Time to Bale

From the Philipsburg Mail, August 2013

Time to bale

by Reecy Pontiff

Well, I did it. Yes, this southern city girl made it through an entire year in Montana, including a winter, and most of the summer (which is like a New Orleans winter, but colder).

And to cap it off, I became a part of that revered annual ranching ritual: the hay harvest.

My rig during the hay harvest, the hay rake.

When I mentioned my new employment to my Montana friends, many regaled me with stories of driving tractors shortly after they took their first steps, but were encouraging nonetheless.

When I told my metropolitan friends what I was doing with my summer vacation, there were mixed reactions. My favorite came from one of my most fabulous of city-slicker friends, a cabaret singer named Chris who exclaimed, “Reecy, you're a farmer now?!”

I suppose for a few weeks there, I was.

My job was to operate the hay rake. For you fellow city mice out there, a hay rake is a long “V” shaped contraption on wheels pulled behind a tractor. The beams that form the “V” have a number of light-weight metal wheels covered in tines that spin on the ground, combing flattened rows of mowed hay together into big, fluffy piles. This allows the hay to dry faster – if you have wet hay in a bale it will rot – and the baling machine to scoop it up more efficiently. It was fun to watch the baler roll by, gobbling up the rows of hay like Pacman and then periodically pooping out a big round bale like a gigantic mutant rabbit pellet. 

Life from the tractor.

The training I received was startlingly brief, considering that I'd never even ridden on a tractor before, and how lawsuit-happy America has become. My only strict instructions were not to hit any bales (“The bales will win.”) and to keep the tires of the rake out of the ditches. Each field is hemmed in by irrigation ditches, which given my instructions meant the outer ring of hay was the most stressful to rake. It was hard not to feel at least a little paranoid, as the job entailed constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure the tires and rake wheels were all where they belonged and functioning properly.

On my first day I repeatedly hit a particularly lumpy patch of ground and my tiny, open cab John Deere pitched uneasily beneath me every time I moved across it. I asked my co-hayer, who like everyone else in Granite County had been doing this since birth, how difficult it might be to actually roll a tractor.

“More talent than you've got,” he replied amicably, which put me at my ease-–though I think he underestimated my talent.

The baler at work.

As for my boss, he spoke almost reverently of the reason we'd gathered together. “That's some good hay,” he'd say with bright eyes. And he wasn't exaggerating—I keep hearing around town that this is the most hay a lot of folks have ever seen in these fields. A number of times out on the ranch we had issues with the baler jamming up because there was so much.

Generally I found operating the rake to be meditative. I created a temporary labyrinth from the ground, shaping tidy lanes across the valley between four-foot, olive-drab barricades of hay that would soon be transformed into a flat, camel-colored landscape dotted with bales.

Haying was one of the best seasonal job I've ever had. I soon shall take my leave of the Rocky Mountain wildfires and return to moister altitudes--but might I return to Montana for the next haying season? I just might at that.

#end#