Thrashing Time

Yesterday I had occasion to drive to Bellingham. It was a hot day and as I drove through the Skagit Valley I pulled off the freeway and rolled down the windows to observe the grain harvesting operation in a couple of the fields.

Farmers today use combines to harvest grain. It is an efficient operation where one man drives the combine and one or two more drive trucks to haul the clean grain to storage. The cabs of the trucks and combine are air conditioned so even though it is a tedious job it isn't so uncomfortable and the operators can listen to their favorite music or converse with friends via cell phone. In my truck I could feel the hot air, breathe the dust and smell the smells of harvesting wheat in summer but in their air conditioned cocoons those operators were just doing another job.

Seeing those combines working the fields reminded me of the late forties when things were a little different in the grain harvesting business on Grandpa's family farm there on Orcas island.

 As the wheat ripened in August we would hook the old Farmall tractor to the binder and head for the field.

From the days of the hand sickle to the cradle scythe, harvesting was a labor intensive operation. They say a good day for a skilled man using a cradle scythe was three acres. Another person would gather the cut stalks and tie them into sheaves and another would stack five to seven sheaves into a shock for drying. With the development of the binder into the modern machine I pulled, we could cut and tie at least ten times as much in one day.

Since the binder was built to be pulled by a team of horses it had a long tongue and a spring-mounted seat for the driver operator. The cutting bar was on the left with a rotating wheel of wooden bars above. The cutter would cut the wheat, the bars would knock the stalks back onto a canvas carrier and the cut stalks would be carried across the bed and up a forty-five degree slope and dumped into the bin to be tied. The bundles would be wrapped with sisal twine (binder twine), knotted and dumped out onto a carrier on the right side. The carrier was composed of slightly curved metal bars so when enough sheaves had accumulated Grandma would drop the carrier and the sheaves would be swept off by the ground.

Thanks here to my sister, Retha, who, after reading my last post, reminded me that whenever she left the house, Grandma wore rubber knee boots because she was afraid of snakes. Never mind that we don't have poisonous snakes here, she worried so much about them she wore those uncomfortable boots. Incidentally, I've always admired the Japanese name where they are called "nagagutsu" literally translated as long (nagai) shoes (kutsu).

Grandpa bought ankle-high black leather shoes that had hooks on the uppers. He would wear them to town and to dances then as they got older he would wear them around the farm. On the other end he always wore a hat. Again, when it was new it was for town and other social functions and when older it was a permanent fixture on his head. His face and neck were suntanned a deep brown but from his eyebrows up his skin was white.

Of course, back then we never wore safety glasses, hard hats, safety boots or ear protection. It seems like I wore an old pair of tennis shoes. We didn't know any better. While we use safety precautions today for most things, people (especially younger) seem to forget that loud sounds can permanently damage the audio nerves.

It was there on the farm that I learned to tie the first real knot since I learned to tie my shoe laces. The spools of binder twine were mounted on two spindles. One was being fed into the machine and the other was ready to go but the end of one spool had to be tied to the beginning of the second so the operation would be endless. The knot used to tie the twine together was the square knot and it was important because if an inexperienced hand tied a granny knot the knot would come untied in the binder and the knotting mechanism would have to be re-threaded. That was a time consuming process so NO mistakes allowed.

Later Grandpa or some of us would work the field to stack four sheaves cut side down with one or two more laid across the top. After drying for a few days they were ready to be transported to the threshing machine, or "thrashin' machine" as we knew it.

Every day Grandpa would carry a gallon jug of well water to the field, place it in the shade of a shock of hay or wheat and we'd have a drink once in awhile. For lunch we had a sandwich prepared by Grandma earlier that morning. No bottled water or refrigerated coolers for us. The work was hot and dusty but since we didn't have contrasting air conditioned spaces we didn't mind.

After the wheat had dried it was thrashing time.

A day or two before the appointed day we would load available wagons and the truck with the sheaves from the fields then early on thrashin' day a couple more old flatbed farm trucks would arrive and head for the fields to load.

Grandpa would fire up the old Caterpiller tractor, twist the drive belt once, stretch it between the pulley on the back of the Cat and the bull wheel on the thrashing machine, draw it taut and engage the pulley. The Cat would groan, slow then return to speed. The wheels and pitman rods on the thrashing machine would come up to speed and the workers would come up to speed.

A loaded truck or trailer would be jockeyed into position alongside the gaping maw of the thresher with its chomping teeth designed to break up the sheaves. Two men unloaded the wheat then that vehicle was driven to the field to be reloaded by the field crew and eventually driven back to the thresher to feed that hungry machine.

Straw and chaff passed through the machine and were blown out the pipe on the back onto what became a huge pile of straw. The clean wheat grains sifted down through the various screens and were lifted by an auger then dumped into the bag chute. The bag chute terminated in a double gunny sack holder with a diverter lever. As each bag filled the man stationed there threw the diverter lever, tripped the holder rod so its teeth released the full bag, replaced it with an empty and quickly sewed the bag shut with a bag needle and cotton twine. By that time the second bag would be almost full and he would go through the routine again.

