Bob Bell Hitches With Farming Memories On His Way To Jackson 1980
June -1980 Jackson
I shivered awake in the trembling predawn breeze, blinking and wondering where the hell I was. Ah yes. The high desert. Somewhere in Wyoming. Zurich? No, no, Geneva, that’s it. The greyness lightened, and propping my self on my elbows, I peered out of the end of the little barn, where the door would have been were it still to be there. A rosy glow danced on the mountain tops to the east, the vanguard of the yet unseen clambering sun. I looked around me. Old hay bales were scattered about, ancient and musty, all sustenance long gone, no longer hay now simply mouldy dead grass. A window on one side had one pane of glass remaining, the other five also long gone. A couple of hessian sacks hung on a rusty hook, and a few empty plastic fertiliser bags littered the floor. Nice joint.
Splashed a little of my valuable water over my face, brushed my teeth with the same. Rolled up my sleeping bag, stuffed it into my shoulder bag, and set off for the road once more, coat wrapped tightly, shoulders hunched against the cold, stepping over the rusty barbed wire fence, a weak but bright sun making me squint. The only sound was bird song, melodic and drawn out, long notes trilled, sung by a small flock that danced among sage, celebrating the dawn. A lone hawk circled way up high, on his breakfast beat, those sharp eyes searching for moving morsels scurrying through the sagebrush, innocent of their approaching doom.
No traffic and it was cold, and so I tramped northward, arms swinging, throwing an occasional and optimistic glance backward. Nope, no cars, no trucks, just plenty of nothing. What was it old Pete Connolly used to sing about, back in our teenage years at parties, when we would persuade him to pick up his guitar, and serenade us with tunes like ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, ‘Angie’ and all those Davey Graham songs he knew? Whatever it was, it ended with the line, spoken more than sung, “a preponderance of nothing”, and that summed up the situation I was in perfectly.
Eventually nothing does become something, if you wait long enough. And one of my backward glimpses caught the glint of sun on a windshield, and a pick up approached. Salvation! And Hallelujah, it slowed as it drew alongside, and then stopped.
“Jackson, I’m going to Jackson. Throw your bag in the back and hop in. It’s cold out there.” I sat down on the worn bench seat, the vinylette ragged and torn, and exulted in the warmth. The driver was a man in his fifties, tanned and smiling under the ubiquitous cowboy hat. He explained that his wife worked at a hotel in Jackson, and stayed up there for five days at a time. They lived on a remote ranch several miles back, on the western side of Geneva, and by golly, sure wasn’t enough money in ranching these days to pay all the bills.
So she had taken this job a few months ago, and it was a bit of a drag for both of them, but it meant they could keep the ranch which had been in the family for a couple of generations. He had a dairy farm, with a herd of seventy Friesians, ran a few sheep and grew hay and wheat. Told me that despite the desert-like look of the land we were driving through, his valley was lower and there was enough water to make it all viable.
My last farming job had been as a dairyman in West Somerset, looking after a herd of one hundred plus Friesians, in addition to running my own small flock of twenty broken mouthed ewes on the side, and so we were soon deep in conversation about the troubles that beset farmers and the joys that made it all worthwhile.
I told him about the hill farm I had lived and worked on prior to the dairy farm and how we had for two summers in a row grown wheat for thatching and explained how labour-intensive it was, and how hard it was to find seed stock that would grow a long stalk. There is no feed value in wheat straw, so all the strains are bred to have a short stem. In fact, the straw is called in thatching circles reed, as the premium material for thatching comes from the reeds grown in the Norfolk Broads, out in the east of England.
Wheat reed is the best substitute when Norfolk reed is unobtainable - the cost of shipping it across the country would be prohibitive. Told him how we had to find people who still ran and maintained old fashioned threshers with combers on top, huge old wooden machines that were made obsolete by the arrival of combine harvesters, the last ones being made in the thirties, and how to harvest the crops one had to use an old fashioned reaper binder.
Using a combine would just mangle the reed making it completely unusable for thatching a roof. He was intrigued. If you are a farmer, you are among many other trades a mechanic, and he asked me to tell him about the entire process, from reaping the standing wheat right up to threshing.
