When I was a teenager, I bucked bales in the hay fields every summer from June to August. It was hard work, monotonous, dangerous, and working conditions were horrifying by today’s standards. In the fields, the sun beat down relentlessly, but the bale bucks all went shirtless, eight, ten hours at a stretch. Unloading hay in the barns, the air was thick with hay dust; sometimes it was hard to see fifteen feet.
For the first couple of weeks each summer, my back was a sheet of blisters as layers of skin burned, peeled away, and burned again. I slept on my stomach and took aspirin for the burn and fever. After a bad day in barns, I coughed black phlegm. I still associate summer with sunburn and congestion.
The work was picking up, carrying, and stacking forty to seventy-five pound bales onto wagons and into the barn. The cut ends of the hay wore through jeans and slashed skin; arms were red and bleeding by the end of the day. Dousing them with diesel oil soothed burn and seemed to speed healing, if you could take the searing pain when the diesel hit raw flesh. I wonder what a physician would think of that home remedy.
The toughest job was stacking the bales on the wagon. Some bales had to be lifted over your head in a military press onto the top of the load while standing on a jerking wagon on rough ground; just standing up was difficult. Carrying, lifting, and placing the bales on an unsteady platform took strength and skill. Comic tractor drivers popped the clutch to knock the bale bucks over in mid-lift. If an injury stopped you from working, your summer job was gone.
Fifty years later, a dermatologist has found pre-cancerous lesions on my skin. My orthopedist attributes the arthritis in my knees, hips and back to those years of grinding on my joints in the wrong ways.
Do I resent the hayfields when I have trouble standing up in the morning? Or when my dermatologist orders another biopsy? Not often. Would I wish it on a teenager today? No. They have their own learning fields.
But stacking hay on a wagon, you have choices. If you stack a sloppy load, it will collapse and have to be restacked. If you stack a perfect load, your self-serving perfection is a waste of the crew’s time.
The farmers had a way of forcing this tradeoff. They pushed mercilessly to get the hay on the wagons, and then made the stacker climb to the top of the load and ride it home to the barn—often five or so miles on rough county roads as fast as a pickup could pull the load. A stacker could place the bales any way he pleased, but he had to ride his load home. A stacker who wouldn’t ride it home was, well, someone who wouldn’t ride it home.