Tossing bales

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These are the so-called “dog days” of summer, a time of year that got its nickname from such homespun colloquialisms as “It’s hot enough to fry a hot dog on the driveway” and “It’s so dry, the trees are following the dogs.”

This is also the time of the year which, in my youth, I spent toiling under the broiling orb of the sun, performing a disgustingly arduous task called “tossing bales.”

To give you an idea of how long ago this was, there was only one type of hay bale (small squares) available at that time. In other words, this was before the advent of the big round bale, the big square bale, the medium hexagonal bale and so forth. This was indeed a long, long time ago.

It was also an era when parents (including mine, I’m sad to report) flouted the child labor laws by forcing their teenage offspring to toss bales during some of the hottest days of summer.

This stands in stark contrast to today’s young people of the teenage ilk. These self-subsumed pimple-poppers generally spend their summers lolling about in their climate-controlled bedrooms, playing video games and complaining whenever the air conditioning overchills their facial metal and causes them the tiniest smidgeon of discomfort.

But enough of that; back to my personal suffering.

As I was saying, it was the generally accepted practice, back during my teen years, for adults to force their children to perform hard physical labor. And by “force” I don’t mean the use of whips or chains or anything of that order. The methods adults employed to get us to work – and work hard, mind you – were a lot more devious and much more effective.

What the adults did was drill into our heads the belief that the ability to perform hard physical labor was a sign of manliness. This strategy worked wonderfully well on all of us kids, including the girls. This is why Midwestern farm girls command such high levels of fear and respect. It’s difficult to be chauvinistic toward someone who can whip you at arm wrestling.

Be that as it may, the primary sign of having become a person who can work hard (and was therefore a man) took place when a neighbor came over and asked if they could hire you for a day or two of hard physical labor.

The first neighbor to hire me for such a thing was Dave Wosje, who farmed a quarter of land south of us. Dave arrived at our farm one dog day morning and asked Dad if he could borrow me for a day or two of bale tossing. I was 14 years old, built like a broomstick, and thrilled to the bone to be chosen for such a manly task.

Dave had baled a field of alfalfa and had dropped the bales onto the ground in bunches of eight called “8-packs.” Our mission was to pick up the bales, pile them on a flatbed and haul them to Dave’s farm where we would pile them in an orderly heap referred to by those “in the know” as a “stack.”

The system Dave had worked out went like this: Dave would race his tractor over to an 8-pack of bales while I bounced behind on his flatbed. Once we arrived at a bunch of bales, Dave would jam the tractor into park, leap off, and dash like a madman to the 8-pack. He would then hastily toss the bales onto the flatbed while I scrambled to stack them. Dave would then spring back onto his tractor and repeat the process.

Dave wasn’t very tall, but he was certainly strong. The bales would arrive on the flatbed in a rapid-fire manner, as if they had been shot out of a Gatling gun. It didn’t slow Dave one whit when the flatbed grew full and he had to toss bales to a height that was more than double his own. It’s scary to be high atop a full flatbed and have bales blasted at you from below as if from a cannon.

That was how I spent many dog day afternoons when I was a teen. And none of it involved air conditioning, other than the breeze from the near-miss bales that Dave had fired at me.

My pay for working like a dog while serving as a live target for Dave’s bale artillery? A buck-fifty an hour. When Dad told Dave that this was much too generous, Dave replied, “I’d rather have half a man the whole time than a whole man half the time.”

And to this day, that’s one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.