For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.
1 Corinthians 3:9-10
Someone, who has never experienced putting in an actual day’s work on a no-kidding working farm, would have trouble putting the experiences of farm life into a world view that they can fathom. I am not referring to the large industrial farms with a dozen hired hands; no this is a family farm where the family are the hired hands. In this kind of life there simply is not an excess amount of money to just go buy fancy new things to do basic tasks. You take what you have and come up with ways to build, repurpose, repair, or whatever. In short, you just figure it out. I once had a factory owner / manager tell me that he would rather hire either a farmer or a veteran because both knew how to just get things done with what they have. His maintenance manager was both; prior service Marine and a farmer, and that factory owner could not have been happier.
I discovered early on that I have somewhat of an aptitude for being able to just figure things out. My time in the Navy was helped out by my experiences on the farm, and also amplified that technical capability in a very helpful way.
As a farmer and rancher Papaw maintained a herd of beef cattle for most of my memory with him. I do have some memory, early on, of the dairy cattle he raised, but those went away when his primary milking machine graduated high school and went to Appalachian State University. Neither he nor my grandmother was very interested in the laborious task of milking the cows every day once they were the ones responsible for it every day. In beef cattle your money is made when you successfully raise and sell one of your herd to market, and, for the most part, beef cows are pretty good about eating.
Papaw would often just sell his cows outright to be processed, but other times he would work a bargain where he got part of the processed meat in payment. It is no trivial thing to fill your freezer with beef to feed your family for months, and it would cost him much less than going to the local grocery store to buy all that meat. However, getting a cow to market is no small feat either.
Cows don’t do stairs or steps up very enthusiastically, and they definitely do not appreciate going down steps at all. As a result, you have two options – you can either use a ramp of some kind or you can position your hauling vehicle in such a way that the cow simply steps from dirt directly into the vehicle. Since it is tricky to find a place you can back your truck or trailer up to that has just the right hill, most farmers build or use ramps. Papaw fell in the latter category and built his own ramp.
Papaw’s ramp was about 20 feet long and came up to exactly the height of his tailgate for his pickup truck. He built the form from old lumber and boards from around the farm, and then the only real purchase was the cement for the ramp itself. It was well-made and ingenious. It really did work perfectly to guide a cow to the back of the awaiting pickup truck. Of course, it took a lot of convincing to encourage the cow to make that walk up the ramp; they usually had other ideas of what they wanted to be doing. Perhaps the cows were aware of what awaited them at the other end of that truck ride.
Looking at that ramp you get a great idea of how rustic things can look and still be functional. The fence rails and posts forming the sides are not refined. The posts are lengths of cedar trees from around the farm that were cut down, cut to length, and the limbs trimmed off. Manual posthole diggers were used to place the poles. The sides are rough cut planks, with heavy emphasis on the “rough cut” portion. Your average 84-Lumber would not even sell these as seconds or off-quality; they don’t meet even that standard. The poured cement is really more like a bunch of bags of Sakrete roughly mixed and poured in to form the ramp; it is neither smooth, nor refined. In short, this ramp will never win a beauty contest, but it works and it works well.
Periodically, fence lines needs to be changed, removed, or repaired. Once Papaw wanted to pull the barbed-wire fence up from around a field that had not held cattle in probably a decade or more; he never really gets in a hurry to make these kinds of changes. However, we had to start with making a reel to coil up the old barbed-wire.
There is no doubt in my mind that we could have easily gone down to Beaver’s Country Store or any number of hardware stores and purchased a reel to coil this wire up on, but that was never going to happen. We had too much in the way of raw materials and way too much time on our hands to be spending money to do anything.
Without telling me what we were doing, Papaw had me cut 4 pieces of 1”x4” lumber into lengths of about 24”. Then he had me cut 4 pieces of 1”x1” about the same length. Of course, those cuts were made with a hand saw, and, of course, it took a while. By the time I got to the last cut I pretty much had it down, but the first couple were a bit rough and certainly not the definition of straight.
His desire to have certain boards at certain lengths bears a little description. In the event that you think he may have actually used a ruler or tape measure or any other method of accurately determining length you would be sadly mistaken. In reality he used the width of fingers and hands and feet. It was not what I was expecting, but farm methods, as previously mentioned, are simple methods.
We also didn’t have a workbench readily available that I could use to place the wood on to cut it. Instead, my “workbench” was the platform on which he stored the mowing machine that he would tow behind his tractor to make hay with. Of course, he did not tell me this at first and instead simply watched me flounder around for a while wrestling with a board and a saw in the dirt. Eventually, however, he came over and placed the board on the platform, then put his foot on it and showed me how to start a cut. Gently, with his leathery hands, he reached down to the board being cut to guide the saw blade to where he wanted the cut to go, just resting the blade against his thumb. Then he pulled back on the handle and allowed the saw blade to make a shallow bite into the wood from its own weight alone. After two or three pulls a small channel began to form that held the blade in place, and then he pushed and pulled with vigor and quickly severed the board at the perfect length. The end was perfectly straight and the length was spot on. “Now you do it,” he encouraged me.
It took a couple of attempts to get my body to comply with stepping on the board on the platform without toppling over; this was a source of significant hilarity for him as he watched me. I then tried to just start pushing the saw right away, like a “real man,” without getting it started first – this did not go well. It bounced and jostled all over the place. Ah, I had forgotten to guide it with my hand. So I got my hand in the mix to guide it, but still tried to muscle my way through. Again, it bounced and I discovered in a painful way why they refer to the cutting edge of the saw blade as “teeth”. Those teeth are quite sharp and they can also do to human flesh about the same thing they can do to wood; lesson learned. Papaw was amused but not very sympathetic; he gave me an old rag to wrap around my hand while I finished the job. Finally, I stopped trying to muscle my way through and allowed the tool to do its job, and the cut started near perfectly. It felt spectacular as the bits of sawdust scattered from the point where the blade met wood. It was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment as I watched that first board fall to the dry, dusty ground with a satisfying thump. Of course, the nice straight and accurate lines he was able to produce did not quite match what I provided, but mine were just as functional.
