Reminiscences of a Farm Kid and Ramblings of More Recent Eve

[bretf]

My wife, while not a fan of the Post Apocalypse fiction I’ve been trying to write, wants me to try writing something lighter, and possibly humorous. Somehow following our discussion, I came up with this idea. It will be just short little tales, most based on my life. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to comment. I hope it might trigger memories from others that you will share here. Things that helped mold us into the people that visit self-sufficiency, homesteader, prep and survival sites. I’m sure that we all have our own stories about this.

I’m still working on “The Ashen Horse”, and it will be the focus of my writing efforts, but somedays, I need to get away from that world for a while to recharge my batteries. So here are the first couple of installments that I’ve been sitting on.

Bret


Reminiscences of a Farm Kid

Reminiscences of a farm kid – well, kind of. I grew up in a semi-rural area with livestock, tractors, open spaces; but we never lived on a farm per se. The home where I grew up was about an acre and a half, but that never stopped Dad. He got a lot out of that place, as well as renting pastures, and doing custom hay work for many years.

We always grew a substantial garden, had a bunch of laying hens, and a milk cow. Dad had other cattle that were his savings account; one of which would make a deposit each fall into the freezer. Most years Mom and Dad purchased from fifty to one hundred Cornish cross chicks that we raised and butchered. Remember the saying, “Chicken Every Sunday”? That was our Sunday dinner for many years, and I still find home fried chicken hard to beat.

Dad had other livestock over the years; sheep, pigs, goats. But the Jersey cow was the constant, and most important of them all to our way of life.

Years later, at the culmination of a party; party being defined in that period of time as a group of young people getting together and drinking enough alcoholic beverages to get stupid. We had to get stupid, since at that age we knew everything; there was only one way to go. Anyway, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to take some of the left over beer home. It’s true; I’m not making this up. We really did have beer left over. Clearly, we were rank amateurs at partying at that time. As we progressed in our education, we managed to avoid repeating that particular dilemma. Even the times it would have been much more prudent to save some for a later day. But oh well, we bounced back quickly back then. So, after that one party, my friend asked if I wanted to take some of the leftover beer home. I told him, “No, I can’t. We don’t have any room in our refrigerator.” He was puzzled at my response, and asked, “Really, what’s in your fridge?” In all seriousness, I told him, “Milk.” You see, he was a city boy that had recently moved to the area. He looked me over, trying to find the joke, and then busted out laughing, and said, “Welcome to Idaho!”

[bretf]

How Not to Start a Tractor, and a Salute to Dad

My dad took care of a lot of hayfields for a lot of years. There were a few years that he supported the family by doing custom haying in the local area. When he was back to work full time, my brother and I took on a lot of the fields. I thought it was great summer work during junior high and high school; it left my brother and me with lots of time for fishing and backpacking. We just had to make sure we got the work taken care of when it was there.

While the bigger custom hay guys ran swathers and larger balers, Dad’s machinery was small so we could get into the smaller patches and narrow entries. Dad had an Allis Chalmers WD that he used to handle a sickle mower and the baler. Windrowing was done with a Ford 8N and side delivery rake. I left a lot of paint from the rake on a number of corner posts; some of those entries were quite narrow.

What some people call progress happened in our area; more and more fields grew houses instead of hay and the places we took care of dwindled. Eventually, Dad was only doing a few fields on shares; taking half the hay for putting it up. As the owners died off, of course “progress happened”. Their offspring didn’t want to mess with a field of hay.

By that time, Dad had sold off most of his cows, but had a few mules he liked to mess with. He never liked to buy hay, but loved working the fields so it was a great arrangement for him. The last place we did, was owned by a woman that was 96 years old when she passed on. Her daughter had tried to get her to sell and move into a home; she countered that taking care of the place was the only think keeping her alive. I look the other way when I pass her place now; a new subdivision is coming out of it.

Dad still has one mule, but can’t get on the AC any longer. My brother - that recently retired - mows, rakes and bales, two small patches in our neighborhood. They produce just enough for the old mule to get through the winter.

All of Dad’s equipment was well used before he ever got it, so it seemed there was always something in need of repair. A chain around the frame of the AC held the mower mount in place for years. The place where it mounted to the frame, had broken and been welded too many times (we were pretty good at making hay but needed a lot of improvement with the welder) so we had to add extra support. The chain did the trick.

