Cowboy Summer

He’d met the old man when he worked one summer baling hay on a neighbor’s cattle farm. On summer break from high school, it was his first real job, and hard work, out in the field loading the freshly baled hay onto a flatbed trailer, pulled behind a John Deere tractor. Then, when the trailer was full, the hay was stacked up into the barn loft, where it was at least a hundred and twenty degrees. Even showering after work, he could still feel the prickly hay itch on his skin.  

The old man pretty much ran the operation, sometimes driving the baler, sometimes the tractor, and he could do any job on the farm that needed doing. He didn’t say much, but when he did the kid paid attention, and so learned to drive a tractor himself, plant fence posts, string barbed wire. Herd cattle.

After the hay was cut and put up, they cleared a wood lot together and he learned to use a chainsaw, keep the blade sharp, and split the straight oak logs into fence rails. The beauty of the fence they built along the driveway made all the hard work worthwhile. 

Foot and mouth disease got into the herd that August, and every morning three or four more cows had died. The kid had to hook the bodies to a chain and use the tractor to pull them down to a big hole and bury them. This went on for weeks until the vet got the sickness under control. He didn’t eat beef for a good while after that, and the whole experience kind of turned him off of farming in general, and raising cattle in particular.

The neighbor had two daughters about his age, and he learned to ride a horse when they invited him out after work one afternoon. It was a big place, the farm, and that summer they rode horses all over the pastures and wooded trails, down to a stream where they swam and jumped off a rope swing hung out over the water. It was some of the best times he had had so far in his life. Being young, the company of women, and after a good ride, unsaddling and brushing the horses down in the big barn, treating them to a little sweet feed. Them nuzzling his pockets for the apples and carrots he hid there.

A few years later, after college and out on his own, he heard the old man had died. Heart attack, is what he heard. He thought about it a good bit, this tenuous life, and all the old farm hand had taught him that summer, often without saying a word. Just having him watch a thing being done, and then doing it himself. Until he got it right. 

He was reading a lot, had always read a lot, and one day came upon a poem by Gary Snyder, Hay for the Horses. And the last few lines that really stuck with him.

“I’m sixty-eight,” he said. 

I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit that’s just what I’ve gone and done.”

A few things he knew by then. That there was no shame in hard work, or a man making a living with his hands. That, like Jesus with his carpentry tools and visions, real knowledge came from all sorts of places. That money, or fame, or fortune didn’t necessarily make a person happy. And finally, that it was difficult to sum up a man’s life, decide about him, looking at it from the outside. Even sometimes for the man himself, with no perspective but his own.