Load of Hay

     I opened the hood on the blue Ford pickup.  The tractor driver turned his machine my way, but I waved him off.  The snow blew in wisps around my feet in the millet stubble.

    It was another Uncle Ricky adventure. His father-in-law needed hay for his cattle.  Ricky arranged with Ed to get a load of bales on that weekend.  It was Sunday afternoon and we were about out of weekend.  The weather was rotten.

     It had snowed earlier.  The snowfall was done, but the wind and the drifting wasn’t.  The hay bales were still in the field.  They were in bunches where the bale sled had dumped them, six to a bunch.

     Ed had a Case tractor with a frontend loader equipped with a hayfork.  We had removed he grain sides from the old Chevy truck.  With its tandem axle, it wasn’t very mobile in the stubble field with small drifts of snow. 

     Ed’s tractor could easily handle one of the stacks of six bales, two stacks if conditions were right, but conditions weren’t right.  The bottom three bales of many of the stacks were frozen to the ground.  The tractor had trouble freeing the stack without destroying the bottom bales.  The tractor would deliver the bales to the truck where three or four of us would stack them on the truck. 

       It seems nothing went right.  We restacked more than once to get the load distributed evenly on the truck bed.  The nasty north wind made sure we got faces and eyes full of snow, dirt, and millet hay.  Since the truck couldn’t move very well, the tractor had to haul the bales farther as the loading progressed.  In the back of our minds was the thought that if Mother Nature turned on the snow spigot, it would really get nasty.  We were quite vulnerable out in the middle of the hay field on the flat old plain.

     Getting the truck loaded was the last thingto do on our weekend, and we decided to leave for home directly from the hayfield when the loading was accomplished.  We had driven our Ford pickup to the field with the truck.  Another car sat beside the pickup.

      The loading took probably twice as long as it would have in fairer weather.  But eventually we had the eleven or twelve layers of bales on the twenty-one foot bed.  Ropes had been webbed over the load and secured.  But the poor old truck wouldn’t move. 

     Ed chained the tractor to the front end of the truck and tugged it along to the field edge where the truck could get enough traction to move itself.  The truck moved onto the county road where it had a fifty-mile journey to get the bales to their destination.  It was getting late.  Uncle Ricky had to deliver the bales and return to Nebraska.  I didn’t envy him his journeys. It would probably be early Monday morning before he got home.

      The rest of us returned to our vehicles.  The car took off and exited the hayfield.  I tried to start the Ford pickup.  It wouldn’t start.

      Ed was beginning to load his own truck with bales for his own cattle.  Once more out in the biting wind, I popped open the hood.  I had been down this road before.  Moisture would build up inside the distributor cap and short out the ignition.

      When Ed turned to come to my rescue, I waved him off.  I was pretty sure I could handle this problem.  I popped off the distributor cap, which on the 390 engine was on the front left, very accessible.  With a dry rag, I wiped out the beads of moisture and replaced the cap.  I knew better than to close the hood before the engine was running.

     This time when I hit the starter, the engine took off.  I closed the hood and we were off, over the drifting, wisping snow in the millet stubble, down the path to the county road, over the county road to the paved state highway. 

    We reached I-70 without further incident.  I thought about Uncle Ricky and his trip.  I thought about Ed in the hayfield now alone loading his own truck.  Not much good thinking about what you have no control over.  About fifteen miles east on I-70, we ran out of the ground blizzard.  We fought the north wind for the entire 170 miles, but the wind didn’t seem so threatening without the snow.       

     We reached home safely and reported to work Monday morning as usual.  The weekend adventure didn’t do a thing to improve my opinion of hay handling.