Farm Hogs

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My brother in law belongs to a motorcycle gang. Harleys, black leather, the works. Except his gang is made up exclusively of middle-aged South Dakota farmers, so I don't think you need to alert law enforcement when you see them rolling into town. If this bunch of renegades had a logo, it would be an ear of corn.

Instead of choppers, these guys have touring bikes, the motorcycle equivalent of a 1972 Buick four door. Wide body, sound system, GPS, cushy back rest on the rear seat for the wife. More trunk space than my grandmother's attic. Tip one of these puppies over, you've gotta call a tow truck to get it upright again.

When they all decided to haul their bikes to Florida for an extended vacation, their biker friend Tim figured no problem. He'd just toss it in the bed of the pickup. He backed up to a dirt embankment, plunked down a twelve inch plank to bridge the gap between there and the tailgate like he'd always done with his snowmobile, and eased the bike onto the ramp.

A little too easy.

Halfway across, it stalled. And that's when he discovered the critical difference between a snowmobile and a motorcycle. When stopped, a snowmobile doesn't tip over. Therefore, he'd never noticed that on a foot wide plank suspended in the air, there's no place to put your feet down to catch your balance.

A thousand pounds of motorcycle began to teeter, and Tim had no choice but to save himself. He dove one direction, the bike went the other. Crash! And that was just Tim. You should've seen the bike.  

Luckily, the damage was mostly cosmetic (to the bike, not Tim, who was both bruised and mortally embarrassed because of course his wife told everybody). He was able to get his pride and the Harley repaired in time for their big trip, but he still had to load it in the pickup. Definitely not trying the ramp again. Being a farmer with no livestock, he didn't have a big loader like the ones his rancher buddies used to feed hay to their cows, but he did have a nice utility tractor that should do the trick.

He built a sling for the bike, hooked it onto the tractor bucket, and lifted…the rear end of the tractor right off the ground. Whoops. Obviously, counterweights were needed. He chained a couple of old chunks of broken concrete to the three point hitch on the back of the tractor and gave it another go. This time the bike came off the ground, but as he started toward the pickup the motorcycle began to sway on its tether, and the concrete blocks weren't quite enough to offset its weight. Every time it rocked forward the tractor bobbed, the bucket dipping a little farther with each swing, sway-dip-sway-dip, until Tim was dribbling the motorcycle across the yard like a very expensive basketball while his wife debated whether to speed dial their insurance agent, an ambulance, or one of those funniest home video shows.

Somehow, he finessed tractor and bike into position. When we saw him, he was en route to Florida with the Harley securely strapped in his pickup bed and a vague sort of plan for how he was going to get it out again once he arrived at his destination. My husband suggested he might consider buying a motorcycle trailer. A nice low one, with a built in loading ramp.

Tim snorted in derision. "Tow a trailer all way to Florida, through those cities? That would be a pain in the butt."

As opposed to the obvious efficiency of his current method. Then again, if he liked to do things the easy way he would've quit farming years ago. 

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Waiting to Exhale

Farmers around here are holding their breath so hard they're starting to keel over in the cafes and parts stores. This could be one of the best grain crops they've had in years. I say 'could be' because in farming, disaster is never more than one thunderstorm away. And farming at above 3000 feet in the shadow of Glacier National Park is an annual invitation to disappointment. Once in a while, you have one of those summers where it all comes together. The ground thaws and dries early enough to get everything planted at a decent time. The rain falls right on schedule. And the grain springs to gorgeous, bountiful life. And then you wait. There is nothing quite as nerve-wracking as watching that bumper crop ripen with all the speed of a snail racing up the side of Chief Mountain. Will it be ready to combine before the sawflies buzz through and whack off every other stem? Will the cold, damp weather delay it so long that an early snow mashes it? It's so thick, a wind-driven downpour could do almost as much damage.

Or it could hail. Hail is a hit and miss annihilator of farmers' dreams. Storms tend to be compact, often less than a mile across. Sometimes you can almost draw a line where the squall ended that turned your barley to muddy green pulp without touching the neighbor across the road. The weather man isn't much help. It's not like you can run out and throw up a tent over a hundred acres of oats. Listening to a storm forecast is like parking your car at a jam-packed Walmart, knowing a plane is about to fly over and drop a few bowling balls. The odds that one will go through your windshield as opposed to one of the hundreds of other cars are actually pretty low. But you know it's gonna hit somebody. Combines and swathers are just now beginning to chomp their way across the fields to our south. A week of good, warm weather and some of our neighbors will start harvesting winter wheat. But here on the upper slopes, we'll be holding our breath for a while yet.

