I am convinced that the earliest crafters of video games made hay.
Making hay, aside from demolishing whatever naive suburban notions you cherished that you were mildly fit, is a great deal like a video game. At least, it is here. I don’t know what it’s like to clamber into the belly of a three-million horsepower tank and bulldoze grass into two-ton round bales. That too sounds like a video game, only more like something for the kiddies, demanding all the intellectual rigor of an episode of Teletubbies. Here, we do it the old-fashioned way—square bales.
Actually, the really old-fashioned way is probably to scythe the stuff and fork it into huge haystacks. Sorry, no word on that here.
But it occurs to me that you may be in the same awkward position I was in before my stay here, namely, you may be a Hay Neophyte.
You’re not? Okay, quick, what’s the difference between hay and straw? Aha! Not only are you a Hay Neophyte, but you haven’t been reading this blog.
And I thought we were friends.
Well, let’s make this quick. A standard year around here has four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. Winter is cold. In winter, plants are not at their best. The plants don’t mind (or rather, the Collective Consciousness of the Plant Races, if that’s your flavor), because they planned ahead and popped their seeds in the ground before Old Dude Winter crashed the party. Plants figured out that trick sometime ago, and Winter has yet to catch on.
However, animals (which often eat plants) have no such foresight. Animal babies are singularly unequipped to spend the winter buried underground. You can make this experiment yourself with a puppy, although I don’t recommend it. Leave that to the friendly folks who live on tax grants.
(Makes you realize how different plants are, doesn’t it? Wait until I get around to writing my blog about how plants can sprout whatever body part they happen to need wherever they need it. Or, just go sit in your yard.)
Of course, some animals hibernate, which almost counts as being buried in dirt. Unfortunately, cows and horses don’t. Winter comes, and cows and horses are still milling around thinking, “Grass. Grass. Eat. Grass.” But there doesn’t happen to be any grass. Hence the problem.
Now, no one has yet been able to explain to me how cows and horses got through winter before they conquered the human race. Maybe barns formed naturally in the wild. Maybe aliens dumped loads of hay en route to Stonehenge. Maybe all the cows used to migrate south and make huge cheese wheels which hardened and were later carved into the Pyramids.
Whatever the mysteries of their heroic past, the cow of today cannot be inspired to imitate the feats of her ancestors. Look a cow in the face, exhort her to take thought for the morrow as did the bovines of old, and she will favor you with a vacant stare. Horses are little better, and content themselves only with a sarcastic remark.
Thus the farmer must cut hay. First he mows it. Most folks (in America) use tractor equipment, but here, the horses pull the mower. So there’s a pretence of fairness. Then (here, anyway) the farmer rakes the mown grass into long piles called windrows. The horses pull the rake, too.
The mower and rake have a functional similarity to the lawnmower and rake your elderly neighbor uses to purify his lawn of the grass clippings which are promptly classified as trash. As a Blue Belt Haymaker, this waste would bother me, except that with all the pesticides it takes to keep those little grass blades spanking green, the clippings would probably kill any animal smaller than a woolly mammoth.
Still, the processes are kin. Next Saturday afternoon when you’re lazing around trying to read this blog and unable to follow my convoluted sentences because of the locust-plague-like roar of the surrounding lawnmowers, you should pop your head out the window facing your elderly neighbor and ask, “Making hay?” If he’s old enough, he’ll get it.
Meanwhile, we left the farmer with huge windrows of hay lying in the field. Maybe you’ve seen these rows on your jaunts through the countryside and dimly thought, “What kind of crop is that?” That’s what I used to think. In fact, fields make a lot more sense now that I’ve lived on a farm. But that’s another blog. We return to the windrows in the field.
What happens now? Well, on this farm, it rains, and the whole merry process comes to a grinding halt. Rain is the enemy of good hay. It leaches nutrients. It makes the hay willing and able to mold. It means you can’t pack the hay into nice tight bales, because the moisture will heat up (I forget why) and your stack of dead grass can actually spontaneously combust. This is unfortunate if the bale happens to be with a couple more tons of highly flammable hay in a wooden barn.
So rain is bad for hay. Naturally, it rains here regularly. The only time it doesn’t rain is if the farmer decides to put off making hay because it might rain. The occasional threat of a dry spell is easily remedied by the prompt mowing and windrowing of several acres of hay. You think I’m joking. Truly, the ideal place to make hay would be the Sahara desert, but, Murphy’s Law holding true, that is the one place on the planet besides the ocean where grass fails to thrive. Farming brims with such ironies.
Eventually, it stops raining long enough for the windrows to get dry enough to bale. (Note that the nearby Amish have some sort of extra sense—one of many—so that they successfully mow, rake, and bale over two or three dry days. Unfortunately, this ability does not seem to be available for purchase.) The baler is a huge hulking machine which the horses refuse to pull. So does the farmer, and so do I, and the tractor, being inanimate, gets the short straw. The baler sweeps the hay into its belly and squashes it into a square chute that spits out a rectangular prism of tightly packed hay. It’s reminiscent of the apparatus of Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneetches, or the car-crushing conveyor belt in The Brave Little Toaster. But I digress into Literature.
One or two sturdy folk stand on a wagon trailing the baler, seize each bale from the chute, and stack it on the wagon. There’s a fun pirate hook you use to grab the bale (parrot not included). And with the stacking, we are at last back where we started—video games.
Actually, everything up to now was like a game too, but it was a strategy game, generally one where the computer cheats. Now, it gets physical. Bales aren’t neat like bricks, and if you don’t stack them right, the whole pile can collapse, killing anyone stupid enough to walk next to a hay wagon on a steep hill. It’s an art unto itself.
And if that’s not enough excitement for you, there is the final task: filling the barn. I don’t know how other barns are, but this barn is Hay World. At first it’s easy; toss the bales off the wagon, stack them on the floor. You stack layer after layer until you can’t lift a bale (which is 30-50 lbs.) that high.
Then comes Level 2. You have to climb onto the huge “floor” of hay you’ve just crafted and keep stacking. Now someone has to toss the bales up from the wagon and someone else has to lug the bales over to new layers on top of the old ones. Hay World, like any good video game, is full of unsteady blocks, surprises (like hidden nests full of rotten eggs), and holes. One false step and you’re up to your thigh in hay. Venture too near the edge and you’ll fall six or seven feet, presumably onto something sharp. The bales keep coming and you keep stacking. It doesn’t get faster, but it feels like it does because your strength drains. I still haven’t found the Health Pellets.
Anyhow, when it’s all done (which it isn’t yet), your smug livestock can sleep knowing they’ll make it through the winter without losing a pound. Especially if you’ve also put grain in silos…but we don’t have a silo, so that’s not even another blog.
Your mind tells you cheerily that you must have lost some weight or strengthened muscles are at least gotten your heartrate up, and your body promptly replies that if speeding your heartrate is so fabulous, why didn’t you just say so in the first place and watch a Hitchcock movie?
So the mind changes the subject. As should we.
