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Silo Filling Drama

We filled the silo in the spring with grass and in the fall with corn. My grandpa, (Gus Waschke) was big on corn silage. He and my grandmother were photographed by Northwest Farm News in 1946 standing in front of a stand of Minnesota 13 field corn. Judging from the photo, the corn was over twelve feet tall. Dad (Ted Waschke) less inclined toward corn. Dad did not like to spray with pesticides and herbicides and raising a good crop of corn in those days without spraying meant many passes with a cultivator and some hand hoeing that took time away from tending the pasture, haying and the grain crops. Not long after Grandpa died, Dad quit growing corn silage and increased his small grain acreage.

I was enthralled with silo filling and remember much more about spring grass silage. Probably because the fall corn silage filling was after school had started and I didn’t participate as much.

Silo filling was a community event, but it was a different community than most of the other events on Waschke Road. Unlike hog butchering or chicken catching, silo filling was more business and equipment rather than a gathering of friends and neighbors. And had an element of danger.

In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field cutter and a blower. The machines were expensive and only used for a short time each year. Each farmer supplied their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is usually hauled on trucks and self-unloading wagons, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to the back of the wagon where the silage was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyer attached to the blower. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the silage already in the silo.

The blower was powered by a big tractor with a thirty-foot drive belt. The tractor was run with the throttle wide open. Log chains held the tractor to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor could be heard a mile away. The ground thumped and shook with raw energy when a wad of silage weighing fifty or more pounds hit the blower blades and was thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.

In the silo, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter of the silo, leveling and packing the chopped fodder to prevent air pockets that caused spoilage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as hard as pulling silage off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required some heavy fork work, especially when the silage was wet. Filling never stopped for the soaking rain storms that come in off the Pacific in June in Whatcom County, because the silos had to be filled quickly while the fodder was at its prime.

As the silo filled, the work in the silo got harder and more dramatic. As the level of silage rose, sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section was removed, the silage became more difficult to direct and more silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.

About twelve feet from the top, the pace of the men on the forks became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the tractor quickly, the energy of the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with tons of silage. If the crew was quick and lucky and the silage was dry, the pipe could sometimes be cleared by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage packed tight and the blower pipe would have to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to clear it.

Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a mud bowl by the wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.

One year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and the pipe was damaged. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to take him in a car to the emergency room at the county hospital at the corner of Northwest and Smith where they sewed his wound up so he could return to work. One of the other owners rushed off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide Meridian for a replacement section of blower pipe while my Dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the packed silage.

The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.

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Catching Chickens

We raised chickens for eggs until the early 1970s on the Waschke Homestead. About this time of year—around Halloween—family and neighbors on Waschke Road would gather one night with flashlights to sneak up on sleeping chickens. For the kids, it was exciting, for the adults, necessary work.

The process started in the spring with the arrival of a batch of newly hatched baby chicks. I can’t remember where Grandpa (Gus) got them. There were several chicken hatcheries in the county and I assume they came from one of them. The hatchlings came in corrugated cardboard boxes and went immediately into the brooder house, which hasn’t been used for at least fifty years now and has fallen into decay.

The first few weeks of life, the chicks stayed under the brooder hood, a sheet metal canopy about six feet long and three feet wide, suspended by a block and tackle from the rafters so it could be raised and lowered easily. The hood was heated with electric light bulbs. As chicks get older, they need less heat. By raising the hood a little bit each day, the chicks were kept at the right temperature. Before the chicks arrived, Grandpa would go over the brooder house, patching with tin any holes a rat could through. Predatory rats could eat several chicks in a single night if they could get into the brooder house. As spring turned to summer, the chicks were allowed first to roam around the brooder house, then let into a roofed area enclosed in chicken wire, later they went into a fenced yard surrounding the brooder house. By fall, the chicks, now pullets, were allowed to roam freely and seldom entered the brooder house. Most roosted in the orchard at night.

