by Ben Hewitt
The very next morning before Blood had halted his crowing, before the sun was yet full in the sky, before Penny and I had finished morning chores, the boys were down in the woods, scouting locations for their shelter. They’d brought a post hole digger, a handsaw, and numerous sections of baling twine, with which they’d lash the framing posts together.
We called them for breakfast, and they arrived with dirt and bark clinging to their skin. “We’ve got most of the posts cut,” Fin said. “And the holes dug!” Rye chimed in. They ate hurriedly, in a slurping fashion, and then retreated back to the woods.
Three hours later, Rye slipped into the house, left hand tucked into right armpit. “What’s going on?” I asked, although by the way he carried himself and how quiet he was, I knew perfectly well what was going on: he’d hurt himself. “Cut myself,” he said softly, pawing through the first-aid drawer with his uninjured fingers. He extracted a bandage and the bottle of tree tea oil, and commenced to doctor his wounded digit. I continued washing dishes and tried not to watch out of the corner of my eye.
Two hours after that, Fin tromped through the kitchen and also beelined for the first-aid drawer. “What’s going on?” I asked, although again I knew perfectly well: he’d hurt himself, smashed a thumb with his hammer, and blood was oozing out from beneath his thumbnail. “Hit my thumb with the hammer, YOWZA,” he said, hopping up and down a little, in an attempt to distract himself from the pain. He pawed through the first-aid drawer with his uninjured fingers, extracted a bandage and the bottle of tea tree oil, and commenced to doctor his wounded digit. I continued preparing lunch and tried not to watch out of the corner of my eye.
By dinner, with no further bloodshed, the boys had erected a sturdy frame. At each juncture of wood, twine had been wrapped and tied. The roof was peaked, and a sturdy ridgepole supported rafters of small red-maple and fir poles. They’d dug a pit off to one side and lined it with rocks to contain their cooking fires. During all of this, they’d asked for and received no help from Penny or me, although clearly one of us would need to cut the metal roofing for them. But otherwise, this project was theirs. The mistakes were theirs. The arguments over how to space the roof strapping were theirs. The small triumph of seeing it assembled was theirs. Even the associated injuries and treatment of them were theirs.
It’s taken me a long time, probably longer than it should have, but I think I might finally be learning to let go. To let my boys saw and hammer. To let them negotiate and argue and yell. To let them screw up and start over and screw up again. To let them bleed and to let them stop their bleeding. To let them follow the spark of an idea and see where it takes them.
What do my children most need from me? The answer is humbling: They need me to let them be.
9
Risk and Responsibility
ABOUT SIX YEARS AGO, the four of us began haying with another neighbor. Martha runs a small dairy farm with her sister, Lynn, on the ridgetop across the valley from our holding in Cabot, Vermont. She is sixty-six, sports an unruly mop of jet black hair, and inhabits a body that seems to have been purpose-built for labor. When I see her arms emerging from the rolled-up sleeves of the flannel shirts she wears, even in July, they are all protruding vein and muscle, and I am reminded of those migrating birds that can fly hundreds of miles without food or sleep. Martha even eats like a bird, existing on a sporadic ingestion of calories, along with less sporadic doses of caffeine and nicotine. When we hay, she often forgets about food, and I have learned to put a sandwich into her hands, to say, “Here, Martha, eat this,” even if all she’s asked for is coffee or a Coke. Paradoxically, she was once an Olympic Nordic skier, and it occurs to me that the same genetics responsible for her athletic prowess also enable her to thrive on this substandard diet.
Our haying arrangement with our neighbor evolved out of mutual needs, in the manner of many rural working arrangements made across generations that came long before mine. In short, what Martha needed was muscle, enough to meet the demands of pulling a few thousand fifty-pound bales from the long metal chute of her baler before tossing them toward the rear of the wagon to whoever is stacking them neatly in a crosshatched pattern for utmost stability. The stability is important, as her hayfield features numerous undulations, like oceanic swells caught at the height of their unfurling. I ride the wagon with my feet spread wide and planted, feeling it pitch and heave beneath me, like some landlocked hillbilly version of surfing. The fact that the brakes on Martha’s old John Deere are barely operational dials up the excitement a notch or two, but still I stick the toes of my boots over the edge to hang ten. Then the wagon bucks and it feels suddenly as if I might be tossed under the wheels, and I retreat.