There are skeletons of old mowing machines in the back of Dads’ place; he would pick them up at farm auctions and put the best pieces together to make them last as long as possible. The old baler is still there, along with the rake I managed to break the tongue off of.

One of the more memorable things I saw him do was “carburetor work” on the AC. When it started coughing and spitting, he would take the hammer out of the tool box and beat on the side of the carburetor, freeing up whatever junk the sediment bowl let pass through.

Dead batteries seemed to be the norm. During haying season, along with the tool box, we always kept a pair of jumper cables and a chain in his pickup, and after I was on my own but still helped with the hay, in mine also. I’ve never had an American Express card; jumpers and chains were what we didn’t leave home without.

One particular summer, the Ford just didn’t want to start. It refused to start with jumpers, but with a pull start, it fired right up. Dad said he’d figure it out in the fall. In the meantime, we would usually go to the fields together, so one of us in the pickup and the other on the tractor, we could pull start it.

One day, no one was around to help, so Dad did what he always did; he figured out a way to get it done. The field was pretty long, so he hooked the chain from the pickup to the tractor, got back in the pickup and had it idling across the field in second gear. He jumped out of the pickup, and got onto the moving tractor. Mind you he was around sixty at the time, but he had work to do and was set to do it.

Once on the tractor, he put it in fourth gear, let out the clutch and it started right up. Then he took it out of gear and stood on both brakes, stopped the pickup killing its engine. Leaving the tractor idling in neutral, he moved the pickup out of the way, and then he raked the field.

When he told me about it later, I said he was nuts. So of course he had to take me out and show me how it was done. While I admired his thinking of a way to get the job done, I was also terrified of him tripping, or missing his step. So much could have gone wrong, but, Dad never let problems stand in the way of doing a job that needed done.

Well, about a week later, he needed me to rake a field for him. The tractor still wouldn’t start and I was on my own. I figured if Dad could start the tractor that way, well I could too.

Uh Huh!

I missed one not-so-minor detail when I did it the first time. I didn’t have the tractor in neutral. I hooked the chain to it and started towing it across the field. Like always, it fired right up, and then I realized my mistake. While I expressed my displeasure at myself in words I won’t use on this site, the tractor slammed into the back of the pickup. I hit the brakes, and forced the tractor’s engine to die. I could have cried when I saw the rear bumper on that S-10. But I didn’t, I don’t think, it’s been too many years ago. I had a field to rake. I put the tractor in neutral, and started it the right way that time.

Dad is slowed now, due to the ravages of time, and can’t do near what he used to do. But still, I marvel at what he could do when he put his mind to it. I thank him for teaching me to think through things, and I know I’ll never be the man he was and is.

Bret

[whereiwant2b]

Thank you for the posts. I enjoyed them.

[themotherhen]

I enjoyed this too, thanks!

[Ozarks Tom]

I've got an 8n I use for road work. I'm assuming you got on from behind, as I'd never step in front of those tires when they're moving.

Great stories, thanks.

[bretf]

Nov 14, 2015 20:19:11 GMT Ozarks Tom said:

I've got an 8n I use for road work. I'm assuming you got on from behind, as I'd never step in front of those tires when they're moving.

Great stories, thanks.

No, it was from the side. Dad would get beside it with his hand on the fender, get the pace right and make his move. Lucky, the pickup idling in second gear wasn't too fast.   See why he freaked me out when he showed me.

[bretf]

The wood Stove and the Gas Meter

The house I grew up in was basic cinder block construction, with nothing on the walls but a coat of paint. The living room had a high, uninsulated, vaulted ceiling. Actually, none of the ceilings had insulation. In other words, it wouldn’t exactly fit the bill for energy efficiency. Somewhere around 1970 the heat bill came, and Dad almost hit that vaulted ceiling.



The thermostat was turned down to the lowest it could go, and we started scrounging any piece of wood we could come up with, and burning it in the fireplace. So of course more heat went up the chimney than into the living room. The bedroom doors were ordered closed from that point on. It could get pretty cold in those back bedrooms in winter.



Dad went to work building a wood stove. When it was finished, it stood in front of the fireplace. The fireplace was closed off with a piece of sheet metal, with a hole cut into it. A section of stove pipe ran from the stove, through the sheet metal. It was a big improvement, at least in the front part of the house.



The furnace was shut off completely then. Since that time, I’ve vacuumed and fired it a couple of times to make sure it still works. Once when they had to be gone for a couple weeks in the winter, I made sure it worked, and left it on so nothing would freeze up while they were gone. But otherwise, it just occupies space.



