Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [91]
The first round was always the best. For better or worse, cutting hay appeals to the innate human need for control and order at the expense of natural things. The haybine goes gnashing into the organic tangle, and out the back comes a continuous straight-edged thatch that drapes the contour of the land like a woven green scarf, each round separated by a pale sun-starved strip of shorn stubble.
After the first couple of rounds gave me room to maneuver without smashing the standing hay, I reversed course and cut the outside round. We called this outermost pass “the backswath.” Because it was up tight to the fencerows and woodlots, the backswath was often booby-trapped with fallen trees and dropped branches. Since the tractor was passing over this area during the first clockwise run, you had a chance to spot remove most obstacles, but invariably you missed a big branch that jammed the reel, or slipped through and into the rollers. The rollers were spring-loaded and designed to part and allow passage of a solid object, but because of the speed at which they were operating, passage isn’t really the apt word—even the smallest solid object would cause them to slam open and shut with a bang! that cut through all the engine and machine noise and invariably bounced me half a foot off the tractor seat.
Once the backswath was flat, I returned to cutting clockwise. As with all fieldwork, you settle quickly into a groove. I can still summon my exact position on the Massey: left hand on the wheel, underbelly of my right forearm resting on the red fender, left knee against the gray-painted crankcase, right hand resting on the hydraulic control valve, upper body rotated slightly back and leaning right, head on a swivel. The position was a matter of function—you glanced forward now and then to correct your course and watch for corners coming up, but in the main your attention was directed to the machine behind you. You were watching to see that everything was spinning the way it ought to, that there were no strips of uncut grass popping up behind, and that the machine was taking as big a mouthful as possible—in fact, you steered mostly while looking backward at the position of the innermost sickle section, tweaking the wheel left and right to run as tight to the uncut hay as possible. Your left foot was always ready to cock and stuff the clutch if something went wrong, and you kept your right hand near the hydraulics control in case you needed to pop the header into the air to scale above a foxhole mound.
A morning spent cutting hay was a morning of being left to your own thoughts, with occasional nature breaks when the sandhill cranes came in, or a deer—bright rusty red against all the verdure—bounced across one corner of the field. But there were also plenty of reminders that you were running a monstrous machine through the habitat of hundreds of creatures: the constant rolling flicker of grasshoppers springing out ahead of the voracious reel; a skunk wobbling across the open swaths, headed for the cover of brush; a gutted gopher; a smashed mouse. Once when Dad had just purchased the haybine and was cutting the field behind the house, I rode my bike out only to see him stop the tractor, dismount, walk around behind the machine, and lift something up, up, and up until his arm was outstretched and the object was still nearly touching the ground. Squinting, I could see bits of furry color, and then I realized: chevron rubber rollers plus one barn cat equals one very skinny kitty carpet runner.
When the last round