As I finished making the remaining cuts my accuracy and efficiency improved. By the time I finished making the last cut I was pretty well spent and ready to call it a day, but little did I know that I was just getting started. Did I mention how much hard work goes into the running of a farm?
When I thought that I was done, he had me gather up the four pieces of 1”x4” that I had cut and find the center of them. He then instructed me to drill a 1 ½” hole at the center point. This was not to be done with a drill press, or a fancy electric drill; no, I was going to use a brace and bit. Although it was still amusing to watch, it went a bit smoother than my first cuts had gone; I had at least seen a brace and bit used before and had some comfort level with it. Also, Papaw was pretty good about keeping his bits sharp and in good shape. Of course, the bigger adventure was simply finding said brace and bit.
Tools at Papaw’s were everywhere. He was never one of those anal retentive types who have a designated peg for every tool, and an outline around it like the police draw around dead bodies. He had somewhat of a system of where the tools were kept, but it was a bit fuzzy to just about everyone; sometimes even including him.
Besides the house itself there were four other, very rustic buildings that dotted the area around the house. Each of these buildings had multiple functions and multiple names, and these names were more of tradition than the reality of their current use. For instance, the first building you come to as you leave the main road is three buildings in one – the car shed, the granary, and the smoke house. The car shed actually did hold the car, but the granary did not hold grain and the only smoking that may have ever occurred in the smokehouse is Papaw with one of his filterless Camels when he still smoked. The granary held potatoes by the hundreds scattered on the floor and covered with sevindust, and the smoke house was filled with lawn equipment with onions hanging from the ceiling.
The barn was a straightforward barn. The floor was a continuous state of muddiness. The loft was filled with hay put up in the summer to be fed in the winter. Little alcoves existed where some cows would get in out of the weather. On each end of the barn was a tremendous door with a gate to control the flow of cattle, especially when we were preparing to send a cow to market.
The milk house had, at one point in its incarnation, been a milk house, and although it had ceased to function in that capacity many years before the name never went away. Instead it became a storage location for many of Papaw’s tools, but also various bins of nuts, bolts, washers, screws, and many items that no one has a clue what they were for any longer. This was, of course, a great place to search for the brace and bit we were looking for, but we did not find it there.
The final of the four buildings is one of the largest, the tractor shed, but also called the tool shed. It did, in fact, house both the tractor and a multitude of tools, but it housed so much more. The truck was usually housed there, along with at least one neighbor’s boat and the golf cart. It also contained the mowing machine, the hail bailer, the manure spreader, and various plows. It was an immense building, completely open on two sides with a tin roof. To be as open as it was, it still amazes me how dry the dusty floor always was. Even with the occasional torrential downpour the floor seemed to always be very dry and dusty.
The various hand tools, including the brace and bit we were looking for, were all in various shelves along one wall of the massive building. They were in no particular order, and there was no telling how much stuff was piled on top of whatever you were looking for. Fortunately for us, however, on this occasion we found the brace and bit with relative ease.
With the wood cut, and the holes drilled Papaw then instructed me on assembling our little project. As of this point, however, he was yet to tell me what we were making or what it would be used for. The odd thing was, I never really thought to ask either. Armed with hammer and nails we began to assemble our project. I nailed two of the 1”x4”s together in a cross pattern with the holes overlapping each other then did the same for the other two. Then, he had me nail the remaining 1”x1” pieces to connect the two crosses I had just constructed. What we ended up with is a reel or spool to put our barbed-wire on. I don’t think that I could have ever envisioned the end product from the various pieces he had me prepare, but looking back on it, it makes perfect sense now.
We mounted the finished reel to the front of the tractor by passing a metal pipe through the center as an axle and connecting that pipe to channel beams that extended from the front of the tractor on which you mount various pieces farm machinery. I was impressed with our country ingenuity. I was excited to try to figure out to do all kinds of things from the nothing lying around us, but we still needed to get up that barbed-wire from the field.
We both climbed up onto the tractor and headed out to the field in question. From one end to the other was probably about a mile, and although the entire field did not have barbed-wire, most of it did. I walked in front of the tractor, continuously guiding the barbed-wire onto the reel and turning the reel by hand to gather up our fence line; this was a very long and laborious process. Papaw was not always the most attentive nor was he the best at being patient for me to move out of the way before he moved the tractor and there were a few times that I nearly became one with the soil under the tires of the tractor. Yet somehow we figured it out and got the job done without having to prepare my obituary. In the end we needed to make several more reels and spend many hours in the field gathering the barbed-wire, but we made it happen.
The barbed-wire fence that he and I reeled in was to be used to repair the fence in other places or rearrange the fence boundaries depending on his needs at that moment, but it was certainly not to be just thrown out. On the back side of Papaw’s property, over near Charles’ farm there was some fence line in need of repair. So, the next day, using our newly acquired barbed-wire we set out to do just that.
Papaw’s farm was never pretentious or very large in comparison to some neighbor’s farms. Papaw’s was rolling farmland, green and lush. It was very good for cattle to wander around on, but as far as growing crops most of it would be challenging because of the uneven terrain and the multitude of trees. To this day I am thankful that going to a more industrial environment of a farm was never an incentive for my grandparents. I believe that would have just taken away from the joy of being one with that incredible piece of land.
Occasionally, an overzealous cow would knock down a section of fence, but with all the trees that are on the land, inevitably they will fall and take out sections of fence; that was the case near Charles’ farm. Papaw and I loaded up various tools on the tractor and one of those reels of barbed-wire and headed out. It probably took us 30 minutes to make the journey because we, of course, had to stop and pick up nearly every stick we saw and toss it into the gulley. We also had to survey the various cows and just admire them for a while, especially the new white-face calf. However, eventually we did make it to our appointed destination.