We managed to find a kitchen cook stove at a farm auction, and the next summer, we built a new chimney in the kitchen and set the stove up. Then we had two rooms in the house that stayed warm.



On a side note, during my teen years, I didn’t exactly keep my half of the bedroom cleaned up. Growing up, my brothers and I always shared one bedroom. By the time I was a teen, one had gotten married, so there were still two of us sharing the room. My brother and I spent as much time hunting as possible, so we went chukar hunting on the last day of the year. It was cold, snowing sideways; a stiff wind pushing the snow. Hunting that day was as lousy as the weather. When we got home, I dropped my hunting vest at the end of my bed. As happened all too often, (and unfortunately still does) I didn’t get it picked up for some time. In mid-February, Mom insisted I clean my room. Reluctantly, I dug through my pile at the end of the bed. A couple of layers down, I found the hunting vest. It was still frozen from that hunting trip.



Over the years, there were steady improvements to the house: spray insulation in the living room ceiling, blown in insulation in the other ceilings, insulating sheet and siding on the outside. It was a lot cozier with each new improvement. Dad cut the legs off his stove, and we put it into the fireplace, and rigged up a fan system to blow the heat out into the room. From those cold winters way back, when we always wore sweatshirts in the house, now, at family get-togethers, we open the front door, Dad has it so hot.



Somewhere along the line, Dad came up with a water jacket to put in the firebox in the kitchen stove. He mounted a tank behind the stove, and then plumbed everything in. Cold water goes into the water jacket, then the heated water goes into the holding tank. From there, the hot water travels to the natural gas powered hot water heater, and then it’s distributed to the rest of the house. In winter, the only gas Mom and Dad would use was for the pilot light. The wood stove makes more hot water than they use.



So, the gas company got all modern on us a few years back. A representative of the company went out to Mom and Dad’s house and said he had to change the meter. Dad asked why, and the man said because it didn’t work. They weren’t using any gas to speak of, and it was winter. Dad said, well of course it works, because we don’t use much gas. The man was incredulous, so Dad took him in and showed him everything. He was amazed, and took a bunch of pictures of it. But then he had to fire up the furnace and make sure the meter did in fact work. He left amazed, anticipating getting back to the shop and telling all about the old man’s house he’d been to that day.



I told a guy at work that story and he thought it was great. So great, he had to share it at the bar that night. As he told the story, the man beside him laughed He’d been out to Dad’s house and seen it for himself, several winters earlier.



It was one more of Dad’s inspiring projects and lessons on self-sufficiency. And he sure likes to tell about the man from the gas company.

[Ozarks Tom]

Oh that brings back memories of winters in Minnesota.

After WWII my dad bought a war surplus supply building, 25' deep by 75' long, all pre-fab parts and pieces that came on 2 trucks. He drove a sand point well, and built the house over it so the hand pump was in the kitchen in the center of the house, with bedrooms on both ends.

My bedroom was on an end, and since the pot belly stove and wood cook stove were in the middle of the house it was downright frigid in the bedroom. I remember my mother stacking old Navy blankets on me so heavy I couldn't roll over, sleeping in a stocking cap, and waking up to 1/4" of ice on the inside of the windows from my breath.

My dad told the story about when he was building the house, being a supply building it didn't have any windows in the pre-fab walls. He designed a way to just cut the window holes, and fabricate windows from scratch to just slide into the openings and fasten there. When he was picking up his window supplies at the lumber yard the owner said "Charlie, just how are you building those windows?" Well, my dad drew it out for him. Every heard of Anderson Windows? Unfortunately, our name isn't Anderson, but lumber yard owner's was.

[themotherhen]

When I was in the 1st and 2nd grade, we moved into a huge old farmhouse. It had a big kitchen, 3 living rooms, 3 bedrooms, a basement and an attic. The windows were old and it was an absolute nightmare to heat. Well, my Dad had to get hernia surgery the first winter we lived there and couldn't work for 6 weeks. Money was really tight. So my Mom and I moved all the mattresses downstairs and we installed a door at the top of the stairs, then closed all the upstairs vents and hung a thick blanket over the door. There was a downstairs bathroom luckily, and my Mom got a huge plastic tub that we bathed in in the kitchen. She bought a clothes basket for each of us so we didn't need to go upstairs.
It really taught me a lot about adapting to difficult circumstances and finding creative solutions to problems. My Mom never complained about anything, just quietly set about solving the problem. She was an excellent Mother, and is a great Grandma too!

