Heat Domes and Haying

Late June, early July was haying season on Waschke Road when I was growing up. The heat dome of the past weekend that everyone is talking about brought haying to mind. It was hot work. One hundred degree temperatures have never been common in our part of Whatcom County, but they were not unheard of either.

Hay fields at sunrise.

Waschke Road is about eight and a half miles from the Salish sea and then a good twenty miles of open water intervenes between the beach and the Southern Gulf Islands off Vancouver Island. That stretch of cool water drops the temperature of the on-shore breeze by a few degrees before it reaches the Waschke farm.

I have always been grateful for those gentle on-shore breezes. This weekend was hot, but I learned real heat in the haymow.

The job eased you in. When haying started, the haymow was a shaded and breezy cavern capped with a high cathedral dome ceiling. But as load after load of hay bales arrived from the fields, the top of the stack approached the cobwebbed rafters.

Tier upon tier of bales rise forty feet up in the dusty air, nearly touching the roof. The high stack blocks the airflow and the sun beating down on the roof turns the little space at the top of the barn into a bake oven as the loaf-like bales of hay come in, piping hot, steeped in sun from the fields.

The haymow cathedral dome.

Up near the roof, the haymow crew begged for gaps between the hay loads, a minute to climb down from the mow, feel the onshore breeze cool sweat-soaked jeans and tee-shirt, and gulp down cold well water from the milk house wash hose. Then, before these luxuries began to inspire resentment, scramble back up the long ladder, into the sweltering oven, and make ready for the next onslaught from the fields.

I couldn’t man a haymow today, but I haven’t forgotten why I loved it when I was sixteen. Oh, love it I did. Loved it because my resilient young body could do it, loved it because it gave me a role on the hay crew appreciated by Dad and the older men, who knew how hard the work was because they had been up in the fiery mow many times themselves.

Later, they would trade the heat and dust of the haymow for the adult worries of haying in a marine climate where rain always lurks off-shore, where a cloudless morning never guarantees a dry afternoon, entering a life in which summer rain always threatened to leach nutrients from hay drying in the field.

When spring and summer were over and the grass was no longer lush in the pasture, the cattle ate the hay and converted dry grass into milk and meat that eventually paid the bills and kept life on Waschke Road prosperous.

But when a summer rain washed the grass’s protein into the soil, winter became harder and longer for the family than any afternoon in a fiery summer hay mow; low milk yields, tiny checks from the co-op dairy, and big bills for expensive feed to bolster the poor hay.

Haymows aren’t used much anymore; today’s equipment is fast and powerful. I can only shake my head at the speed farmers today cut, rake, and bale up hay that is stored away by tractors instead of sweating teenagers.

For the time being, I’ll linger on the pleasure of climbing down from the haymow into the on-shore breezes and forget grownup worries. But if these heat domes make a habit of hanging over us, I hope I never forget those fiery haymows.

It’s been hot. Take care.

Spring 2021: Perks You Up Like A Wooden Hairbrush To Your Bottom

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

20 March 2121, will be the first day of spring, but the season of renewal has already arrived for me.

On the second day of spring, I will receive my second covid-19 vaccine injection. Two weeks from then, the CDC says I can safely visit with small groups of other vaccinated people without a mask, indoors, no social distancing required. That’s the CDC rule, but my mood began to change a week after the first injection of the Moderna vaccine.

Yet to be verified but plausible reports say a single vaccination confers substantial protection. I’m sure those reports are in the back of my mind, but we have also had long sun breaks for the last few weeks in Whatcom County, and they too have touched my mood. With the sunshine, I’ve ridden over a hundred miles on my bicycle so far in March, which has done a lot to relieve the crotchets in my arthritic joints and equally age damaged psyche.

When I was a kid, we called this February Spring. It’s a comic act the climate pulls in the Northwest towards the end of February or the beginning of March. The rain stops, the skies clear, a little warm air blows in from Hawaii, dusk quits cramping the afternoon down to not much more than a coffee break, and we get a few days’ reprieve from sullen clouds and soaking drizzle. The baseball mitts come out for playing catch, and maybe an hour or two of workup baseball, or scrub, if that’s what you call it.

One year, to my mother’s chagrin, I grabbed a pair of her sewing shears and converted my jeans to cut-offs on the second or third day of February Spring. My mother and mother nature both pulled the skids out from under that. The next day was the first day of forty days of continuous showers, rain, and drizzle: all the cold damp magic that a marine climate can cast over the land. If it hadn’t been for a few whacks to my bottom with the backside of my mother’s wooden hair brush warming me up, it would have been uncomfortably cold.