We took the saws and axes we brought, and cut the fallen tree off the fence. Actually, more to the point, I cut it off with a LOT of direction and supervision from Papaw about how to and how not to cut. He was also generous enough to provide me with guidance about how slowly I was cutting through the tree; I am sure I would have never figured that out without his insight.
As we got to work on repairing the fence, though, Papaw pointed out to me that the other fence I was standing next to was Charles’ and it was an electric fence. I had already bumped into several times unintentionally, and automatically assumed that it must not be on. Interesting thing about electric fences, they pulse. Electric fences do not put out continuous current; instead they provide periodic pulses of sufficient voltage to convince a cow that going further is a bad idea. These are facts that I was not aware of at the time so I told him, “No, it must be off,” as I placed my bare hand on the wire to prove to him that it was off – for about a second, which at that time was about a second too long.
You know, once that voltage cycled on again during that moment that I held the wire I had a lot to think about. At the top of that list was my foolishness combined with searing pain radiating down my arm to the rest of my body. I let go of that wire as fast as my body would allow, yelling and screaming something terrible.
Between the commotion I created and the hysterics of laughter that Papaw fell into from watching me, our neighbor, Charles, took note of the fact that we were there and came over to see if we were OK. Papaw related to Charles the comedy of errors that I embodied to the point that both of them were nearly in tears. Of course, both of them had sympathy on me and shared about how they had done exactly the same thing, on more than one occasion. I guess that made me feel a little better, but only marginally and not any less stupid.
While we continued to work, Charles and Papaw talked about Charles’ chickens and invited us over to help feed them later. They worked out the details while I hammered away on getting the barbed-wire back up, and the next day we paid a visit over to Charles’ farm.
Up to this point in my life I had been around a lot of cattle, a few horses, an occasional pig, and very seldom a chicken of any kind. I was not quite prepared for what we walked into. In one of Charles’ chicken coops was somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 chickens at various stages of development. This was industrial farming on a scale that I had only heard about but had never seen. The coop itself was divided into sections where the chickens were divided according to their stage of development. The section we went to in order to help Charles out they were probably a couple of months old.
Charles took me to the end of several conveyors that stretched out down the length of the section of the coop we were in. The conveyor was to deliver feed to the chickens on a schedule to help them grow. The only problem was, and always has been, chickens are stupid – that is why we were there and defined our job. Traditionally, farmers raising chickens would get a pail full of chicken feed and scatter it around on the ground near the chicken coop, but to feed this many chickens Charles would have had to have a pail about the size of a cement mixer. Since chickens are stupid and Charles did not have the time or a bucket the size of a cement mixer, we needed to help out.
It actually sounded pretty easy. All I needed to do was to shoo the chickens off the conveyor before it reached the end; otherwise, they would ride the conveyor to their peril. Really, no pressure here; if I screw my job up a bunch of chickens die. But, honestly, how hard can it be? Let me tell you, with chickens, it can be very hard.
Chickens discover very quickly that if they stand on the ground the feed goes past them, but if they stand on the conveyor belt that they travel with their food they don’t have to keep chasing it. OK, so maybe they are not quite as stupid as we would like to think they are; they just aren’t forward thinking and safety conscious.
As Charles fired up the conveyor and started the feed flowing onto it the chickens responded like Pavlov’s dogs, ravenously. At first, it was no big deal at all as I positioned myself near the end of a couple of the conveyors and Papaw did the same between a couple more.
Shortly after the conveyor started, however, the chickens got quite a bit more enthusiastic about the food and they started staying on the conveyor even more. Eventually, I was beginning to feel like the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel are working in a candy factory and supposedly packaging the candy as it passes by on a conveyor; at first they did pretty well as well. Before long, though, just like Lucy and Ethel, I missed a couple and it really went poorly for the chickens.
Missing a few chickens was devastating to me, but that wasn’t near as bad as Charles calmly coming by and dispassionately dispatching them to meet the Great Colonel Sanders in the sky a little earlier than anticipated because the end of the conveyor did not completely finish them off. His calmness in that act, I have to admit, kind of freaked me out a little, so I redoubled my efforts to save just a few more. Papaw missed a few too, but he was just as happy to dispatch the ones that slipped by as Charles was; it didn’t seem to faze him in the least.
Death and disease are as real as part of farming as anything else is, but nothing quite prepares you for seeing it up close and personal like that. It is like the fact that we all have trash, but we don’t really want to acknowledge it or even see it for that matter. As a matter of fact, trash is an important part of farm life because you can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. After all, even Arlo Guthrie discovered on Thanksgiving many years ago at Alice’s Restaurant that you can neither ignore the trash nor handle it improperly, even though you can get anything you want there.
When winter arrives on a farm where there is an appreciable difference between summer and winter, the grass will all but cease to grow. Cows thrive on the grass they consume in the fields and when that grass disappears in the winter it can go very poorly for cows that are not fed daily from other sources. The hay that was stored in the barn was for just that purpose, but it certainly did not make its way to the cows on its own.
Whenever I came to their farm in the winter months I think Mamaw appreciated it more than just about anyone else. Of course I know she loved me, but she also loved the fact that she did not have to help Papaw feed the cows when I was there.
Papaw would back his old Chevy pickup truck to the barn near the opening to the hay loft and send me up into the hay loft. Up there I was to thrown down about 8 or 10 bales of hay into his truck where he was waiting to cut the bailing twine from it with his trusted and well-worn Barlow pocket knife. Once loaded, we headed out into the pasture; Papaw driving while I was in the back with the hay.
Fortunately, that old truck had sides on it that he had installed years before for the purpose of taking cows to market, although the rear doors were normally left off unless he was hauling a cow. The way that Papaw drove and the roughness of the pasture those sides are about the only reason that I did not topple over the side of the truck. The other trick depending on how recently he had hauled a cow, there may be a “gift” left by the cow on the floor of the truck; it is best to watch your step.