What we needed was simpler: hay for our menagerie of ruminant animals, which generally includes a half-dozen cows, an equivalent count of sheep, and the boys’ goats. So a deal was struck, although truthfully, there never was a deal per se. Rather, things sort of took on a life of their own, following a path of crude logic. We’d help Martha and Lynn fill their barn, and once that was full and their livestock were guaranteed another winter of sustenance, we’d fill ours. We’d kick in something for fuel and maintenance, but the bulk of our debt would be paid in sweat and the slightly nauseous feeling one gets at the end of a long day tossing square bales.
Rye was barely more than a toddler when we began haying with Martha; on each wagonload, we’d stack a few bales into a small cubby for him and his brother, and they’d sit there for hours as we traversed the field, the baler sweeping up the windrows of loose hay and pressing them into tight, tied bundles, one of those mechanical sleights-of-hand that has never failed to amaze me.
Over the years, the boys’ responsibilities in the hayfield have evolved in concert with their physical abilities and their capacity for sound judgment and reason. When they became strong enough, they were pleased to demonstrate their newfound strength by unloading and stacking the bales; when they became suitably cognizant of their surroundings, attuned to the potential hazards inherent in large machinery, they were allowed to hitch and unhitch the wagons. Last year, they learned to drive the old Farmall tractors we use to pull the loaded wagons back to the barn. Penny and I rode with the hay behind them as the boys idled across the freshly shorn field.
Riding that wagon last summer, my eight-year-old son sitting tall in the seat of the tractor, I found myself remembering the boys’ first knives. I’m not sure why; maybe there was something in my sons’ careful posture on the tractor that reminded me of how they’d sat with those knives, as if the responsibility actually filled their physical beings, made them more aware of how they carried themselves and how the world perceived them. Perhaps even how they perceived the world.
The boys got their first knives when they were four. This wasn’t because four is a magic age at which a child should be outfitted with a wedge of honed steel; in our family, responsibility doesn’t have birthdays. Instead, the boys’ early exposure to knives was simply an extension of the critical role cutting implements play in our lives. From birth, Fin and Rye saw Penny and me using knives on a daily basis: Slicing through twine on bales of hay, carving spoons, grafting an apple tree. Around here, a pocket or belt knife is not a novelty or an accessory. It’s a necessity.
We started the boys on pocket knives with locking blades, with the understanding they were to be used only in our presence. This seemed prudent, given the blade’s indifference to flesh and tendon, and also given our older sons’ aversion to tranquility. Could Fin really still his restless body enough to use one safely? Frankly, Penny and I were not certain. We kept a pack of bandages close at hand.
We needn’t have worried. There was something in the seriousness of the blade and the responsibility granted that transformed our son. Fin would sit quietly for long periods of time, whittling the same stick until it had been reduced to a pile of shavings. He didn’t so much seek to make things as to unmake them, to transform whatever slender branch he held into wisps of wood fibe
r and the experience of that transformation. With every pass of the blade, with every curl of whittled wood, he learned a fraction more about pressure and angle and process.
I know from the reaction we got from other parents that the notion of a four-year-olds’ tender palm wrapped around the handle of a pocket knife was unsettling; many would probably feel the same about an eight-year-old at the controls of a tractor. We showed the boys how to safely manage these new tools; it’s not as though we handed them knives and left them to tinker and fend for themselves. Still, it wasn’t long before Fin and Rye were granted autonomy over the use and care of their tools. Did they cut themselves? Indeed they did, though never very deeply—never as deeply as I, as an adult, have cut myself in only the past handful of months. We put a first aid kit in an easy-to-access kitchen drawer and showed them how to clean and doctor their small wounds.