The chickens roamed all around the farmyard during the summer. Those free roaming young birds got me in big trouble once. One day, I caught one. For some unknowable reason, I thought it would fit perfectly in the glove compartment of our navy blue 1952 Dodge pickup. I tested my theory and found it correct. Later, Dad heard a chicken cackle when he started the pickup. He found the chicken and several days droppings in the glove compartment. I don’t remember my punishment, but I have never put a chicken in a glove compartment again.

As the days grew cooler and the nights longer, we began to keep an eye open for newly laid eggs in the yard. These eggs were often small, misshapen, or double-yoked as the pullets got the hang of laying. When we had found enough eggs, the young birds were ready to go into the regular chicken house and start producing eggs for sale.

The fun began with a long-distance call to Wallace Poultry on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, where The Bagelry is now. Wallace bought the old hens and butchered them. By the time the old flock was ready to be replaced, the hens were looking bedraggled and, I imagine, were quite tough.

Throughout the year, Mom or Grandma would occasionally butcher and pluck a nice-looking hen for dinner but we didn’t eat much poultry on the farm. Neither my mom or grandma liked butchering and plucking chickens. According to them, chicken dinners were not worth all the trouble.

When it was time to replace the flock, the tough old hens were not candidates for the kitchen. Although the baby chicks were supposed to be all female, a few roosters always made it past the chick sexers, and they supplied all the poultry Mom and Grandma wanted to deal with through the summer and fall.

I always hoped the Wallace Poultry truck would arrive after I came home from school. The truck driver had a folding wire fence that he set up inside the chicken house and we would chase chickens into a corner and corral them with the wire fence. The driver grabbed the corralled chickens by the legs and loaded them into crates on his truck. When all the chickens were crated, he drove off, the chickens never to be seen again. Wallace Poultry was still in existence after we quit raising chickens, but Mom would never buy poultry from them because she remembered those scrawny old birds that they used to get from us.

During the year, one of my jobs was to clean the chicken house and spread fresh straw litter on Saturday mornings, a job I hated, and, I suspect, I didn’t do very well. After the Wallace Poultry truck left and the chicken house was empty, Dad would take a couple days to give it a thorough cleaning, removing every bit of litter, taking apart the laying nests, hosing everything down, spraying with carbolineum to eradicate mites and other parasites, then brightening the place up with hastily applied slaked lime white wash.

Crating the old chickens was more fun than cleaning the chicken house but the real fun came after the chicken house was cleaned and it was time to introduce the new hens to the chicken house. The new chickens were wild by fall; even with bribes of wheat or oats, you couldn’t get closer than a few feet. Catching a few with a leg hook was possible, but with two hundred birds to catch, hooking them would take too long.

Instead, we would wait for night when the chickens were sleeping in the orchard.

The men would use flashlights to spot the roosting birds and reach up and grab them by the legs. The chickens roosted close together and it was easy to grab two or three at a time. The caught birds would cackle and screech, but the others ignored them and obligingly waited to be caught. When I was big enough, my job was to carry the chickens from the catchers to the chicken house feed room, where I deposited them into a wooden barrel with a lid to keep them captured.

My grandpa would reach into the barrel, grab a chicken, give it a worming pill and let it loose in the chicken house proper. Getting those pills down the outraged birds was harder than it looked. Grandpa did it in one smooth motion before the chicken knew what was happening. When I tried, the wriggling bird drew blood with its beak and claws and got loose before I could shove the pill down its throat. After one failure, I left it to Grandpa.

When Grandpa died, Dad quit raising chicks and bought birds that were dewormed and ready to start laying.

There were almost always a few stragglers that eluded capture for a few days. I remember one year, a hen stayed loose until Christmas when Dad asked a neighbor to come over and shot it with a shotgun in return for the meat. My mother was very clear that she was not interested in plucking and dressing a chicken brought down by a shotgun blast.

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Libraries and Optimism

Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.

I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.

In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.

But we are not.

In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.

Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.

The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.

Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.

But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.

The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.

Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.