I clearly remember the day that Papaw, my father and uncles finished making those sides for his truck; I was maybe six or seven at the time. They were impressive additions to his truck, and another work of farm ingenuity. They were sturdy and well built. Assembling them on the truck was an amusing sight to watch.
I was clearly too young and small to try to get my little hands in the mix, but I was allowed to watch from a distance. They hoisted them up, and manhandled them one by one to fit them in place and put the interlocking pins in place that bound one side to another. At first, it looked great, but then they began to note that something was wrong; they couldn’t see out of the truck’s rear window. I came closer to the bunch of men and studied the conundrum with them and then pointed out, “You know, you’ve got it on upside down.”
To a person they all laughed hysterically and slapped me on the back for noticing their faux pas. They then spent the better part of the next hour undoing what they had just done, and turning the whole thing over so that now you could carry a cow, and see.
One cold winter morning while everyone else was still enjoying a biscuit and cup of coffee, Papaw tugged on my shirt and said, “Come on boy.” I didn’t need to ask what for; I knew we were about to feed the cows.
As normal, we got the truck and backed it up under the window of the hayloft, and then Papaw sent me up to toss down bales of hay. I had grown some since last winter and now had the strength to easily pick up a bail and toss it on my own. The trick was not smacking Papaw in the head with a bail. Once loaded, we assumed our normal positions and headed out to the pasture.
One of my jobs was always to open and close the gate. I would jump down from the tailgate of the truck, run around and open the gate, let Papaw through, then run to close the gate and catch the truck; Papaw really wasn’t one to wait around for me all day. So, I caught him and jumped up in the back of the pickup truck, carefully avoiding what the previous cow had left for me there.
Once we got out to the area he wanted to feed, Papaw would give me a shout and I would start feeding the hay a little at a time. For some reason, this particular day he seemed to be driving just a bit faster and a bit more rough than usual. Add on top of that the fact that I had probably grown an inch or so since last winter. At one point I was standing beneath the crossbar at the back end of the truck, which the previous year I had cleared easily. That year, however, it was a much tighter fit. When Papaw hit a bump it then launched me up, knocking the crown of my head into the pipe and sending me in a most spectacular manner sprawling amongst the cows I had just been feeding.
Knowing how much my grandfather loved me I was positive that he would immediately stop, and run back to see that I was OK. Nothing could have been further from the truth; he had no idea that I had been ejected from the truck so he continued on. I quickly gathered my senses and ran like mad to catch up to the truck, jumping in not long before he was ready for me to open the gate for him. I got to warm up with a pretty good bruise and an interesting story back in the house.
When you live on a farm, by definition, you are pretty remote because you just don’t put farms in the middle of the city. Therefore, many of the city services that most people take for granted like water, sewer, trash, and similar services do not exists for farmers in the same way. In recent years some of these services have been extended further and further into the countryside, but most will never make their way out to the most remote farms and land.
Papaw’s solution for trash was easy, burn it. He always kept a burn barrel on the edge of the garden and would burn the household trash almost every day. Any food scraps were either composted into the garden, fed to the cats and dogs, or fed to the cows. The ashes of the trash that was burned would then be composted into the garden. In many ways it was a very symbiotic system. The one weak link is the burn barrel.
Burn barrels are typically old 55 gallon drums that Papaw got from a wide variety of sources; it is probably best if we never ask where. After a number of uses, however, the metal would become thin and sitting out in the weather they would rust so each one had a very limited lifespan. Making a burn barrel last for a full year was considered a huge success. Most probably only lasted about 6-9 months, at best.
Depending on the barrel’s configuration would determine what Papaw needed to do to prepare the barrel for use. Many have a lid that is clamped on using a strap; those are the simplest. Take the strap off, which releases the lid – done. The hard ones are where the lid is crimped onto the drum of the barrel. Those, the lid will need to be cut off in some manner. The one occasion that I remember witnessing and being asked to help, the barrel had a crimped on lid requiring it to be cut off. That is when the fun began.
Papaw pulled out a heavy chisel, or perhaps even a wedge like you split wood with, and handed it to me; picking the best tool for the job was not his forte. He then instructed me to hold the chisel on the top of the barrel near the edge. All of this seemed innocent enough so I complied, oblivious to what he was actually expecting of me. He then pulled out a 10 pound sledge hammer and reared back for a really big swing. It was not one of those swings where you are confirming distance. Nope, this was a swing that was meant to kill, devastate, and destroy. And I was holding the chisel with my bare hand.
At this point in his life Papaw was still pretty strong and virile; he was in his mid to late 70’s and holding his own quite well. Despite that, and despite my tremendous love and trust for the man, there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to hold that chisel with my bare hand while he was taking a swing like that. What transpired next was truly comical.
As he came around in full swing with the sledge and I woke up to what he was about to do I quickly released the chisel and leapt from beside the barrel just as he made a blasting impact on the top of the barrel. “What are you doin’ boy? You need to hold that thing for me!”
Typically, I am not the one to defy my grandfather, but on that day I was firmly convinced that he had completely parted company with his sense of reality. The only thing I could come up with was, “No way!”
“Aw, come on now. You know I ain’t gonna’ hit you and I need to cut the top of that barrel off,” he pleaded with me.
“No way, you hold it and I’ll swing.” I really wasn’t buying that there was a prayer that he would hit only that chisel. I had visions of my hand being turned to Jell-O, and I am kind of fond of my hand the way it is, thank you very much.
In the end, neither he nor I held the chisel, and neither one of us were swinging the sledge hammer. I honestly can’t remember how the lid of that one eventually was sorted out, I am just thankful that the episode ended with all my digits intact. But, he did send me up on the roof of the house to put more sealant on the tin roof. I was much happier doing that with a 60 degree incline on a tin roof on the second story of the house than letting him take swings at my hand; it felt many times safer.