How protective should we be of our children? And I don’t mean just Penny and me, but all parents. It often seems that parents are at once too protective and not protective enough, that having been socialized to accept certain risks but not others, we shortchange our children’s sense of responsibility and confidence by “protecting” them from the tools and activities that build these very qualities. Of course, that shortchanging is itself dangerous, and even more so because the danger is abstract. It does not result in blood or tears or broken bones, and therefore, it is easy to pretend it does not exist. And in pretending it does not exist, we allow it to fester.
In her groundbreaking book The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff recounts her observations while living with the Yequana, an indigenous South American Indian tribe. At first, Liedloff was shocked by the level of so-called danger the tribe’s children were exposed to, including machetes and knives, open cooking fires, and swiftly running rivers. Surely, these hazards meant frequent injury and maybe even worse among the tribe’s children. But after two-and-half-years of living with the Yequana, Liedloff observed almost exactly the opposite: Despite almost immersive exposure to risks that would make most American parents go cold with fear, accidents and injuries were exceedingly rare.
The operative factor seems to be placement of responsibility. The machinery for looking after themselves, in most Western children, is in only partial use, a great deal of the burden having been assumed by adult caretakers. . . . The result is diminished efficiency because no one can be as constantly or as thoroughly alert to anyone’s circumstances as he is to his own. It is another instance of trying to better nature; another example of mistrust of faculties not intellectually controlled, and usurpation of their functions by the intellect, which does not have the capacity to take all the relevant information into consideration.1
What Liedloff observed is perfectly logical. When you take responsibility from a child, he becomes less responsible. And as he becomes less responsible, he is granted less and less responsibility. The intellectual rationale for this is again perfectly logical: If a knife is sharp and can hurt a child, we should protect the child from that potential harm. If a tractor is big and ponderous and imbued with the possibility, however small, of an accident, we should protect the child from that possibility.
But what if, as Liedloff contends, the child already has protective mechanisms beyond what our intellect can fathom? Furthermore, what if the opportunity for a child to feel useful is worth the risk of parted flesh? Because to feel useful is a powerful thing. To feel trusted is a powerful thing, and I wonder if that is what I see in my sons’ young bodies when they take to the seat of Martha’s tractor. I wonder if it’s what I remember in the early days of their knife handling, the way it quieted and focused them, the way they appeared just the smallest amount more substantial with those blades unfolded.
Haying with our friends has become a ritual for my family. It is, like sugaring or cutting firewood, a task connected to a particular season, place, and process, work that we have come to know so intimately that we can hardly imagine what our lives were like before it was part of them.
I think about this in the context of Fin and Rye, who have been involved in these rituals almost literally since they were born. Or maybe ritual is too strong a word; perhaps it is merely habit born of simple necessity: We make hay because if we don’t, our animals go hungry. We cut firewood because if we don’t, we are cold. But no matter what you call it, our boys have known these things since they were infants, and I wonder how these tasks will inform their lives. Of how they have already informed their lives. I recall the look on Rye’s face when he learned to drive the tractor, how it shifted from nervous to determined, visible in the slightest subtleties of arranged features and held tension that only a parent could identify. And the huge smile when he finally mastered the clutch and the Farmall lurched into motion, my boy riding it across the field, the smell of drying hay in our noses. Or my sense of Fin, finally allowed to do what he feels like he’s been capable of for so long, and how he receives that trust and stores it somewhere inside of him for future reference. It is impossible to say when or how that reservoir of trust will serve him. But I am certain it will.
Or the ties we’ve formed with Martha and Lynn and Lynn’s husband, Roman. They are not ties of mere convenience. Rather, we are bound by mutual need, and I think about how rare this dependence has become. I think about how a couple of haying seasons ago Martha became discouraged—there were breakdowns of equipment and rain and other complicating factors—and she commented to Penny at how ridiculous the whole operation seemed when all around us farmers were putting up hay with modern equipment at a pace that might have been ten times ours. “You are right, Martha,” Penny told her. “They do put up more hay. But they are sitting alone in the cabs of their tractors when they do it.” Martha’s eyes lit up and the tension drained from her face.
