Pioneers – Page 2 – Vine Maple Farm

September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

Reading The News

This morning while scanning the list of web sites in my browser bookmark tab labelled “News.” I may have been doom-scrolling, but I soon lost interest in today’s events and opinions and began to think about what “News” was like when I was growing up on Waschke Road in the region that the denizens occasionally call “The Fourth Corner,” referring, perhaps pretentiously, to the last corner of the U.S. to be dominated by Europeans.

First, we lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house. When I entered the first grade, my grandparents bought the house and five acres across the road and they moved there, leaving old farmhouse to my parents.

My grandparents subscribed to the local daily newspaper, The Bellingham Herald. The Herald arrived by mail the day after it was published. No home delivery on Waschke Road back then. When my grandparents finished reading the paper, they gave it to my parents, usually just before supper at five-thirty. Thus, we read the evening newspaper about twenty-four hours after it was published.

We got a TV when I was in the first grade, but we didn’t watch the evening news much because Dad switched off the television when the news started. That was the signal to go to the barn and milk the cows, taking all our attention until eight or eight-thirty. That schedule was fixed by the sun and the cows. Bovines must be milked every twelve hours or they stop lactating. Milking had to be at six in the evening and six in the morning, or the dairy interfered with raising summer field crops.

Sometimes, we turned on the radio at noon dinner break, but more pressing farm issues often dominated the midday.

Knowledge from off our road also came from magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Washington Farmer, Farm Journal, McCall’s, Sunset Magazine, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Saturday Review all graced our rural mailbox at one time or another.

No dearth of content threatened the old farmhouse, but the cadence of our news sources was far different from my sources today. Our most constant news source, the daily newspaper, had a twenty-four hour delay built in. Everything else was either weekly or monthly.

Compare that to today. I have close to twenty websites listed in my news bookmark tab. I could easily add more. These are all updated continuously and I open them several times a day. I have almost instant news from all over the globe.

Am I better informed than I was in the 1950s and 1960s? Depends on what you mean by “better.” I certainly wallow in half-baked and ill-considered data, but am I more aware of what is important in my surroundings?

I don’t know.

July 2, 2025July 2, 2025

A Perfect Day For Haying 2025

… what a waste of a perfect day for haying.

The neighbors have been putting in hay for the past few weeks, taking advantage of a patch of sunshine and high clouds, the same few weeks of the year when we used to put in hay when I was growing up on Waschke Road. The uncut fields ripple in waves like they did sixty years ago, and I imagine the hay tastes the same to the cattle and horses who chew it up and swallow it down, but much has changed in the intervening decades.

I’m not here to say the old ways were better, only that they were different and I remember them.

When I was a kid, neighbors hayed together and haying was an event, a gathering of neighbors, friends, and relatives. Cousins sometimes came all the way from Seattle, traversing a hundred miles of two-lane highway to help with haying. In the 1950s and early 60s cars and tires were not what they are today. Air conditioners were unheard of and a flat tire, boiling radiator, or other mishap was to be expected.

Sometimes haying was closer to a reunion party than work. I remember hay wagons that held more helpers than hay.

My mother and grandmother always prepared hearty and special dishes for the shared meals. The dessert pies and cobblers were to look forward to. June and July are a little early for fresh fruit, but the freezer needed to be cleared out of last summer’s cherries, apples, blueberries, blackberries, and peaches.

Every year, my dad would set aside two or three of our own fields for hay. He also hayed the fields of several neighbors. Dad seldom paid money for the hay from those fields, but there were always bumper crops of vegetables, fruit, and corn from our garden and orchard; liver, heart, and sweetbread to share when we butchered; or spare bull calves to raise for beef. All these eventually found their way onto the tables of those neighbors who had fields for Dad to take the hay.

Dad also traded cutting and baling a neighbor’s hay for a load or two of bales for our barn. No one kept track of these interchanges in dollars and cents, but everyone was satisfied.

Farmers don’t store winter fodder the way we did anymore. Now, early in the season, late April and May, farmers cut fields, let the grass wilt, then bale it up into what look like white plastic marshmallows that they stack in the field or close to their dairy operation. These contain what we used to chop and blow into silos and let ferment into silage.

Later, in June and early July, they cut the grass, let it dry like we used to dry hay, bale it up in round bales so big that I can barely see over them, and load them on trucks. The process is all machine work. No sweating neighbors and teenagers, only tractors with air-conditioned cabs, trucks, and gallons of diesel fuel.

In my day, bales were three feet long and weighed between forty and eighty pounds, just right for teenage boys and the occasional husky girl to pick up and stack. Haying began with a couple of days overhauling and greasing equipment. Saw-like sickles were ground to gleaming razor sharp edges for cutting tough rye, timothy, fescue and orchard grass.