1 Corinthians 3:9-10
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Someone, who has never experienced putting in an actual day’s work on a no-kidding working farm, would have trouble putting the experiences of farm life into a world view that they can fathom. I am not referring to the large industrial farms with a dozen hired hands; no this is a family farm where the family are the hired hands. In this kind of life there simply is not an excess amount of money to just go buy fancy new things to do basic tasks. You take what you have and come up with ways to build, repurpose, repair, or whatever. In short, you just figure it out. I once had a factory owner / manager tell me that he would rather hire either a farmer or a veteran because both knew how to just get things done with what they have. His maintenance manager was both; prior service Marine and a farmer, and that factory owner could not have been happier.
I discovered early on that I have somewhat of an aptitude for being able to just figure things out. My time in the Navy was helped out by my experiences on the farm, and also amplified that technical capability in a very helpful way.
As a farmer and rancher Papaw maintained a herd of beef cattle for most of my memory with him. I do have some memory, early on, of the dairy cattle he raised, but those went away when his primary milking machine graduated high school and went to Appalachian State University. Neither he nor my grandmother was very interested in the laborious task of milking the cows every day once they were the ones responsible for it every day. In beef cattle your money is made when you successfully raise and sell one of your herd to market, and, for the most part, beef cows are pretty good about eating.
Papaw would often just sell his cows outright to be processed, but other times he would work a bargain where he got part of the processed meat in payment. It is no trivial thing to fill your freezer with beef to feed your family for months, and it would cost him much less than going to the local grocery store to buy all that meat. However, getting a cow to market is no small feat either.
Cows don’t do stairs or steps up very enthusiastically, and they definitely do not appreciate going down steps at all. As a result, you have two options – you can either use a ramp of some kind or you can position your hauling vehicle in such a way that the cow simply steps from dirt directly into the vehicle. Since it is tricky to find a place you can back your truck or trailer up to that has just the right hill, most farmers build or use ramps. Papaw fell in the latter category and built his own ramp.
Papaw’s ramp was about 20 feet long and came up to exactly the height of his tailgate for his pickup truck. He built the form from old lumber and boards from around the farm, and then the only real purchase was the cement for the ramp itself. It was well-made and ingenious. It really did work perfectly to guide a cow to the back of the awaiting pickup truck. Of course, it took a lot of convincing to encourage the cow to make that walk up the ramp; they usually had other ideas of what they wanted to be doing. Perhaps the cows were aware of what awaited them at the other end of that truck ride.
Looking at that ramp you get a great idea of how rustic things can look and still be functional. The fence rails and posts forming the sides are not refined. The posts are lengths of cedar trees from around the farm that were cut down, cut to length, and the limbs trimmed off. Manual posthole diggers were used to place the poles. The sides are rough cut planks, with heavy emphasis on the “rough cut” portion. Your average 84-Lumber would not even sell these as seconds or off-quality; they don’t meet even that standard. The poured cement is really more like a bunch of bags of Sakrete roughly mixed and poured in to form the ramp; it is neither smooth, nor refined. In short, this ramp will never win a beauty contest, but it works and it works well.
Periodically, fence lines needs to be changed, removed, or repaired. Once Papaw wanted to pull the barbed-wire fence up from around a field that had not held cattle in probably a decade or more; he never really gets in a hurry to make these kinds of changes. However, we had to start with making a reel to coil up the old barbed-wire.
There is no doubt in my mind that we could have easily gone down to Beaver’s Country Store or any number of hardware stores and purchased a reel to coil this wire up on, but that was never going to happen. We had too much in the way of raw materials and way too much time on our hands to be spending money to do anything.
Without telling me what we were doing, Papaw had me cut 4 pieces of 1”x4” lumber into lengths of about 24”. Then he had me cut 4 pieces of 1”x1” about the same length. Of course, those cuts were made with a hand saw, and, of course, it took a while. By the time I got to the last cut I pretty much had it down, but the first couple were a bit rough and certainly not the definition of straight.
His desire to have certain boards at certain lengths bears a little description. In the event that you think he may have actually used a ruler or tape measure or any other method of accurately determining length you would be sadly mistaken. In reality he used the width of fingers and hands and feet. It was not what I was expecting, but farm methods, as previously mentioned, are simple methods.
We also didn’t have a workbench readily available that I could use to place the wood on to cut it. Instead, my “workbench” was the platform on which he stored the mowing machine that he would tow behind his tractor to make hay with. Of course, he did not tell me this at first and instead simply watched me flounder around for a while wrestling with a board and a saw in the dirt. Eventually, however, he came over and placed the board on the platform, then put his foot on it and showed me how to start a cut. Gently, with his leathery hands, he reached down to the board being cut to guide the saw blade to where he wanted the cut to go, just resting the blade against his thumb. Then he pulled back on the handle and allowed the saw blade to make a shallow bite into the wood from its own weight alone. After two or three pulls a small channel began to form that held the blade in place, and then he pushed and pulled with vigor and quickly severed the board at the perfect length. The end was perfectly straight and the length was spot on. “Now you do it,” he encouraged me.
It took a couple of attempts to get my body to comply with stepping on the board on the platform without toppling over; this was a source of significant hilarity for him as he watched me. I then tried to just start pushing the saw right away, like a “real man,” without getting it started first – this did not go well. It bounced and jostled all over the place. Ah, I had forgotten to guide it with my hand. So I got my hand in the mix to guide it, but still tried to muscle my way through. Again, it bounced and I discovered in a painful way why they refer to the cutting edge of the saw blade as “teeth”. Those teeth are quite sharp and they can also do to human flesh about the same thing they can do to wood; lesson learned. Papaw was amused but not very sympathetic; he gave me an old rag to wrap around my hand while I finished the job. Finally, I stopped trying to muscle my way through and allowed the tool to do its job, and the cut started near perfectly. It felt spectacular as the bits of sawdust scattered from the point where the blade met wood. It was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment as I watched that first board fall to the dry, dusty ground with a satisfying thump. Of course, the nice straight and accurate lines he was able to produce did not quite match what I provided, but mine were just as functional.