Someday, of course, there will be no more haying with our friends. It is an inevitability as certain as Melvin’s retirement, as our son’s growing older, as the coming of winter at the knife’s edge of fall. It is as certain as death. But for now, I have the luxury of knowing that what I contribute on that hayfield and in that barn matters. That hay does not just happen, but must in some way be called forward, given little pieces of myself—sweat, a tired back, the crosshatched welts dried hay leaves on the pale underbellies of my forearms—in exchange for its gift of sustenance.
I suspect this is at the core of what I love so much about haying. It feels like such an honest, tangible exchange. It is so unpretentiously elegant in its simplicity, and there are moments when I’m riding the wagon across the hayfield, or grunting bales into the barn, or just sitting in the grass, letting the breeze dry my sweat to salty streaks, when I feel as if I am in some crude way rubbing against that elegance.
“Pay attention, guys, because you’re going to be in charge of this operation before long,” Martha tells Fin and Rye when we stop to put a new roll of twine in the baler. She means it, although frankly, the boys seem a little skeptical. And who can blame them? The intricacy of the baler, with its gears, knotters, and web of twine, all of which require frequent intervention. And the sheer mass of the Deere, its rear tires towering high above the boys’ heads, its exhaust snorting the rich black smoke of uncombusted diesel. My children have not yet arrived at the conquering age, when the default assumption is that such things can be bent to their will. But they are only human; they’ll get there, and Martha knows it. She knows, too, of her own mortality, that even a creature that can fly hundreds of miles without food will eventually grow weary. She jokes that someday we’ll have to strap her rocking chair onto the wagon. We’ll stick a lit Camel in one hand and a megaphone in the other, and she can bellow orders as we make long, looping passes through the field. The real joke, of course, is that she’s not joking.
Not many farmers put up large quantities of square bales these days. Speaking strictly in terms of haying technology, square bales are nearly two generations past their prime. The onset of the square bale’s decline can even be traced to a specific year: 1965,
which is when the delightfully named Virgil Haverdink was casting about for a master’s thesis project at Iowa State University. After a winter of tinkering in the school’s machine shop, Haverdink had fabricated a loutish-looking contraption known as the world’s first large round baler.
Haverdink cleverly designed the implement so that the finished bales—each of which contained roughly the equivalent of fifteen square bales—would shed water. And because air could not penetrate into the compacted mass of hay, any moisture encapsulated within it would introduce fermentation, rather than mold. The former is entirely palatable to ruminants; the latter can be deadly. This meant that farmers could bale before the forage was entirely dry, which in turn meant they needn’t wait for a three-day window of sun to make hay. Indeed, many farmers now put up what is known as “hay in a day.”
The modern round bale, then, confers numerous advantages. It turns the phrase “make hay when the sun shines” into a platitude rather than a truism, and by doing so, it extends a callused middle finger to the vagaries of weather. And because the bales are too big to be handled by hand (depending on moisture content, a round bale can weigh upward of twelve hundred pounds), they must be handled by machine. Because they must be handled by machine, no more physical effort is required than that which is necessary to operate the tractor’s controls. The upshot? With round bales, an entire winter’s worth of hay for an entire farm can be put into round bales by one person, who needn’t even touch a single stem of grass in the process.
All of which is to say, putting hay into rounds is quicker, easier, and exponentially more forgiving than putting it into squares. Heck, if you wrap them in plastic, as is common practice in the Northeast, they don’t even require shelter. It’s not hard to understand why the technology gained widespread adoption in very short order and why you can’t drive through Vermont’s farmland in the early years of the twenty-first century without passing row upon row of the big white marshmallows of hay.