Why Farm Girls Can Cook

People always seem surprised to learn that I can cook. I'm not sure why. Because I live in a house with a bare concrete floor and unpainted plywood walls? Or is it my tendency to avoid the vacuum cleaner until the carpet starts to crunch underfoot? Maybe because my husband and I didn't purchase a mutual piece of furniture until we'd been married for ten years. (Yes, it was a couch. With a recliner on each end. Priorities firmly in place here.) Whatever the reason, I fail to see the connection between lack of general domesticity and the production of food. I love food. I like to cook it, and I especially love to eat it. In fact, I love eating even more than I hate to sweat, which accounts for what I laughably call a fitness plan. I crave baked goods: pies, pastries, cookies, and cakes. When the nearest bakery is an hour's drive away, you're either going to suffer in vain or whip up something to satisfy your own sweet tooth. But that isn't why I learned to cook. There are four children in my family. Three girls and a lone, spoiled boy bringing up the rear. I am second in line. My brother is eight and a half years younger than me, and was practically useless around the ranch until he finally hit second grade. Which left us girls. Cows and crops are the original equal opportunity employers. They could care less whether the person on board the tractor is male or female. Neither did my dad. In lieu of sons, he made ranch hands out of his daughters. I'm not complaining. I've always loved the outdoors and animals. Farming, well, I believe I made opinion on that subject clear in an earlier post. So when it came time to plow or combine or bale, I started looking for a way out, pronto. I found the magic portal in the kitchen. "Well, gee, Dad, I'd love to go out and summer fallow the north forty, but this bread dough's got another hour to rise, and then I have to bake it, and then I thought I'd whip up an apple pie. But if you'd rather I went out and farmed…" Worked every time. Unless my older sister beat me to the kitchen, but I'm bigger than her, although she does throw a sneaky left hook. Oddly enough, my mother seemed to prefer hours alone on the tractor to hanging about the house with her darling children. Baffling woman. So I learned to cook in self defense, and at some point it turned into a passion. Which explains why I got up this morning and, after a quick chat with my dad, decided to make a rather labor-intensive lunch, complete with homemade bread. Then I followed up with a batch of caramel rolls for tomorrow's breakfast. What's that you say? Why, no. Whatever made you think my sudden burst of culinary activity had anything to do with my dad's declaration that it looked like a good day to pound fence posts?

Tractor Crazy

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Some day spring may come, and when it does the cattle will take a back seat to farming for a bit. My brother and I would have made good partners in this split operation. He has always loved anything mechanical. I'm an animal person. In his opinion, a cow is a thousand pounds of mobile aggravation in leather pants. I consider a day on the tractor slightly less tedious than counting the grains in a fifty pound bag of rice. \

Unless it's wild rice. That might put it over the top.

 The topic is fresh on my mind because I dragged pastures today. In other words, I drove a tractor around in circles for two hours, busting up cow turds with a harrow. My MP3 player was no help. Forget those businessmen trying to sleep on a noisy airplane. This is the real reason they invented noise cancelling headphones.

Luckily, the tractor did its best to keep me entertained. If I went more than two miles an hours, it immediately hit a badger hole hard enough to launch me out of my seat. And every fifty yards or so, for no particular reason, the door popped open. No big deal until the wind freshened and starting driving pellets of semi-frozen rain into my face as I attempted to steer with one hand while leaning out to drag the door shut with the other. 

Man, I love farming.

Maybe I would like it more if I was gliding along in one of those deluxe tractors with a temperature controlled, sound-proof cab, ergonomically designed seat, Bose stereo and a GPS system designed to eliminate all need for thought on my part.

 Wow. That sounds really dull.

 Old equipment does add a certain edge to farming. Can I make this one last round before the clutch goes completely? The answer is no. It will disentegrate when you've only got five acres left to seed and a three day rain settling in. The tractor I was driving today has a history of personality quirks. One year, during harvest, my sister was using it to bale straw. I was ahead of her on one combine and our hired man was on the other. Mom was in a field a mile away, swathing barley. Dad was in the fuel pick-up, roaring from one machine to the other, fixing them almost as fast as we could break them.

 I can't recall exactly what was wrong with the tractor, but every time my sister shifted gears the front end popped off the ground. She bounded down the rows like a bronc buster on a rearing colt. I had problems of my own. The slightest pressure on the brake pedal caused the combine wheels to lock up. At the end of every row it lurched to a stop, nose-diving, butt flying in the air.

It was a real rodeo out there, I tell you. Her tractor rearing, my combine bucking, and Dad racing around picking up the pieces that flew off.

 Like the people on this ranch, our tractors are getting to the age when they require a little extra encouragement to get going in the morning. Each is equipped with the same basic tool kit: wrenches, screwdrivers, and a blue can of starting fluid.

We hadn't realized how often we had to pump ether into carburetors until one chilly morning when Mom and I and my three-year-old son climbed into one of the diesel pick-ups. It is notoriously cold-blooded and we had forgotten to plug in the block heater. My mom turned the engine over and over, hoping against hope that it would start anyway.

 My son tapped her on the shoulder, full of male superiority. "You know, Grandma, it won't go unless you use the blue can."

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