As I finished making the remaining cuts my accuracy and efficiency improved. By the time I finished making the last cut I was pretty well spent and ready to call it a day, but little did I know that I was just getting started. Did I mention how much hard work goes into the running of a farm?
When I thought that I was done, he had me gather up the four pieces of 1”x4” that I had cut and find the center of them. He then instructed me to drill a 1 ½” hole at the center point. This was not to be done with a drill press, or a fancy electric drill; no, I was going to use a brace and bit. Although it was still amusing to watch, it went a bit smoother than my first cuts had gone; I had at least seen a brace and bit used before and had some comfort level with it. Also, Papaw was pretty good about keeping his bits sharp and in good shape. Of course, the bigger adventure was simply finding said brace and bit.
Tools at Papaw’s were everywhere. He was never one of those anal retentive types who have a designated peg for every tool, and an outline around it like the police draw around dead bodies. He had somewhat of a system of where the tools were kept, but it was a bit fuzzy to just about everyone; sometimes even including him.
Besides the house itself there were four other, very rustic buildings that dotted the area around the house. Each of these buildings had multiple functions and multiple names, and these names were more of tradition than the reality of their current use. For instance, the first building you come to as you leave the main road is three buildings in one – the car shed, the granary, and the smoke house. The car shed actually did hold the car, but the granary did not hold grain and the only smoking that may have ever occurred in the smokehouse is Papaw with one of his filterless Camels when he still smoked. The granary held potatoes by the hundreds scattered on the floor and covered with sevindust, and the smoke house was filled with lawn equipment with onions hanging from the ceiling.
The barn was a straightforward barn. The floor was a continuous state of muddiness. The loft was filled with hay put up in the summer to be fed in the winter. Little alcoves existed where some cows would get in out of the weather. On each end of the barn was a tremendous door with a gate to control the flow of cattle, especially when we were preparing to send a cow to market.
The milk house had, at one point in its incarnation, been a milk house, and although it had ceased to function in that capacity many years before the name never went away. Instead it became a storage location for many of Papaw’s tools, but also various bins of nuts, bolts, washers, screws, and many items that no one has a clue what they were for any longer. This was, of course, a great place to search for the brace and bit we were looking for, but we did not find it there.
The final of the four buildings is one of the largest, the tractor shed, but also called the tool shed. It did, in fact, house both the tractor and a multitude of tools, but it housed so much more. The truck was usually housed there, along with at least one neighbor’s boat and the golf cart. It also contained the mowing machine, the hail bailer, the manure spreader, and various plows. It was an immense building, completely open on two sides with a tin roof. To be as open as it was, it still amazes me how dry the dusty floor always was. Even with the occasional torrential downpour the floor seemed to always be very dry and dusty.
The various hand tools, including the brace and bit we were looking for, were all in various shelves along one wall of the massive building. They were in no particular order, and there was no telling how much stuff was piled on top of whatever you were looking for. Fortunately for us, however, on this occasion we found the brace and bit with relative ease.
With the wood cut, and the holes drilled Papaw then instructed me on assembling our little project. As of this point, however, he was yet to tell me what we were making or what it would be used for. The odd thing was, I never really thought to ask either. Armed with hammer and nails we began to assemble our project. I nailed two of the 1”x4”s together in a cross pattern with the holes overlapping each other then did the same for the other two. Then, he had me nail the remaining 1”x1” pieces to connect the two crosses I had just constructed. What we ended up with is a reel or spool to put our barbed-wire on. I don’t think that I could have ever envisioned the end product from the various pieces he had me prepare, but looking back on it, it makes perfect sense now.
We mounted the finished reel to the front of the tractor by passing a metal pipe through the center as an axle and connecting that pipe to channel beams that extended from the front of the tractor on which you mount various pieces farm machinery. I was impressed with our country ingenuity. I was excited to try to figure out to do all kinds of things from the nothing lying around us, but we still needed to get up that barbed-wire from the field.
We both climbed up onto the tractor and headed out to the field in question. From one end to the other was probably about a mile, and although the entire field did not have barbed-wire, most of it did. I walked in front of the tractor, continuously guiding the barbed-wire onto the reel and turning the reel by hand to gather up our fence line; this was a very long and laborious process. Papaw was not always the most attentive nor was he the best at being patient for me to move out of the way before he moved the tractor and there were a few times that I nearly became one with the soil under the tires of the tractor. Yet somehow we figured it out and got the job done without having to prepare my obituary. In the end we needed to make several more reels and spend many hours in the field gathering the barbed-wire, but we made it happen.
The barbed-wire fence that he and I reeled in was to be used to repair the fence in other places or rearrange the fence boundaries depending on his needs at that moment, but it was certainly not to be just thrown out. On the back side of Papaw’s property, over near Charles’ farm there was some fence line in need of repair. So, the next day, using our newly acquired barbed-wire we set out to do just that.
Papaw’s farm was never pretentious or very large in comparison to some neighbor’s farms. Papaw’s was rolling farmland, green and lush. It was very good for cattle to wander around on, but as far as growing crops most of it would be challenging because of the uneven terrain and the multitude of trees. To this day I am thankful that going to a more industrial environment of a farm was never an incentive for my grandparents. I believe that would have just taken away from the joy of being one with that incredible piece of land.
Occasionally, an overzealous cow would knock down a section of fence, but with all the trees that are on the land, inevitably they will fall and take out sections of fence; that was the case near Charles’ farm. Papaw and I loaded up various tools on the tractor and one of those reels of barbed-wire and headed out. It probably took us 30 minutes to make the journey because we, of course, had to stop and pick up nearly every stick we saw and toss it into the gulley. We also had to survey the various cows and just admire them for a while, especially the new white-face calf. However, eventually we did make it to our appointed destination.
