While I was doing marketing for Fairwood Retirement Village there was trouble brewing at the ranch. For confidentiality sake, we will call it a personnel conflict that ended with the manager of the ranch being asked to leave. Being in a tight spot with haying season approaching it was quickly determined that I would be best used at the ranch.

I went to live full time on the ranch on the twenty-first of June. There was much to do to prepare for haying, tractors had to be fixed, bailers had to be cleaned out. The most pressing problem we had was that “Big Blue” our New Holland 8970 tractor was broke. The hydraulic valve body was torn up, once it was taken off and tried to fix, but pieces soon went missing, so as the hay matured we sat with only the two smaller tractors and could not use the Massey Ferguson 2170 bailer.
 
We began to cut the hay on the twenty-fifth of June on acreage along the highway going into Chewelah. This was the first time I had been so intricately involved with every asset of haying. As a kid, I had bucked bails and sat on the tractor as we bailed, but this was a completely new ball game. Driving a swather was not as easy as it looked from the truck as I watched others do it, and fiddling around with the rakes as I turned the hay over sometimes distracted from driving in a straight-line.  As they say practice makes perfect and eight hours with the rakes driving “Peanut” make sure I knew what I was doing.

With two fields down and starting to cut a third, time starting to work against us. I took the valve body to Tri Cities to be worked on on the 1st of July hoping that it would be done in a short matter of time. One thing that we did not consider was that it was a holiday weekend, this slowed things down considerably as the parts didn’t get shipped till mid week and when they did arrive and the technicians began to put it back together they found that they were missing more parts than they had at first thought.

Back at the Ranch we were finally ready to start bailing the first field. We prepped one of our tractors and one of a guys who we were co-opting with, at ten-thirty PM on Wednesday the ninth we set out for the field to begin bailing. It did not go so smoothly; we started bailing the ends to open up the windrows when we ran into slugs. I ran into one on one side of the field and Fritz ran into one of the other side of the field. Being the virtual green horn that I was I had not checked to make sure we had extra shear pins, so we were back at the house by twelve thirty am.  The next morning I went to town and bought enough shear pins to last us for the rest of the season. It was a unusually busy day, besides making sure that, we would be ready to bale that night, John McVay and all the Vice-Presidents and their families from Walla Walla University were coming up to the ranch Friday. John and Pam McVay were coming up early to set everything up that night. So I was occupied with cleaning the house and making sure that everything that was needed for their weekend was ready.

We turned over the hay during the afternoon and took a nap in the early evening. By the time the McVay’s arrived around eight pm we were just gearing up to start haying. I helped them unload their van, and get situated in the house, then I jumped in the truck and drove to the pink house and was on a tractor by nine thirty bailing. We bailed the pink house field and then moved on to Hafer property just off 395.  We bailed about half the field and then the hay was getting too wet with the dew, so we quite for the night/morning at four am. Everyone was so tired we barely made it to our beds, Fritz had thought about going home, but he decided to spend the night.
I woke up at eight the next morning and gave the McVay’s a tour of the ranch and the surrounding property and showed them were everything was, and the trails that could be used for dirt bike riding, riding the horses or walks. After I turned over the hay of the Hayford property and around noon we finished bailing the Hayford property. We took all the equipment home and Mike worked on taking off the old shears on the swather.  I drove to LaDuke and Fogle and picked up the new shears for the Swather. When I got back to the ranch, I fed the horses and then went up to the house and visited with the VP’s as they arrived at the ranch.

Sunday morning we picked up the Hayford fields on Sunday afternoon and then took a nap to before we bailed Deer Heaven. I woke up with a stomachache, it wasn’t too bad but bad enough to be noticeable. I went to the store and bought some Pepto-Bismol and Alka-Seltzer and promptly downed them and went back to sleep.   I woke up an hour later feeling much better. We went to the shop and greased up the tractors and bailors and filled them with twine. After we finished I started to feel sick again, I went to the house and downed a bottle of kaopectate and then went back to the shop. We drove the tractors up to Deer Heaven and started bailing, at first everything went smoothly, but gradually the rocking motion of the bailer stirred the contents of my stomach. To say that the next four hours were miserable would be an understatement. Finally at one thirty am we stopped and went back to the house.

The rest of the summer was spent fixing tractors and relaying pvc pipes across the ranch. None of the things that followed were as strenuous or time taking as the month spent preparing, cutting and bailing the first cutting. But it was valuable for learning how to do many things I would have not learned how to do otherwise.

- The Consiglieri