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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
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Gryphon
Charter Member
18463 posts |
Feb-04-17, 03:31 PM (EST) |
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2. "Elder Days Story Time: Farming"
In response to message #1
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LAST EDITED ON Feb-05-17 AT 02:48 PM (EST) >"Good JESUS crike how can these people live with this!?" > - Billy Connolly, on the smell of farms When I was a kid, my parents had a number of horses. In order to obtain the prodigious quantity of hay they required, my father for several summers struck a deal with an acquaintance of his from work who also ran a dairy farm (because one full-time job just isn't enough), whereby we would go for a couple of weeks and help with the haying on his farm in exchange for a cut of the product. There are a few things about this experience that make it stand out in my mind as a particular zenith of misery in my childhood. One is that haying, by the cruel caprice of the gods, happens at the absolute height of summer, and by definition, must be carried out in open fields on sunny days, when there is exactly no respite at all from the searing gaze of the pitiless daystar. Another is that a bale of hay (as produced by the baling machine Mr. W owned, anyway) weighs about 50 pounds, which is fucking heavy to a fifth-grader. A third is that each day began and ended with the retrieval from, or return to, the main barn of all the necessary equipment. This was, let me just reiterate, primarily a dairy farm. Horses are not particularly smelly animals. Cows, on the other hand? (At least it wasn't a pig farm.) It did have its compensations. For instance, the farm's proprietor had an elderly, half-mad farmhand (he might've been the man's uncle, he was called Uncle Mert but I was never clear on whether it was meant literally) who drove one of the two tractors necessary to make haying a field a halfway efficient operation—one to make windrows, the other to go along the rows and bale the hay. Mert drove the one with the windrower on it, and he was old enough (this was in the early 1980s) that he had been an actual teamster as a young man, so he still had the habit of speaking to the tractor as if it were a team of horses. Before setting off he'd kind of jerk the steering wheel and say "Hup!" and braking was always accompanied by a loud declaration of "Whoooooa." If it got a little bit out of hand he'd be bellowing "Eyyy-up, you sonofawhore!" while managing the situation, which never failed to make my mother fret. He also had an Australian cattle dog called Tippy who was, in many respects, the most congenial individual on that farm, as long as you didn't mind him trying to herd you everywhere you went. Still, the entertainment value of Mert and the fraternal socialist comradeship of Tippy did not sufficiently balance the wretchedness of the actual farming. My job—and keep in mind I was in about the, oh, fourth to seventh grades when we were doing this—was to trudge along after the baler and drag the bales into little piles of six or seven each ("consolidate" them, the word my father always used), so that my parents, who were following in our old Dodge pickup with a trailer behind it, would have to stop and collect them less often. This was just as horrible a way to spend an entire week in high summer as you think. Time has not rose-tinted this experience in any way. To this day, whenever my father speaks of "consolidating" anything, I feel a mild but genuine urge to punch him. Also: One day my father decided that the pickup and small trailer combination we were using to get our share of the hay home to our horse barn for storage was too inefficient, so he borrowed or rented a much larger trailer, then stacked both it and our pickup to about twice the pickup's usual height with hay bales and hit the Interstate. I have never had a more terrifying ride in a motor vehicle of any type. A short-wheelbase Dodge pickup loaded with something like its own volume of hay, and towing a trailer packed until it was about the size of a motor home, is not the most stable highway platform, especially if you've managed to get the tongue height and the CG on the trailer all wrong, and it really, really doesn't like crosswinds. When Dad and I look back on this incident now, we are not entirely certain why we are still alive. But I suppose I can't blame the farming itself for that, that was simply incompetent transportation of goods. :) --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Nathan
Charter Member
1301 posts |
Feb-05-17, 11:52 AM (EST) |
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5. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: Farming"
In response to message #4