We took the saws and axes we brought, and cut the fallen tree off the fence. Actually, more to the point, I cut it off with a LOT of direction and supervision from Papaw about how to and how not to cut. He was also generous enough to provide me with guidance about how slowly I was cutting through the tree; I am sure I would have never figured that out without his insight.
As we got to work on repairing the fence, though, Papaw pointed out to me that the other fence I was standing next to was Charles’ and it was an electric fence. I had already bumped into several times unintentionally, and automatically assumed that it must not be on. Interesting thing about electric fences, they pulse. Electric fences do not put out continuous current; instead they provide periodic pulses of sufficient voltage to convince a cow that going further is a bad idea. These are facts that I was not aware of at the time so I told him, “No, it must be off,” as I placed my bare hand on the wire to prove to him that it was off – for about a second, which at that time was about a second too long.
You know, once that voltage cycled on again during that moment that I held the wire I had a lot to think about. At the top of that list was my foolishness combined with searing pain radiating down my arm to the rest of my body. I let go of that wire as fast as my body would allow, yelling and screaming something terrible.
Between the commotion I created and the hysterics of laughter that Papaw fell into from watching me, our neighbor, Charles, took note of the fact that we were there and came over to see if we were OK. Papaw related to Charles the comedy of errors that I embodied to the point that both of them were nearly in tears. Of course, both of them had sympathy on me and shared about how they had done exactly the same thing, on more than one occasion. I guess that made me feel a little better, but only marginally and not any less stupid.
While we continued to work, Charles and Papaw talked about Charles’ chickens and invited us over to help feed them later. They worked out the details while I hammered away on getting the barbed-wire back up, and the next day we paid a visit over to Charles’ farm.
Up to this point in my life I had been around a lot of cattle, a few horses, an occasional pig, and very seldom a chicken of any kind. I was not quite prepared for what we walked into. In one of Charles’ chicken coops was somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 chickens at various stages of development. This was industrial farming on a scale that I had only heard about but had never seen. The coop itself was divided into sections where the chickens were divided according to their stage of development. The section we went to in order to help Charles out they were probably a couple of months old.
Charles took me to the end of several conveyors that stretched out down the length of the section of the coop we were in. The conveyor was to deliver feed to the chickens on a schedule to help them grow. The only problem was, and always has been, chickens are stupid – that is why we were there and defined our job. Traditionally, farmers raising chickens would get a pail full of chicken feed and scatter it around on the ground near the chicken coop, but to feed this many chickens Charles would have had to have a pail about the size of a cement mixer. Since chickens are stupid and Charles did not have the time or a bucket the size of a cement mixer, we needed to help out.
It actually sounded pretty easy. All I needed to do was to shoo the chickens off the conveyor before it reached the end; otherwise, they would ride the conveyor to their peril. Really, no pressure here; if I screw my job up a bunch of chickens die. But, honestly, how hard can it be? Let me tell you, with chickens, it can be very hard.
Chickens discover very quickly that if they stand on the ground the feed goes past them, but if they stand on the conveyor belt that they travel with their food they don’t have to keep chasing it. OK, so maybe they are not quite as stupid as we would like to think they are; they just aren’t forward thinking and safety conscious.
As Charles fired up the conveyor and started the feed flowing onto it the chickens responded like Pavlov’s dogs, ravenously. At first, it was no big deal at all as I positioned myself near the end of a couple of the conveyors and Papaw did the same between a couple more.
Shortly after the conveyor started, however, the chickens got quite a bit more enthusiastic about the food and they started staying on the conveyor even more. Eventually, I was beginning to feel like the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel are working in a candy factory and supposedly packaging the candy as it passes by on a conveyor; at first they did pretty well as well. Before long, though, just like Lucy and Ethel, I missed a couple and it really went poorly for the chickens.
Missing a few chickens was devastating to me, but that wasn’t near as bad as Charles calmly coming by and dispassionately dispatching them to meet the Great Colonel Sanders in the sky a little earlier than anticipated because the end of the conveyor did not completely finish them off. His calmness in that act, I have to admit, kind of freaked me out a little, so I redoubled my efforts to save just a few more. Papaw missed a few too, but he was just as happy to dispatch the ones that slipped by as Charles was; it didn’t seem to faze him in the least.
Death and disease are as real as part of farming as anything else is, but nothing quite prepares you for seeing it up close and personal like that. It is like the fact that we all have trash, but we don’t really want to acknowledge it or even see it for that matter. As a matter of fact, trash is an important part of farm life because you can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. After all, even Arlo Guthrie discovered on Thanksgiving many years ago at Alice’s Restaurant that you can neither ignore the trash nor handle it improperly, even though you can get anything you want there.
When winter arrives on a farm where there is an appreciable difference between summer and winter, the grass will all but cease to grow. Cows thrive on the grass they consume in the fields and when that grass disappears in the winter it can go very poorly for cows that are not fed daily from other sources. The hay that was stored in the barn was for just that purpose, but it certainly did not make its way to the cows on its own.
Whenever I came to their farm in the winter months I think Mamaw appreciated it more than just about anyone else. Of course I know she loved me, but she also loved the fact that she did not have to help Papaw feed the cows when I was there.
Papaw would back his old Chevy pickup truck to the barn near the opening to the hay loft and send me up into the hay loft. Up there I was to thrown down about 8 or 10 bales of hay into his truck where he was waiting to cut the bailing twine from it with his trusted and well-worn Barlow pocket knife. Once loaded, we headed out into the pasture; Papaw driving while I was in the back with the hay.
Fortunately, that old truck had sides on it that he had installed years before for the purpose of taking cows to market, although the rear doors were normally left off unless he was hauling a cow. The way that Papaw drove and the roughness of the pasture those sides are about the only reason that I did not topple over the side of the truck. The other trick depending on how recently he had hauled a cow, there may be a “gift” left by the cow on the floor of the truck; it is best to watch your step.