But, somehow, I think this spring is different. I know. Nature has fooled me many times before and she sure can fool me again, but I don’t recall a February Spring lasting past the Ides of March like this year. The Indian Plum is blooming, the hazelnut trees have yellow catkins, the tiny pink and blue violets my grandmother planted a hundred or so years ago are popping up in the lawn, the forsythias are flashing their bright yellows, cherry blossoms are peeking out, and I see early rhododendron blooms in front of the covid-vacant school down the road.

Indian Plum
Forsythia

If I weren’t so stinking old this week, I’d have cut the bottoms off my pant legs, dug out a mitt, ball, and bat and found a game of workup this afternoon. Will nature bust me again for over optimism? Maybe. But I have to say, today, I’d give anything today to have my mother take a hairbrush to my bottom for cutting off my jeans.

We’re breaking free of the pandemic. The Whatcom County Library System has opened its branches at twenty-five percent capacity. I think I will wait until after my second shot before I venture inside, but the day is coming. In a month, planning a haircut will no longer be a soul-shuddering existential calculation.

Covid-19 had me spooked.

I’ve studied the risk calculations with all the engineering and mathematics on my resume. I have enough going against me that the odds look about fifty-fifty that I would go to the hospital if I contracted covid, and one in ten that I would not come out alive. I’m not brave, not likely to venture a round of Russian Roulette, which is close to my odds if I ever “catch the covid,” as I heard somebody say.

A few months back, I seriously doubted that I would see next Christmas, and was awed and grateful when I saw my fourth grandson, Charlie, back in November when the death count was climbing.

But today, I’m contemplating that I might just see Charlie as a young man, looking to find himself in the world. See our eighteen year old twin grandsons as established adults, and six year old Dario perhaps starting a family.

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

Northeaster! Frasier Arctic Outflow

When I was a kid, Northeasters were exciting. If we were lucky enough to have a real rip-snorter, school closed and the kids would have a day or two to slide on the ice, sled, build snow forts, snow men, and throw snowballs.

If we were really lucky, when the thaw came, the county engineer would close most roads to heavy vehicles. No school buses! Another day off or at least a chance to walk a mile to heavy duty pavement.

Adults don’t understand the pleasure of a few days of disruption. They shake their heads. It’s cold. Brruuhhh! The wind is a danger: trees blow down, power goes out. Water pipes freeze.

But for a kid, it’s fun. Our grandson, Dario, came over to visit this afternoon, wound up like a top, excited by the Northeaster, delighted to be knocked over and blown away by the wind, and exulted to experience a day unlike any other.

This morning, I was up at five. Good thing I was. The northeast wind was howling and the windchill readout from our backyard weather station was only five degrees. I can’t count the number of mornings I have got up to the roar of the Northeaster to discover frozen pipes or and frozen pumps.

First thing, I turned on the water in the kitchen sink. All I got was a trickle. But I kept the valve open. Within ten minutes, the ice dam dissolved, and the water ran freely. Crisis averted. For a while.

I don’t know why, but one of my cherished moments was a Northeaster in the 1980s. Rebecca and I were living in a house that shared a well and pump with my cousin Steve.

I woke up around five, the usual for me, discovered that we had no water, and went out to the pumphouse: a damp, half underground chamber. Sure enough. The pump had froze up tight. I took a minute to figure out what to do.

Before half an idea hatched, my cousin Steve came down the steps and entered the pump chamber. My cousin was a big man, both in spirit and girth. He was puffing on his pipe and he brought a propane torch.

The pumphouse filled with the sweet Cherry Blend pipe tobacco smoke Steve favored as he lit his torch and began to play the blue flame over the pump. It wasn’t long before the pump started up and we could return to our respective houses and resume normal lives before our wives woke.

What am I supposed to say about that moment? Steve and I faced the Northeaster and brought our families back to their accustomed normal. Spontaneously, each driven by our responsibilities, we worked together.

Why this makes me profoundly happy, I do not know. But I shake my head and hold back tears when I think of it. Steve died a few years ago.

In my dad’s day, keeping the dairy herd supplied with water was paramount. Milk is mostly water. Dairy cows who can’t drink their fill, don’t give their full share of milk, and milk in the tank kept the farm solvent.

Dairy farmers get to know their water supply. When the Northeaster hits the water pipes, a farmer soon learns what has to be done to keep the water flowing. I well remember holding a flashlight for Dad as he warmed the pipes with a propane torch to get the water moving into the drinking cups in the milking barn before the cows noticed they were getting thirsty.

Tedious stuff, holding a flashlight. Not a bit of romance or excitement in it for me. But I’ll bet that was not what my dad thought. My dad was not one to be scared or threatened by anything, but I think those early morning struggles against the Northeaster were for him, high drama, not tedium.

Back to reality. Never mind the drama. I neglected to keep a trickle of water flowing and somewhere between ten and twelve in the morning, while the sun shined and the Northeaster blew, our water line froze solid.

I’m working on it. Our son is working on it. Dario is having fun with it.