Maiden Voyage
As a woman, I could see the writing on the wall. There were so many things that needed to be done; cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbooks and paying the bills were just the white spot of the top of the mound of chores that called for attention. In addition to my own business and soon-to-be college classes, there were also dogs, cats and horses that all required attention on a daily basis – sometimes twice a day. The lawn was well on its way to seed and the place screamed out for some female attention, like planting flowers and hanging pictures on the barren bachelor pad walls. The irrigating water was overdue to be moved and the cows needed to be checked to make sure all four feet were still pointing down.
Then there was the farming. It started out with harrowing and spraying weeds in the spring. At some point,known only to Curtis, the grass and alfalfa were ready to be cut, (swathed),raked if necessary, baled in various sized bales and piled up nice and neatly for winter storage. I didn’t realize it at the time but summer is merely a blur of farming equipment coming and going at all hours of the day and night in various stages of working/disrepair. At times Curtis would joke that it was either raining or he was fixing his haying equipment. Trust me that was only AFTER he regained his sense of humor when something broke. And something was always broke.
About two months into the haying season, I wasn’t sure how he had done it all by himself before I had moved in. He was out there doing his farming thing and I was doing my best to make sure he ate and the bills were getting sent out. I had my own miniature farming experience mowing the lawn but that is another story in itself. There seemed no end in sight to the to-do list. Instead of getting shorter, it just seemed to get longer.
That is when my maiden voyage on the “swather” took place. A swather is a beast of a machine. Think of the biggest lawn mower you have ever seen and add steroids to it. A lot of steroids. The tires were taller than me and the “blade” of the lawnmower was 14 feet across. I had heard many conversations about swathers growing up on a cattle ranch. The men would come in after a long day “swathing” and be covered from head to toe in dust and dirt. Thankfully, Curtis had upgraded two years ago to a swather with what he calls that “glass wrap around option”, in other words, an air conditioned cab.
On this particular day, things had piled up way too high for Curtis to take control of. He had to time the haying just right in order to get the best nutritional value out of it for the cattle. The hay that had been swathed needed to cure and ideally without getting rained on. Then, when it was dry -but not too dry -it needed to be baled. At the time of this particular crisis, he had fields that needed to be baled and fields that needed to be swathed at the same time. As that took two different pieces of equipment, there was no way he could do both himself.
That is when he must have been desperate enough to consider using his last resort – me. I am really good at typing medical transcription. I make a mean chocolate chip cookie, my checkbook is always reasonably well balanced, I try to run for fitness and I can play a decent guitar. But swathing? Nope. I only got near one of those machines when it was sitting quietly in the shop with the motor not running and I had to get past it to get whatever I needed and only if I was very desperate for whatever it was I thought I needed. Swathers were taboo. There were things unwritten about them and whispered stories about getting plugged or parts flying off. I knew enough to know I didn’t want to get near one.
“Honey? What are you doing today?”
And so it began. I wrapped up whatever pressing tasks needed my attention that morning and, after procrastinating long enough, I tied up my hair in a cute little side braid, pulled on a pink baseball cap and meandered out to the field. Curtis had cut the borders of three fields and my task was simply to cut the middle out of them.
We walked around the machine, humming its great big monster roar in the dry heat made worse by the engine exhaust. Just being that close made my head swim. Then Curtis climbed the flight of stairs into the cab and his dog, Dot, dutifully followed. As I made the trek into the belly of the beast, I squared my shoulders and gave myself a little rally shout, “You can do this.”
Curtis pointed out the important levers and buttons in the cab. Push this one this way and then this one the other way and keep your RPMs here and then you put the header down but,
“There is no brake, it is either forwards or backwards, and you kind of have to play with it a little to get it to do that,” were the only words that stuck in my head. Down the windrow we went. He made it look very easy and Dot was so sure it was simple that she just closed her one blue eye and one brown eye went to sleep in a little corner by the window.
