The Slide

Dad and grandpa used to call this the slide. I looked it up on the web and found several names for it: hay slide, beaver slide, hay stacker. Surprisingly I found that at least one in Montana is still in use.

Visit it at: (I had to remove the link. It has a virus.)

This one was "parked" about a quarter mile north of our house. I remember it used to be up against a rail fence but the fence has been removed. Dad and grandpa used to stack hay with this thing and a couple teams of horses. They used a buck rake (maybe I can find a picture of one of these later) to bring the hay to the slide. The rake put it's tines down on the slide tines. The slide tines were then raised by horses pulling the long cables to the top where the hay would drop off in a pile. It is about thirty feet high maybe more.

It is mounted on metal wheels so it can be towed by the horses too. That way they could make several thirty or so foot tall haystacks around the farm to later feed to the cattle.

Now, I don't remember any of that. I just remember it being a place to go play or hide out. As you can see there is a large area under the slide that is shady. The only thing that was a little spooky was the bones. There were always bones under it. I think rabbit size.

After photographing hawks and owls for a few years now I understand what was going on. What a great place to take your kill, eat it and still be on lookout for more. But the bones and owl pellets were always a little disconcerting.

The scene makes me sickish

He crashed his car in a bad snow storm. She rescues him and begins nursing him back to health. This story haunts me on a re-occurring basis. I have never seen or thought of anything that causes my skin to crawl every time I think of it. And, for some reason, I think of it. The scene makes me sickish. I am not like that. I don't get sickish.

The scene is in a bedroom on a bed. Kathy Bates has rescued James Caan from the wreck near her house. She is scary, but you don't notice until the scene. Cann is an author who is "killing off Misery" in his last novel of a popular series. Kathy Bates is a fan of Misery's.

She walks in the bedroom with a sledge hammer. Cann can't move because of injuries. She puts a plank under his leg, swings the sledge hammer down, smashing his foot. In my recollection it actually shows the leg broken just above the ankle. Like deformed broken...his scream. My ankle feels weird when I think about it. And, I think about it. Misery

I can't figure out why I think about it. I rarely remember movie scenes let alone think about them. It's weird.

The Wind Blew Right Through The Boards

I also spent many boring hours in the swamp in the late summer haying. Dad would have me mow the tules for cattle feed in the winter. It wasn't very good feed but there was lots of it. There was close to one hundred acres to hay. I would just go around and around the square field for several days to cut it all. The ranch was under the training flight path for jet fighters out of Nevada and Klamath Falls, OR. One day I was mowing hay in the swamp when one went over. The shadow and noise came at about the same instant, causing my heart to stop, and die, as the sound of the tractor covered up the jet noise until the moment of the shadow. Hauling those light tule bales was a breeze though compared to heavy alfalfa bales. We would stack the hay high up in the lower barn.

The lower barn was down close to the swamp at the north end of the property. No one that grandpa Leo ever talked to knew when it was built and it was always felt to be very old in the 1960's. All the main timbers were hand hewn and wooden pegs held them together. It was a very large hay barn, about one hundred twenty feet long, with manger stalls under the roof so the cattle could feed out of the weather. When it was empty and you looked inside knowing you were going to have to fill it you got a pretty overwhelmed feeling. Dad had put a tin roof on it. The roof came from buildings he helped tear down at the Pit 3 powerhouse.

I spent some the coldest times in my life in the lower barn feeding cows. The cold north winds would just pass right through the boards not to mention the sifting snows. Some mornings would be ten or more degrees below zero. I would get up in the barn and find several inches of frozen crusty snow on the bales. No amount of gloves or hard work could keep my skinny hands and feet warm. Sometimes it felt like I had no feet or hands left. When the tule hay ran out we would begin feeding off the back of the Hoopy. (See my blog of Sept. 8. 2008 for more about Hoopy)

In the mid 1980's we had to tear the lower barn down as it was starting to fall and had collapsed in one place. My father-in-law, Bob McKernan, along with help from Mexican hands, Bruce and me took the barn down. For some reason we all still loved that old barn no matter how daunting the job of filling or miserable the job of emptying it was.

Hauling hay on a wooden sled, exciting and dangerous

Hauling hay on a wooden sled, exciting and dangerous. Grandpa Leo and dad built a sled from full 2x12 boards to haul hay bales from the field to a stack or barn. The sled must have been about eight feet wide and twice that long with a cable attached to the front of the sled and hooked to the tractor . We pulled it with our Model G, John Deere tractor, the B just wouldn‘t pull much hay.

I liked the G, it had an electric starter but could be cranked if the batteries were dead. The Model B had to be started by hand though. It had an exposed flywheel that you just grabbed hold of and gave it a spin (it almost always started). Usually I could start the B without opening the petcocks. The petcocks are valves on each cylinder (there is only two on these two models, Johnny Pops) that can be opened to relieve some of the compression. The G almost required the petcocks be opened to start even with the electric starter.

Back to hauling hay on a sled. You needed a tractor driver and a stacker. I was very happy when Bruce got big enough to be a stacker. The tractor driver would just drive beside the bales of hay and the stacker would grab the bales with hay hooks and stack them. Sounds easy and it was except when dad got the bales so heavy they out weighed me. Then the driver had to stop and the stacker would have to drag the bale up to the sled now because the driver went by it. The stacker would have to decide whether to buck the heavy thing up to an empty spot or start a new bottom layer. Start a new bottom layer sounds good but some times there are a bunch of heavy ones and you just can’t have that much bottom layer before going up with the stack.

Then when you get to the front of the sled the danger and excitement begins. It is probably being pulled between two and five miles per hour. If your little brother was mad at you he would just drive too fast to keep up with the bales. The driver has to watch where he is going or he runs over bales. The stacker must be careful to not step off the front of the sled so it doesn’t run over him and smear him under the sled until the driver noticed. The driver would never be able to stop in time.

Exciting!