Res Ipsa Loquitur

Yes, it's hot, tiring physical labor, but I've always enjoyed it. I think the primary reason was the incredibly antique haying equipment my dad always used. Cash money was hard to come by, so we made do with what we had. There was the horse-drawn mower (ours had a metal seat & rubber tires, but otherwise it's the same) and hayrake that he had converted to be used by the antique Farm-all tractor. (Yep, that's the first thing with a motor I learned how to drive.) But my favorite thing was the first hay baler we ever owned....looked something like this. As I remember, it was called a "peckerwood" baler. The plunger was much heavier, the flywheel was a little different, and the side guards were smaller, but the basic operation was the same. You pulled it up between two haystacks and pitched the hay in with pitchforks. The upright plunger pushed the hay down, a horizontal plunger inside the baler pushed the hay back. The triangular metal piece on the side of the upright plunger was used to push a wooden block down to separate the individual bales. There was a metal holder in which the block was placed which you flipped up whenever the bale was big enough. Eventually, the block would work its way back towards the end of the baler, where you would insert long wires & hand-tie each bale. (Usually my job).

Needless to say, you had to pay attention to what you were doing...if your timing was off by even a fraction of a second, the plungers would, at the very least, take your arm off. And the motor was started with a hand crank, which meant you had to put the belt that drove the baler on the big flywheel after the motor was running...a rather delicate operation to say the least. (OSHA? We didn't need no stinkin' OSHA.)

But the grownups would always tell the best stories while we all worked...and I made all kinds of interesting additions to my vocabulary when something would break. My paternal grandfather, who always helped us, had a well deserved reputation for being a little quick tempered and seemed to take it personally when something stopped working correctly. And the fact that no one cared how dirty I got (I was 10 or 11 at the time) and that there was a small creek nearby that I usually managed to sneak off to while we were waiting for the baler to start running again helped too.

We eventually were able to buy a baler that was a bit more modern, and haying was still fun....just not the same.

Definitely easier though.