[bretf]

The place right behind my home was a dairy farm when I was young. An old fashioned dairy, where the cows actually grazed on pastures, not the feed lot style of today. After the family closed the dairy, they entertained various options for selling the land. One was to become a gravel pit for a nearby highway project. That didn’t happen. One was for a subdivision. Whew, that didn’t happen. One was for a Mormon church. Finally, it was sold to the city, and the Optimist Club developed it into a sports field / city park.


Besides all the use the fields get in football and soccer season, it is very popular for people to walk their dogs. My chickens are a popular attraction. The goats were, when they were in the pasture next to the park / sports field. My dad’s mule just spent a little over a month eating down the field I used to have the goats in.


I was out doing the chores the other night when a lady walking her dog called to me.


“Do you know what happened to the horse that was in that field? Did he die?” she asked.


“No, there wasn’t a horse there,” I said.


“Yes there was.”


It could have gone on for quite a while, so I told her it was a mule. Then I had to try to explain the differences in horses and mules to her. I really threw her off when I told her a mule is just a half-assed horse.


Then she started admiring my chickens. She pointed at one, and asked, “Why doesn’t that one have feathers on her back?”


I said, “Because I have too many roosters, and she’s popular.”


She was as confused with that statement as the one about the “half-assed horse”.


I had the egg bucket with me, and she saw the araucana eggs in it and wowed over them. I had to point out a couple of the hens to her. One of the roosters came walking near, and she asked what eggs I got from that one.


“None, that one’s a rooster.”


“You don’t get eggs from roosters?”


“No, they’re the males.”


“So what do they do?”


“You know, the male duties, they fertilize the eggs.”


“So you don’t get eggs or anything from them?”


Being careful of my egg bucket, I said, “No, they do the nasty,” and I clapped my hands together lightly, “And then roll over and watch ESPN.”

The light of understanding turned on. “Oh, I understand,” she said. As if on cue, the rooster demonstrated why some of the hens are missing feathers.

[Ozarks Tom]

My nephew and his first wife (I never have figured that one out) were driving through the country and stopped for a burger in a small town. Between bites she wondered aloud why all those country people kept so many big pets. When he explained what those big pets were, and what she was eating, she became a vegetarian - for about a week. This is the same gal who joined a weight control meal club twice because they weren't sending her enough food.

[themotherhen]

I have people that come and knock on the door to tell me that my chickens are out, and walking around the yard. They don't understand the dynamics of hens and roosters either, and I think it is a good example of why marriages don't work anymore.

[mnn2501]

This is a really good idea. While I wish my grandparents had wrote down all their old stories, its not to late for me to write my remembrances of them and also if my parents and even of myself for future generations.
If i come up with anything good, I may post some of them.

[Ozarks Tom]

mnn2501 , You've jogged a memory of a story my father told me many years ago.

His parents emigrated from Sweden in the 1890s, my grandfather as part of his family, and my grandmother as sort of a "mail order" bride. They dug out a hard scrabble life in first N Dakota, then Wisconsin. They had a male friend who was to hear my father tell it, the ugliest man they'd ever seen. His chances of finding a wife were nil. So, he sent back to Sweden advertising for a wife. Well, he had a positive response, so he sent the fare. He asked my grandparents to go with him to meet the train in Superior. When she got off the train, she was the ugliest woman they'd ever seen. As they were walking from the train station, the man and my grandfather, the woman and my grandmother, each said to my grandparents "my God, he's/she's ugly". I was told they married and had a long happy life together.

My father was born in a sod house in N Dakota in 1898, quit school in the 8th grade. He made a deal with a nursery in town, and every spring, starting when he was 12, he'd load up a wagon with berry plants & bushes, hook up a team, and go off selling them to the homesteaders on the plains. Those people had only brought with them the necessities of life, not strawberry, raspberry or blueberry plants, so he'd take a little different route each time and sell out in a few days. He'd go back and load up again, and basically spend the summer on the road. He'd take a little food with him, but most times the farmers would feed him, and he'd sleep in their barns. Can you imagine a 12 year old and a team of horses wandering the countryside these days? Even though it could be surmised he had a pocketful of money at the end of his ride, nobody ever bothered him. I'd like to think some of the descendents of those plants are still growing there today.