Haying was sweating in the open air under blue skies for four passes over a field: one to cut the grass, another to rake and twist it into windrows, a third to bale the windrows and finally haul the hay into the barn. The third and fourth pass were often combined.

The first three passes were jobs for a driver and tractor. The loading and hauling was for a gang of neighbors, relatives, and teenagers, toiling in the sun.

The other day, I was surprised to see a neighbor bale up what I guess is about sixty acres into small square bales like we used to store. Forty years of desk work and arthritis have intruded between the days when steel bale hooks felt like extensions of my hands bucking bales, but my interest piqued when I saw a string of wagons like those we used to haul loads back to the barn come down the road. Perhaps I’d get a few hours of nostalgia.

I was disappointed. A rig trailed behind the baler, compacting ten or so bales into a neat array. Then a tractor with a special front loader picked up the cluster of bales and placed it on a hay wagon. All diesel and no sweat.

Efficient, I suppose. But what a waste of a perfect day for haying.

March 5, 2025March 5, 2025

Ages of Piety

“It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.”

The fourth year of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program is devoted to theology. EfM years equate to Richard Hooker’s classic Anglican three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason. The first two EfM years are on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the third year is on church history and tradition. The fourth year is theology year, which I like to think of as the year for reason.

Our group’s fourth year students are now reading Timothy Sedgwick’s The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Sedgwick ties the practices of Christian piety to the challenges in life that vary over time. He depicts three phases of American piety.

The first, he calls “traditional” and ties it to the society typical of the first half of the twentieth century. At that time community survival was crucial. Vine Maple Farm is my name for the farming community in which I grew up, immersed in what Sedgwick calls traditional piety.

Social interaction was a necessity, not a luxury. Neighbors had no choice but to get along and work together. Tasks like putting hay in the barn, thrashing grain, and harvesting potatoes took more concentrated labor than a single family could provide, but with the cooperation of willing neighbors, everyone could survive and sometimes prosper.

But cooperation doesn’t happen without reciprocity. Rules are required, like returning borrowed tools in better condition than when received. Visiting, exchanging meals, celebrating birthdays, weddings, and funerals were necessary to keep communications lines open and the community working. This spirit of cooperation and mutual support was the vital characteristic of traditional piety. Read my impressions of this life in posts like Chicken Catching Night.

Traditional piety declined in importance as people got jobs. Instead of relying on their neighbors, folks began to rely more on their job and employer. This, and other societal changes brought on the form of piety that Sedgwick calls “modern.” For me, this was the piety of the Vietnam War protests in which an equitable future became the dominant concern of folks who were morally concerned about their world.

I mark the beginning of “post-modern” piety to nine-eleven when America discovered vulnerability. I happened to be at the east coast Consumer Electronics Show in Atlanta when the Trade Towers went down. I entered the show hall early, preparing for a panel discussion on a new release of our team’s product that I thought was exciting and would make the company a mint.

By the one o’clock, my bosses and colleagues were huddled together in a hotel dining room worrying over what to do next. My boss, who lived in Brooklyn, was frantic because his eighty-year-old mother had been in Manhattan for the day and was returning home on foot, walking over the Brooklyn bridge. We were all figuring out how to get home as safely and quickly as possible. Since planes were grounded in Atlanta, a group from Seattle formed a caravan of three rental cars for forty-three hours of driving straight through back to the northwest. Our piety had shifted focus from the future to vulnerability and safety in less than a day.

In 2025, we’ve practiced post-modern piety for almost twenty-four years, but I wonder: have we moved on to a new stage? America changed decisively in November 2024. Have we passed on from community, future equity, and vulnerability to something new? And more terrifying?

This week, our EfM group discussed our changing feelings about Tesla vehicles. A year ago, a Tesla Y was a desirable vehicle. Its minimal carbon footprint, sleek design, and low operating costs were all attractive. But today? For some folks, a Tesla has become an advertisement for a nihilistic creator intent on rapid and radical change, reshaping government programs indiscriminately, and pursuing threat diplomacy.

It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.

But caution has never stopped me from making wild guesses. I predict a decline in reliance on government and return to something like traditional piety in which personal cooperation shines more than it has for decades.

Today, government services and society in general appear disrupted and not as trustworthy as they once were. Consequently, we may have to turn more often to our families and friends for support. Personal communities will become more important, revitalizing bowling leagues, lodges, and churches. Neighborly visits and community potlucks will comfort us in a turbulent world. Computer networks will foster interdependent support groups and shift away from spotlighting blazing individualism. Helpers will become more prominent than influencers.

Sound utopian? Well, why not?