Pretty And Not Pretty

The farm truck we call The Big Red Beast is cumbersome, unsightly and quite threadbare in every sense of the word. She is held together by tuck tape, baling twine, wire, lots of angle iron and extra bolts. She sputters and bucks, pitches and lurches, sounds like a cross between a twin engine aircraft and a bulldozer low on fuel and tends to belch a fire ball when cranked over with anyone but Mike behind the wheel. How she continues to haul hay bales from the fields to the barns is a wonder in itself, yet every year she soldiers on and gets the work done.

When standing in the back of the truck, loading the bales as they drop down after being scooped and elevator-ed up the chute up by the Henry loader (a device that hooks onto the side of the truck when in the field), I do not look pretty at all. Trying to stay upright is a big deal while the truck sways and bounces below me. Add layer upon layer of rows of hay bales and the comedy begins.

But once the truck is stacked high with bales and the load is being taken into the barn for unloading, it is a beautiful sight to behold. But the stacking job is not pretty. It is uneven and leaning to one side. Bales are tossed all which ways on the very top.

Getting the truck into the barn and snugged up to the hay stack to begin unloading, it turns back to being not pretty as the looming job of unloading and pitching the bales high up until they reach the rafters is a stifling, hot task. Things begin to look pretty again when the bales are all in their resting spot until winter when we use the animal feed a few bales at a time.

For those of you who are waiting patiently for the totals of the field we are currently working on to see if your guess is the winner of total bales or the winner of Mike’s guess, you still have one more day to submit!

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