Drive - A Memoir 18th Installment
“Now
‘door nail’ it” Vern said.
“What?
Do what?” Russ questioned.
“Haven't
you heard the old saw 'dead as a door nail'? It means to bend over
the tip of the nail to make the nailing permanent as they did making
doors. The dead part means if you tried to re–use the nail it would
be so weakened and bent that you couldn't use it twice, thus it was
dead.” he explained as we banged away bending nails.
Linda
was the tractor driver and would pull the slip between the rows of
bales in the field. Russ and I would grab the bales as they went by
and swing them onto the slip and pile them three deep, one on
another, until we had 24 bales (about a ton) down the length of the
slip. Linda would then pull the load to the end of the field by the
stack yard. I would take the digger bar and pound several times in
the ground through the middle gap of the slip close to the hay,
making a fairly deep hole in the earth. Then Russ and I would throw
our shoulders against the bar and brace ourselves as Linda drove
away. Three things would happen, the right thing, the not so good
thing or the terrible thing. The right thing was the bar would hold
in the ground and our backs would hold out against the pressure and
the slip would slide out from under the hay pile leaving a nice tight
little stack swiftly unloaded. 'Neat huh?'. The not so good thing
would be either the bar would slip through the earth or our strength
would give out, smash us down to our knees and then the bar would
slip out of its hole. The hay would not slide off in a neat little
pile; Linda would have to go around and we would try again. The
terrible thing that could happen was when the pile would start to
slide, the bar would slip, and the nice pile of hay would tumble
loose as the tractor drove off. This meant we would have to stack the
pile back up again, thus doubling our work load by having to handle
the bales twice.
The
Old Man had acquired an old army bomb carrier vehicle that was a
truck sized jeep, and he fashioned a homemade hydraulic front loader
on it. He would push the ‘fork like’ front basket under the pile
of bales, raise it up and drive over to the hay stack and set the
bales on top. He had improvised a hydraulic ram to push the bales off
the front loader, and then he would zip back to the slip piles for
another load. We would stack the bales in place making a stack with
straight up sides and up to 18 layers high or over 20 feet. It was
like a farmer's skyscraper going up.
Finishing
the haying for the year we
500 more words tomorrow
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