[joebill]

Bret, your tractor starting story reminds me of a job I had in a lime quarry back in the early 70's. Mimsha (osha for mines) was just getting started, and there was not much in the way of safety rules enforced.

We had a lot of big Euclid haul trucks and a 966 Cat loader (giant machine) and several IH dump trucks that operated a gravel pit and washing/sorting plant on the same property. There were no women anywhere around, so everybody just answered the call of nature as required.

One guy stopped a dump truck in the middle of the road and got out of it, unzipping his pants, and just as he got started, the dump truck started rolling down the road without him. He began doing two things at once, one of them being chasing the dump truck on foot. The guy operating the giant loader heard him hollering and started chasing them both with the loader, blowing the air horn and trying to get the dump truck driver off of the road. he had a plan for catching up with the dump truck and sitting the loader bucket on top of the bed to stop it. Finally the runner heard him and veered off to the side, the loader caught up to the truck and the guy raised the bucket up above the truck bed, sped up, dropped the bucket down, but the dump truck put on a burst of speed as it started down a long hill.

The loader guy dropped the bucket, but the truck had gotten a couple of feet ahead of the loader and the bucket missed. The whole thing was speeding up quickly as the road steepened, and I was watching but rapidly losing hope

One more try.....one more miss, and just as the bucket dropped down below the top of the bed, to the rear, a great big Euclid haul truck started to cross an intersection across the road in front of the dump truck. Now, these thngs weighed about 50 tons themselves and also hauled about 50 tons of gravel, and this one was loaded.

The poor, wimpy little dump truck, loaded weight prob'ly only about 15 tons, t-boned the euclid, loaded weight pob'ly about 100 tons, and then was rear ended by the 966 cat loader, prob'ly weighing in about 25 tons, because the operator had, for the last time, failed to get the bucket on top of the bed, and when the chain reaction started, the bucket was only about 4 feet off of the ground.

Of course, the dump truck took all of the notable damage, not being truly mining quality but a retired state highway truck, and when the supervisor showed up to survey the damage and hear the story, I made the mistake of laughing as I told it, so instead of telling me to tow the dump truck up on the hill with the rest of them we had totaled in one way or another, He told me to tow it up to the shop and not quit on it until it was runnable again, and "it had better look straight when it's finished, and no, you can't buy any parts, you have to straighten everything, and you are luycky I don't make you do it without a torch!"


I was the mechanic but also had the job of fueling all of the equipment on both sides of a river from an old chevy fuel truck right after noon. At noon, the shots were supposed to go off, 40 holes drilled about 18" apart into the limestone, 12 feet deep, one stick of dynamite in the bottom of each hole, then filled within a foot of the top with amfo and topped off with rock dust. They were electricly detonated, and often there would be a broken wire in the setup so the shots would be delayed until I was in the pit with the fuel truck.

Often a shot would go off while I was within 100 yards or less, and every shot was a blowout, meaning that big rocks went up clear out of sight, then came back down. We needed that much powder and force because our crusher jaw was so small that we had to pulverise every bit of rock as small as possible with the blasts to get the rock into the crusher, and often some of the bigger ones were crushed again to make them fit the crusher by using a wrecking ball on a giant mining shovel, dropping the 500 pound ball on the boulders to bust them up.

Anyway, I would be on a dozer or a shovel or whatever, fueling it up, and the shot would go off unexpectedly, and I would have to jump off of a high seat or footing onto what amounted to riprap stone and then roll or wiggle under the machine berfore the falling rocks hit the ground (and me). I asked my supervisor for a radio so I could get the same warning that the bosses got when the shot was about to go off, so I could get clear, and he said he would check it out.

Next day, I'm up on a D-8, fueling it, shot goes off, I drop off and wiggle underneath, (pretty tight gap under there, lucky I was skinny back them), rocks fall all around me, including where I had been standing near the ripper, Get out, and see that the boss is standing up on a hill watching.

Next time I see him, I ask him again about a radio, and he tells me I don't need one. "I was watching you the last time you got caught by that shot, and YOU hit the ground had had seconds to spare after you were under the dozer before the ROCKS hit the ground".

Average size of those rocks were a bit bigger than a basketball.

Funny part was, I wasn't even mad at him. I was in my 20's and considered myself a cross between Paul Bunyon and Big Bad John at the time. I loved the excitement!....Joe