spot up on the hill, just off the dirt road leading to my aunt and uncle's house, chasing cell phone reception. I sat in the wheat while across the valley floor my uncle finished up in the distant field, and watched fireflies emerge in the twilight, and I spoke to the far-off boy I'm dating about home, and roots, and my late grandfather's presence everywhere on this farm.
It felt suddenly massively important that I try to make him understand this about me, that I have a pull back here. Part of me wants to learn how this too works, learn the process of squeezing a livelihood out of raw land, a mere 300 acres in a Pennsylvania valley. This part of me empathizes with small-town conservative Americans, a slice of the population my liberal culturally-progressive profession generally disdains. But I know these people too well to dismiss them.
At the funeral earlier that day, my mother would whisper to me the identities of the unfamiliar faces wrinkled with sympathy: "That's the Geigers, Florence's parents." "The Moyers, from down the valley; Pappy used to farm with him." Names familiar from back road signs, from church bulletins, from local feed and grain businesses; distant cousins and fellow old farming families. There is a completely different sort of social network map here in the rural areas, a map based not on jobs or personalities, but on family lineage, on geography. Grandma, oldest girl from the family on the hill, married Pappy, only son of the family down the valley, and they stayed married 64 years. Families stuck together because they needed all hands on deck for the harvest. And so on. Country folk aren't stupid, and they're not simple; but as the boy pointed out over the phone, who talks about high-minded concepts like politics and social revolution when they're too busy keeping track of hogs and worrying about whether the rain will hold off long enough to get the hay in?
I thought of all this while automatically grabbing bales from the wagon and wrestling them onto the conveyor belt. "We've been talking about what's going to happen to the farm," my cousin said suddenly. I glanced over. "I confess I've been thinking about it quite a bit myself," I said. "I wish I could help more often. This... it feels right, you know? It feels like family. But it's not me, not entirely. It would just be helping."
"Of course," she said. "You've got your career. You don't live here."
"So what were you thinking?"
"...We'd love to take it over. We love doing this work, and we know how. ...It's a long way off, though."
"Yeah," I said. It isn't really, though. And at least now I know I'm not the only one who puzzles over the conundrum of how to keep this going, evolving, this random patch of ground breathed into life through collective memory and years and years of hard desperate work. "As long as you save me a spot at the hay harvest," I added.
"You can be first in line," she said.
***
Today I lived an Andrew Wyeth painting.
I hung onto the tractor fender as my cousin Tim took me up into the hilly fields above the red barn to meet up with my uncle, running the baler. "How does he get the bales into the wagon?" I asked. "And you call yourself a farmgirl," Tim sneered.
A rotating combing wheel scooped up the piles of dried hay laying in a line; an auger squished it back into a cubic hopper, where it compressed until the spring tension signalled the tying mechanism to wrap the cube with twine; and the newborn bale inched its way out back like an animal's solid waste until it reached the end of the flat metal spatula, which then gave a sudden, violent flick. From afar, one could only see the tractor assemblage moseying through the hayfield, and every minute or so a tiny flying bale would arc upwards, landing gracefully atop a growing pile in the red rickety wagon.
I hopped down from the fender when the wagon was full, traded out pins and hitches, and clambered back on to let Tim expertly guide us back down into the valley, across the road to the half-empty wooden barn where my other cousin and her husband waited to unload.
We unloaded a total of five wagons that afternoon, which doesn't sound like a lot, although my back would say otherwise; except I had a dawning suspicion of they do this regularly; my uncle does this every day. What was simply a one-off family activity for me, this occasional hard manual labor that makes me feel achingly satisfied, is in fact a way of life. I will go back to my office desk job; my uncle will stay in these fields, only without someone to hop down and switch out the wagons for him.
I brag about my rural heritage: I have no idea what it entails. I feel ignorant and frustrated with how much I don't know. My scheduled regular reminder that the simple life is not so simple.
*
The previous evening, I had chosen a spot up on the hill, just off the dirt road leading to my aunt and uncle's house, chasing cell phone reception. I sat in the wheat while across the valley floor my uncle finished up in the distant field, and watched fireflies emerge in the twilight, and I spoke to the far-off boy I'm dating about home, and roots, and my late grandfather's presence everywhere on this farm.
It felt suddenly massively important that I try to make him understand this about me, that I have a pull back here. Part of me wants to learn how this too works, learn the process of squeezing a livelihood out of raw land, a mere 300 acres in a Pennsylvania valley. This part of me empathizes with small-town conservative Americans, a slice of the population my liberal culturally-progressive profession generally disdains. But I know these people too well to dismiss them.
At the funeral earlier that day, my mother would whisper to me the identities of the unfamiliar faces wrinkled with sympathy: "That's the Geigers, Florence's parents." "The Moyers, from down the valley; Pappy used to farm with him." Names familiar from back road signs, from church bulletins, from local feed and grain businesses; distant cousins and fellow old farming families. There is a completely different sort of social network map here in the rural areas, a map based not on jobs or personalities, but on family lineage, on geography. Grandma, oldest girl from the family on the hill, married Pappy, only son of the family down the valley, and they stayed married 64 years. Families stuck together because they needed all hands on deck for the harvest. And so on. Country folk aren't stupid, and they're not simple; but as the boy pointed out over the phone, who talks about high-minded concepts like politics and social revolution when they're too busy keeping track of hogs and worrying about whether the rain will hold off long enough to get the hay in?
I thought of all this while automatically grabbing bales from the wagon and wrestling them onto the conveyor belt. "We've been talking about what's going to happen to the farm," my cousin said suddenly. I glanced over. "I confess I've been thinking about it quite a bit myself," I said. "I wish I could help more often. This... it feels right, you know? It feels like family. But it's not me, not entirely. It would just be helping."
"Of course," she said. "You've got your career. You don't live here."
"So what were you thinking?"
"...We'd love to take it over. We love doing this work, and we know how. ...It's a long way off, though."
"Yeah," I said. It isn't really, though. And at least now I know I'm not the only one who puzzles over the conundrum of how to keep this going, evolving, this random patch of ground breathed into life through collective memory and years and years of hard desperate work. "As long as you save me a spot at the hay harvest," I added.
"You can be first in line," she said.
***