When I was in Vietnam last year I saw this threshing crew using a foot-powered  machine. A basket and
the  ambient breeze were used to winnow the chaff from the grains of rice. 

The size of the crew varied but usually consisted of two boys driving vehicles, two men in the field pitching sheaves onto the vehicle and one stacking them, two men feeding the machine, one bagger and one helper preparing bags and reloading needles, one man toting and stacking full sacks and one relief man to spell off the workers as the need arose. The machine and the workers worked straight through until noon.

Old threshing machine similar to the one Grandpa had. Sheaves were fed in on the left, straw blew out
the right and grain was bagged on the  other side (out of view here) of the machine. 

While the work in the fields was going full bore the work in the kitchen was going just as fast. The women and older girls had been working since breakfast getting ready with food "enough to feed a thrashin' crew" as we said in those days. 

There would be bread and butter, a roast or two, fried chicken, potatoes with gravy, maybe some vegetables from Grandma's garden and pies and cakes along with cold milk and hot coffee. Plenty of calories but no overweight people because the hard work burned up all those calories.

Back to the field the machines were fired up again and more grain waited to be threshed. 

In the evening most of the crew would go home, we would help Grandpa do chores and we finally got to eat again. There at my place at supper would be a bright fifty cent piece, my wages for the day. I was very proud of earning that money.

I say most of the crew went home. Smith was the exception. He was Grandpa's hired hand. He would show up at the farm in the late spring, stay all summer and then disappear in the fall. He said his name was Smith. He got room and board and Grandpa may have paid him something at the end of the summer. Today it would be almost impossible to be a "Smith" since we require endless paperwork and identifiers of both employers and employees. Well, except illegal aliens. I guess one of those could pass as a "Smith" with a disreputable employer.  

After dinner there was no TV, video games, personal music piped straight to eardrums, Facebook or other such diversions since none of those yet existed. Well, TV had been invented but was unknown at that time on the Island. 

Not that we had time in any case since we soon hit our beds, hayseeds, dust, sweat and all. Back then baths were few and far between. More likely we would make a trip to the lake or the saltwater beach on Sunday to wash off the accumulated grime.

Work, eat and sleep was the general rule. Overall, I think it made me a better person.

Instant Travel

Northgate Park is a nice park just north of the downtown Durham area and is only three blocks away from our son and daughter-in-law's place. It has one of my favorite walking trails.

I go into the park near the south end on W. Club Boulevard and follow South Ellerbe Creek Trail as it winds through the pine and oak woods alongside Ellerbe Creek. Crossing W. Lavender Ave., it drops the South part and becomes Ellerbe Creek Trail.

It's a pleasant walk, even in the heat of the day which this time of year runs in the mid- eighties to mid-nineties. Depending on the time of day the trees shade most of the trail.

After crossing Lavender, I walk around the west side of a large dog park and head on north until the trail takes a jog on W. Murray Avenue and then continues north until it terminates at Stadium Drive. In all, probably a four-mile round trip.

If I walk the full course it takes a little over an hour so sometimes I stop at Murray Ave and head back home.

About a block north of the dog park is where the "instant travel" of this post's title comes in. As I walk around a slow bend in the trail I come upon a cleared field of about two acres on the west side of the trail where KRJD radio station has its three broadcast towers. The field is mowed occasionally to keep the weeds from growing too high and to provide access to the towers and their guy wire anchor points.

At midday the sun shines on the field, the stubble from the cut grass is dry, there is a little dust in the air, the humidity is just right and that well-remembered smell takes me instantly to the hay fields on Grandpa Mac's farm on Orcas Island where my brother and I spent summers in the late forties and again in the early and mid-fifties.

Grandpa had a small Farmall tractor but his other farm  equipment was left over from the horse farming days when he first settled the farm there in Crow valley. Instead of mounting on a tractor and using a power takeoff as is common now, his mower had a long tongue that would have connected to the team's harness and power to move the sickle bar was taken from the turning cleated steel wheels of the mower. There was a spring-mounted seat on top of the axle where Grandma sat and lifted the sickle bar as necessary.

After the field was cut and the grass dried into hay we would hook up the old hay rake with the same long tongue and seat atop the axle where the rider would trip the rake at the right time to line up the accumulated hay with the lengthening windrows.

Next came the hard physical work. There were no balers in those days so the hay would be pitched into shocks by Grandpa or a worker using an old fashioned pitchfork and lots of elbow grease.

Finally would come the crew loading the hay onto a wagon or truck bed. The guys lifting the hay onto the bed were hard workers, they guy spreading the load was experienced and knew how to interlock the forkfuls and tie them together so the hay wouldn't fall off the wagon on the way back to the barn.