I clearly remember the day that Papaw, my father and uncles finished making those sides for his truck; I was maybe six or seven at the time. They were impressive additions to his truck, and another work of farm ingenuity. They were sturdy and well built. Assembling them on the truck was an amusing sight to watch.
I was clearly too young and small to try to get my little hands in the mix, but I was allowed to watch from a distance. They hoisted them up, and manhandled them one by one to fit them in place and put the interlocking pins in place that bound one side to another. At first, it looked great, but then they began to note that something was wrong; they couldn’t see out of the truck’s rear window. I came closer to the bunch of men and studied the conundrum with them and then pointed out, “You know, you’ve got it on upside down.”
To a person they all laughed hysterically and slapped me on the back for noticing their faux pas. They then spent the better part of the next hour undoing what they had just done, and turning the whole thing over so that now you could carry a cow, and see.
One cold winter morning while everyone else was still enjoying a biscuit and cup of coffee, Papaw tugged on my shirt and said, “Come on boy.” I didn’t need to ask what for; I knew we were about to feed the cows.
As normal, we got the truck and backed it up under the window of the hayloft, and then Papaw sent me up to toss down bales of hay. I had grown some since last winter and now had the strength to easily pick up a bail and toss it on my own. The trick was not smacking Papaw in the head with a bail. Once loaded, we assumed our normal positions and headed out to the pasture.
One of my jobs was always to open and close the gate. I would jump down from the tailgate of the truck, run around and open the gate, let Papaw through, then run to close the gate and catch the truck; Papaw really wasn’t one to wait around for me all day. So, I caught him and jumped up in the back of the pickup truck, carefully avoiding what the previous cow had left for me there.
Once we got out to the area he wanted to feed, Papaw would give me a shout and I would start feeding the hay a little at a time. For some reason, this particular day he seemed to be driving just a bit faster and a bit more rough than usual. Add on top of that the fact that I had probably grown an inch or so since last winter. At one point I was standing beneath the crossbar at the back end of the truck, which the previous year I had cleared easily. That year, however, it was a much tighter fit. When Papaw hit a bump it then launched me up, knocking the crown of my head into the pipe and sending me in a most spectacular manner sprawling amongst the cows I had just been feeding.
Knowing how much my grandfather loved me I was positive that he would immediately stop, and run back to see that I was OK. Nothing could have been further from the truth; he had no idea that I had been ejected from the truck so he continued on. I quickly gathered my senses and ran like mad to catch up to the truck, jumping in not long before he was ready for me to open the gate for him. I got to warm up with a pretty good bruise and an interesting story back in the house.
When you live on a farm, by definition, you are pretty remote because you just don’t put farms in the middle of the city. Therefore, many of the city services that most people take for granted like water, sewer, trash, and similar services do not exists for farmers in the same way. In recent years some of these services have been extended further and further into the countryside, but most will never make their way out to the most remote farms and land.
Papaw’s solution for trash was easy, burn it. He always kept a burn barrel on the edge of the garden and would burn the household trash almost every day. Any food scraps were either composted into the garden, fed to the cats and dogs, or fed to the cows. The ashes of the trash that was burned would then be composted into the garden. In many ways it was a very symbiotic system. The one weak link is the burn barrel.
Burn barrels are typically old 55 gallon drums that Papaw got from a wide variety of sources; it is probably best if we never ask where. After a number of uses, however, the metal would become thin and sitting out in the weather they would rust so each one had a very limited lifespan. Making a burn barrel last for a full year was considered a huge success. Most probably only lasted about 6-9 months, at best.
Depending on the barrel’s configuration would determine what Papaw needed to do to prepare the barrel for use. Many have a lid that is clamped on using a strap; those are the simplest. Take the strap off, which releases the lid – done. The hard ones are where the lid is crimped onto the drum of the barrel. Those, the lid will need to be cut off in some manner. The one occasion that I remember witnessing and being asked to help, the barrel had a crimped on lid requiring it to be cut off. That is when the fun began.
Papaw pulled out a heavy chisel, or perhaps even a wedge like you split wood with, and handed it to me; picking the best tool for the job was not his forte. He then instructed me to hold the chisel on the top of the barrel near the edge. All of this seemed innocent enough so I complied, oblivious to what he was actually expecting of me. He then pulled out a 10 pound sledge hammer and reared back for a really big swing. It was not one of those swings where you are confirming distance. Nope, this was a swing that was meant to kill, devastate, and destroy. And I was holding the chisel with my bare hand.
At this point in his life Papaw was still pretty strong and virile; he was in his mid to late 70’s and holding his own quite well. Despite that, and despite my tremendous love and trust for the man, there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to hold that chisel with my bare hand while he was taking a swing like that. What transpired next was truly comical.
As he came around in full swing with the sledge and I woke up to what he was about to do I quickly released the chisel and leapt from beside the barrel just as he made a blasting impact on the top of the barrel. “What are you doin’ boy? You need to hold that thing for me!”
Typically, I am not the one to defy my grandfather, but on that day I was firmly convinced that he had completely parted company with his sense of reality. The only thing I could come up with was, “No way!”
“Aw, come on now. You know I ain’t gonna’ hit you and I need to cut the top of that barrel off,” he pleaded with me.
“No way, you hold it and I’ll swing.” I really wasn’t buying that there was a prayer that he would hit only that chisel. I had visions of my hand being turned to Jell-O, and I am kind of fond of my hand the way it is, thank you very much.
In the end, neither he nor I held the chisel, and neither one of us were swinging the sledge hammer. I honestly can’t remember how the lid of that one eventually was sorted out, I am just thankful that the episode ended with all my digits intact. But, he did send me up on the roof of the house to put more sealant on the tin roof. I was much happier doing that with a 60 degree incline on a tin roof on the second story of the house than letting him take swings at my hand; it felt many times safer.
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