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>Yeap, misery is the least of it. >Still, as noted, could've been pigs. Or humans. Not that one would >keep humans in a farm, note, but human....leavings...stink far more in >large amounts than any cow, and I would personally say, pig. When I was a kid, my parents did Civil War Reenacting. Because the campaigning season in those days was kind of late-spring-to-mid-fall, that's also when all the battles happened - which means that the reenactments, too, clustered all around High Summer. This did have its upsides; I only got to enjoy the incomparable experience of snowfall under literal canvas while sleeping on the ground once, because the Cheat Mountain reenactment is the first of the season here in WV, commemorating as it does the utterly wretched experience both Union and Rebel troops had wintering along the crests of opposing ridges right along what is today the border between VA and WV... Come to think, getting snowed on there is kind of perversely appropriate for Cheat Mountain. Not that that made it any less miserable. Anyway. The more typical experience was showing up in a freshly mowed hayfield and pitching canvas tents on wooden poles (both heavy for adults, much less a kid my age at the time) under full summer heat in clothes much less heat-tolerant than we'd consider minimum for such environments today. Food would be cooked on a campfire, 'bed' was a thin air mattress with a sleeping back on top of a layer of rocks, lumps, and ground just sloped enough to slide you out from under the edge of the tent and into the night's rain in your sleep... ...and, what started me on all of this, sanitation consisted of portapots, usually half a dozen or so for one to two hundred reenactors and however many visitors showed up. In high summer. ...Yeah. Even today, the memory of That Foul Reek makes me tremble, and anybody insane enough to want to get 'in touch with nature' is welcome to do it without me. ----- Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn! |
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ebony14
Member since Jul-11-11
375 posts |
Feb-06-17, 08:49 AM (EST) |
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13. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: Farming"
In response to message #4
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>Yeap, misery is the least of it. >Still, as noted, could've been pigs. Or humans. Not that one would >keep humans in a farm, note, but human....leavings...stink far more in >large amounts than any cow, and I would personally say, pig. I would agree. As someone who, through family, school, and circumstance, has been around the leavings of horses, cattle, swine, and humans in somewhat large quantities, I have to say that the latter is by far the most foul. Though, in all honesty, that may be the generally disgusting order of a chemical toilet combined with said leavings, rather than the leavings themselves. Ebony the Black Dragon
"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard." |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
18463 posts |
Feb-05-17, 06:23 PM (EST) |
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10. "RE: Farming Simulator 17"
In response to message #9
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>And this just disintegrated into a sort of "MUCH shit, there I was" >upmanship, didn't it? I think any discussion of farming is sort of fated to do that. :) Speaking of, many years ago I lived in the Bay Area in California, and Zoner and I drove down to LA for Anime Expo when it was at the LAX Hilton (so that would've been... 1997, I think). I-5 from northern to southern California (and vice versa) passes through a little slice of hell on Earth called Coalinga, a town so forlorn it doesn't even have a name (COALINGA is what it said on the sign for the railroad refueling stop, as opposed to, e.g., COALINGB or COALINGC). Coalinga's one and, as far as I could tell, only distinguishing feature is that it's the settlement nearest to a colossal complex of cattle feed lots that line the banks of the Interstate. Miles and miles and miles of cows. On a hot day in July, you can smell Coalinga long before you see it, and long after you've passed it by. People sometimes ask me why I'm an atheist. Occasionally I tell them it's because no god who would allow that to be built right alongside a busy Interstate in a hot, arid region deserves to be believed in. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
530 posts |
Feb-06-17, 09:36 AM (EST) |
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14. "RE: Farming Simulator 17"
In response to message #12
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>Christ, who can eat in that place? I assumed they all drive to Fresno >every day to not starve. Continuation of the quote above: "Ten minutes later you go, 'Oh, that smell's away, it must've been a breeze." Now, 10 minutes is probably very optimistic...I would think a WEEK would be optimistic...but if you LIVE in it, I would think you'd get thoroughly numb. Of course, that would also mean that you wouldn't taste much of what you ate, either, but... ...! Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers! |
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Eyrie Productions,
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