My brother and I were too young to work the forks so we were tasked with driving the tractor or truck. Since our legs were too short to reach the pedals one of the men would put the truck in "granny" (compound low) so all we did was steer close to the hay shocks so they could load the hay as we drove along slowly.

All the while there was the ever-present smell of dry grass mixed with dust. What a wonderful smell, as I remember it, although it probably wasn't so good at the time. The dust would fill my nose, the hayseeds and loose pieces would fall down the neck of my shirt and mix with the sweat. But it was good hard work and made me appreciate a big meal at the end of the day.

A farmer in those days was a jack of all trades.

Grandpa had a typical small family farm. I don't remember how big it was but I seem to remember him saying 270 acres or something close. He had maybe fifteen-twenty milk cows, chickens, a few hogs and sometimes turkeys or geese. There was the big barn with its haymows and stanchions for milking, the adjoining milkhouse with an electric separator (although it had to be brought up to speed by turning the long handled crank before the motor could be turned on), a chicken house with a storage area for bags of grain and barrels of gasoline, a bunkhouse where itinerant workers could sleep, a blacksmith shop, the woodshed, the main house and, of course, the two-hole outhouse, the original gender-neutral bathroom.

Grandpa's day began with a cup of coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette while listening to the news on the old radio, then off to the barn at 0600 to milk the cows. Even though he had a vacuum milking machine he had to strip the final few squirts out of each cow by hand. There was hay to be thrown into each cow's stanchion feed box along with some ground grain to sweeten the deal and encourage them to come to the barn for milking.

Next the fresh milk would be separated into cream and skim milk. The cream was sent to the creamery for cash and the skim milk went to the hogs along with a little mash. Along the way the barn cats got a little milk in their saucer.

After morning chores came breakfast then started the work of the day. Tilling the fields, mending fence, planting grain, cutting and putting up hay, harvesting grain with the old binder, threshing (again with the old stationary threshing machine before the days of the combine) and in between getting in wood, patching roofs and making repair parts for the machinery in the blacksmith shop.

In the evening the cows came home and were milked again, the cream separated, the hogs slopped, and finally came dinner followed before long by a well earned night's sleep. Next morning the routine started all over again.

On Saturday night Grandpa and Grandma took a bath and sometimes went to the dance at the Deer Harbor Grange Hall. They would dance the polka, the Schottische, waltzes, foxtrots, the occasional jig and even some simple square dances. I only attended a few of their dances (probably because I was too young to leave at home) but I don't remember them dancing swing dances, the Charleston or The Lindy. The men kept a bottle in their car and sometimes would go out for a "breath of fresh air." Grandpa's drink was gin and 7-Up, without ice of course, since this was before the days of plastic coolers and even household ice makers,

Speaking of ice, up until the late forties Grandma had to make do with an icebox and a cooler in her kitchen. I'm sure you know what an icebox is but a cooler is not much known today. A cooler was a tall box cut into and mounted on an outside (usually north) wall with three or four shelves, a roof and screened in walls. Sometimes the outside of the screen would be covered with louvers to keep out the weather while allowing cool air to flow up through holes in the shelves of the cooler. There was a door on the inside so Grandma could put things into and take them out of  the cooler from the kitchen.

The cooler was a very useful device because, as the old saying goes, "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." Grandma's cookstove was an old Monarch wood-fired range. The fire box was on the left, ash bin under that and the oven to their right. The top of the stove was all cooking surface, ranging from the hottest, right over the fire box to the coolest far on the right side of the stove. Above the cooking surface there were two warming ovens and the important chimney draft which in conjunction with the firebox draft controlled the burn rate of the fire. Grandmas was an expert in getting the correct heat for the cooking at hand but even she couldn't do much with the excess heat generated by that efficient heat producer. Especially in the summertime it was stifling in the kitchen.

In those days before electric or gas water heaters, water was heated by running a pipe back and forth on the left side of the fire box. Water would come in the bottom, exit the top and by convection move the heated water to the hot water tank which stood next to the stove. Sometimes Grandma would need hot water for washing or something and would feel the tank to determine the hot water supply. If there wasn't enough she would fire up the range even though she didn't need the fire to cook.

Mounted on the wall to the left of the hot water tank was the telephone with its mouthpiece mounted on a swivel stalk that moved up and down depending on the height of the user and the earpiece attached by a wire and cradled in the forked holder on the left side of the wooden box. On the right of the box was the hand crank that rang the bell used to ring up the operator (with one long ring) or other people on the party line by ringing their particular combination of short and long rings. It seems like Grandma's ring was a long and two shorts. Or was it a short and two longs?

Well, my trip via instant time travel is drawing to a close. I remember more details of those days some seventy years ago than I do the details of what happened yesterday. Maybe I'll be moved to take another trip through time to remember other adventures on the farm. For tonight, it's time for bed.