Baling twine in summer

The aroma of fresh-mowed timothy (known by some as meadow cat’s tail) brings a wave of nostalgia. It’s remindful of the summers I worked with my father and others harvesting hay for a small herd of cattle.I grew up on a 3,000-acre private estate in western Massachusetts. My father was foreman. The estate included a small dairy farm. The owner, a retired, decorated World War I Army colonel who had married a war widow (she had a lot of Eastman Kodak stock), raised Herefords for meat and Guernseys for milk. Families living on the estate shared in the bounty. The colonel believed in pasture-raised beef, raw milk and homemade butter (today there’s a big deal about “grass-fed” butter. Had that, decades ago.)The estate was equipped with International Harvester (IH) machines exclusively. Two flatbed trucks, a dump truck, a Travelall, a crawler tractor and a tricycle-wheeled Farmall model H. I learned to drive in a hayfield. I doubt I was much more than 12 when I was seated in the driver’s seat in the largest truck, a green 1950 model. Someone engaged the engine, set the throttle (now they call it cruise control) and I steered a straight course up the field. I went about 2 mph. The fieldhands walked alongside and grabbed the 75-lb. bales by the twine and kneed or tossed them onto the truck. A third man stacked them four or five bales high.At field’s end, I wrestled the big steering wheel to head the truck in the other direction. Power steering? The only power was in the driver’s arms and legs. To stop the truck I had to step on the clutch and the brakes, skootching down almost out of sight of the windshield, hoping my weight was sufficient to depress both pedals.u u uAfter a few years, my father constructed a hardwood drag that was chained to the rear of the (IH, naturally) hay baler. As the bales came off the baler, I piled them on the drag. At the end of a windrow, as Dad (on the tractor) navigated around the bend, I grabbed a long iron bar, jabbed it through an opening in the drag in front of the bales, wedged it into the soil, held it and marched toward the hay. The drag pulled through, the hay bales stayed. I trotted to catch up and we did it again.The truck now had only to pull up to these piles to load. That nostalgia I spoke of earlier? It quickly goes away as memory shifts to the hot, dusty barn loft where we stacked those bales.I graduated to driving a mowing machine. First, it was a mower mounted on the rear of the Farmall H. Then, after the colonel died and the property became a holding of The Trustees of Reservations, it was on a Model B John Deere tractor. Oh, dear, John! That tractor had a hand clutch. To make a corner, it required the operator at times to (a) pull back on the clutch with the left arm and (b)shift gears with the right. At the same time, it might be necessary to (c) with the right arm pull on the lever to raise the cutterbar so it wouldn’t clog, and (d) steer with the knees. To step on the brakes? It was a trick.The writer is an associate editor of this newspaper.