I explained how we’d bought an old pre-war binder, which was around four feet wide, with a cutting blade in front of an endless revolving canvas bed, so the cut stems fell back and were borne on the bed to the knotter that neatly bundled the stalks into a sheaf, tied a string around it and tossed it away from the machine. And then how, at the end of the day, you had to walk around the field picking up two sheaves, one under each arm and stitch the tops of them together, with the bases plonked to the ground, making an upside-down letter V, and how you put six or eight sheaves together like that, and it was called a stook, and then how you had to leave ‘em out in the field, in the sun and the wind for the wheat berries to fully ripen and for the weeds inevitably intertwined in the bottom of the sheaf to dry out. You always cut the wheat a little on the unripe side to minimise the potential loss of the berries while being cut and transported - when really ripe, the berries would fall from the stalk.
And how first thing in the morning and the last thing at the end of the day was to walk around the field re-stacking any stooks that might have blown over. And believe me, you wanted to wear long pants doing this - wearing shorts would tear up the skin on your legs every time you picked up and put down a pair of sheaves! This would go on for two or three weeks depending on the weather. And then the day came when it was time to pitchfork the sheaves on a trailer, which was then driven to a barn or to a field where a rick was to be built.
The last time we had done this, we had arranged to build the rick in a barn belonging to our neighbour Harry Bishop, and it was to this barn that the old threshing machine came. The all-important comber was a rectangular box that sat on top of the threshing machine and fed the material into the guts of the machine without mashing the reed. This huge old wooden machine was parked tight up to the rick, and two or three guys on top of the rick pitched sheaves at the three guys at the maw of the comber. The first guy caught the sheaf, passed it to the second guy who cut the string, and the third guy took the loose material and fed it into the cover. The thresher beat the berries from the stems, and the stems came out the other end in another nice bound sheaf, and the grain shot down a chute to a bin with a hessian sack attached to a small sliding door, which would be closed just as soon as the sack was full. Two men operated the grain end, one filling the sacks and tying the top when it was full, and the other carried the heavy item to wherever the grain was going to be stored.
The sacks weigh anywhere from 120 pounds to 150 pounds. And of course, there were a couple of people carrying away the sheaves of the roof to be. And all the time, the ancient old man who owned this archaic machine walked around it constantly, an oil can in one hand, and a rag in the other. A lot of moving parts, a lot of lubrication needed. The noise was tremendous, a mad clattering, chattering and whining roar. The machine was driven by a long belt from a tractor, so the tractor rumbled, the belt hummed, the sieves in the machine shook, and the flails flailed. Dust hung in clouds for hundreds of feet around the machine. I finished by saying that it was all unbelievably hard work, but strangely satisfying, and a visit in real-time to the past, at how things used to be done before the age of combines. All this talk reminded me of Harry’s labourer, John, whom I remember sweating and groaning throughout the day, saying he hadn’t worked this hard in twenty years. And he probably hadn’t.
My driver laughed saying he didn’t know of any job on the farm that wasn’t hard work, but that was OK, it was what it was, all a part of the necessities of living a life, and anyway, throwing his arms up in the air, whatcha gonna do? Other than keeping his combine? Which of course had to be a wise decision, as I had seen no thatched houses anywhere so far in my travels around this immense country.
And so went the ride, easy conversation about the land, the unpredictability of the weather, our mutual awe at the ease with which professional shearing teams handled the sheep at shearing time, the curse of mastitis in the dairy herd and all the small talk of working the land. Although I had spent the previous eight months working in the music business in London, most of the seventies had been spent farming on the edge of Exmoor, and my travels in the US to date had been coloured by what I had seen happening on the land, looking at strange crops, the immense size of some of the fields… The vastness of the cattle ranching out west where the keep was minimal and rather than two cows per acre as in the UK, out here around one hundred and twenty acres were needed to support one cow.
It was a great ride, and when he finally dropped me off in Jackson we had become firm friends. And of course, I never saw him again.