The next thing I knew, Curtis jumped up and indicated I needed to sit down and show him I was paying attention. At age 46, I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent woman, past romantic relationships not included, but I wasn’t sure exactly which lever went forward while the other one went backwards and then I put down what? Thankfully,Curtis was born with an overload of patience or an innate ability to bite his tongue. He went through the process again, I’m sure with his tongue nearly bleeding, and I managed to get through a row, turn around and start another one.
“Well, looks like you know what you are doing! Give me a call if you need anything,” and out the cab he bounced. He was gone. In the cab, I sat with my eyes bugged out trying to smile like “I got this” only I’m sure it looked more like I was constipated. As I sat there, I took heart in the fact that there are 10 -year-old boys across the country driving one of these things. If I couldn’t master this, I needed to go back to preschool.
Slowly I maneuvered the levers this way and that until the big green beast lurched forward and off I went at mach chicken. Around and around the field I went,trying to think of it as mowing an extra-large lawn. As I got through the first field and moved onto the second one, I was feeling increasingly confident and started to loosen my jaw a bit.
The second field had greater challenges with a hill at the end of the row, which seemed to be too difficult for the great beast at times and I had to use my rusty old cheerleading skills to coax it up the grade. “C’mon! You can do it!” I learned to focus towards the end of the row and quit daydreaming about whatever it was that entered my mind. There is a timing trick to lifting the header at the end of the row so you don’t mow through the end windrows. Which, apparently is bad and you will hear about it from whoever is driving the baler and I didn’t want that! Focus, focus, focus was my motto. If you lifted the header too soon, there would be sections of grass that didn’t get cut. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind to bring the kitchen scissors with me the next time I came out.
I was thanking the John Deere God when I got done with the second field and headed to the third and final field to be cut. So far none of the dreaded“plugging” had occurred and the beast hadn’t spit out any parts. I think it was beginner’s luck. I was thankful that I tried to be a good person and open doors for old ladies because I needed all the good karma I could get out on my maiden voyage.
The third field was by far the most challenging and the beast was tired and didn’t like being nudged up the hill by a novice in a pink farmer’s hat. The mowing had to take place in a side hill fashion. I was not able to sit square in the seat on that hill and found myself sitting on one butt cheek only. The grade of the hill was steep enough that the sleeping dog would slide into my leg when we were headed east and back into the window when we headed west. At one point, she slid into the window and did a face plant. I remember looking down to see her looking at me with her lips peeled apart on the glass as if she were saying, “Really lady?”
It was about that time that one of the final challenges had presented itself. It was an issue that Curtis and I had not reviewed prior to his departure. The rule is, the dog had to stay in the cab of the swather so that she did not get run over. The grass is very high and it is easy to lose sight of the dog. Many tragedies from other swather operators have been told and any present and future swather operator knows they would never want to have that on their conscious.
But what happens when the dog farts? I thought about stopping and getting out with her but I was not confident in my ability to stop and start the beast. I was much like the airplane pilot who was good at flying but had no idea how to land. So for the last 30 minutes of my swathing experience, I spent it reassuring the dog that, “we are just about done sweetie,” just like my parents used to tell me when we were out in the middle of nowhere checking cattle and I was starving. I felt like a hypocrite with that one brown eye and one blue eye looking pleadingly up at me. We both knew it was none too soon when we got done.
As I pulled into the yard after getting my task completed, I took a deep breath, kind of wiggled the stick into a place that held the monster still, and turned off the key. Dottie quickly bounded from the cab and disappeared to take care of business. With my poor butt, hands and brain numb, I made my way to the house and climbed onto the couch. My four-hour stent left me drained and Curtis does this for up to 12 hours at a time! (That is, of course,if the thing will run for that long).
But I made it through. One more interesting skill to add to my patch-work quilt of a resume. I did think to myself as I was drifting off in my nap, “if you are going to screw up,you need to do it early in the relationship. If I plug that thing up next year, I’m getting yelled at!”
