Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [90]
When conditions were right, the mower moved through the hayfields beautifully. The tall grass shuddered and danced on its stems for a split second after the sickle sheared it, then toppled backward in a continuous cascade to lie flat in the wake of the machine.
It didn’t always work so smoothly. Sometimes wadded hay, sticks, or old cow pies blocked the cutter bar. Sometimes you hit a gopher mound or a small stone slipped through the rock guards and snapped a brittle sickle section. A good operator kept an eye continuously cast back for the telltale strip of unmown grass springing up like a cowlick through the fallen swath; the key was to notice it quickly, back up, and clear the blockage. If you left a green strip that went on for more than forty feet, you were in for some razzing.
By far the most maddening problem with the old sickle mower was the tendency of the whirling power takeoff shaft to snag the mown hay and in a split second spin up a bundle of hay so tight it cut the power to the mower and had to be hacked away with a jackknife. To counter this, Dad rigged a shield by suspending a plank on chains beneath the power takeoff. It worked pretty well. I have never in all my life heard my father curse, but years later when I was down beneath a serially malfunctioning hay-cutting machine in Wyoming, spittle-cussing and hacking away at the thirty-seventh impromptu round bale of the day, I wondered if just once in the gentle meadows of yesteryear that mower ever caused Dad to lose his religion.
By the time I was old enough to cut hay, the sickle mower had been relegated to pasture-clipping duty and Dad had purchased a New Holland haybine. The heart of the haybine was built around a sickle mechanism nearly identical to our old mower, but there the similarities ended. Mounted to the fore of the sickle was a seven-foot wide revolving reel fitted with spring-mounted steel teeth. The reel spun forward in the same direction as the wheels on the tractor but rotated at a rate exceeding ground speed so that the teeth could draw the hay toward the sickle, then—once it was cut—sweep it into a pair of rotating rollers functioning like a voracious wringer washer. Made of heavy rubber cast in mirror-image chevron patterns, the rollers spun at blurring speed. As the hay zipped through, the chevrons crimped the stems and bruised the leaves. This dramatically decreased the amount of time required to dry the hay, thus increasing our chances of beating the rain. As the hay shot from the rollers, adjustable fenders shaped the flow so it dropped in a clean-edged swath—much better than the old sickle mower. The entire machine was mounted on a wheeled frame raised and lowered by a hydraulic ram controlled from the tractor seat.
Whenever Dad sent me out to cut hay, he would assign a set number of “rounds.” Because our haybine was the sort that would cut only in the wake of the right-hand side of the tractor, it was necessary to circle the field in a clockwise pattern, the perimeter of each “round” contracting by fourteen feet with every pass completed. I don’t know that Dad had any formula for calculating the number of rounds, just that he was trying to strike a balance between having too much or too little hay on the ground at one time.
For a landlocked boy in northern Wisconsin, nothing substitutes for seafaring like nosing a Massey-Ferguson 132 tractor into an unmown hayfield on a sunny summer morning. The grasses