Bale bucking is a job on a farm designed to torture young men and keep them from thinking too deeply about a future in farming. It's almost like the older farmers are trying to give younger farmers a glimpse into their future and to show them that it's not a pleasant place. It's tedious work as much of the work on a farm can be. But on the dullness scale, bucking bales defines the worst case scenario. Farming is selfless labor with no room for advancement or appreciation. You are zapped of hours, days... years of your life and with little to show for it.
If you have ever driven through the country I'm sure you've seen all the endless pastures of alfalfa or wheat or hay stretching on for what seems like miles. Well, someone has to plant those crops that are growing there. That person gets to use a tractor to do that so don't feel too sorry for them. Then someone - often that same person - has to cut the crops and then bale them. This is also done from a tractor. Don't get me wrong, these jobs are horrible in their own right, but they are still done from a tractor, which isn't as taxing. Bucking bales, requires walking, and endless lifting.
I should first tell you that before bales can be bucked, they have to be turned. Turning is the mind-numbing practice of walking across the entire pasture and flipping each and every bale from one side to the other to make sure its dry before it gets stacked. You haven't lived until you have walked across endless miles of farm pasture turning over 80 pound bales of hay... For hoooooooouuuuuuuurs.
A day or two later (after your vision has returned) those bales have to be picked up and stacked in a barn somewhere. Now if you have own a fancy tractor that can gather the bales and stack them for you, you're in luck. If you don't own a fancy tractor (cause you already own a shit load of tractors for other stuff, like planting) then one person has to drive a tractor pulling a trailer while some other poor soul has to pick up those bales off the field and throw them up onto the slow moving trailer. That is called, "bucking." So to recap. You are picking up 80 pound, awkwardly sized, bales of hay and throwing it up over your head onto a trailer. And as the stack on the trailer gets taller, you have to start throwing the hay well over your head. For hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.
Who would want this life for themselves? I was fortunate that my family had no farming aspirations so I wasn't born into this fate. I had choices. And if you're following along, that means I CHOOSE to do this work. Well, my family choose this work for me, but still I did it. I wonder how hard this job must be for kids who grow up in this world and have no choice in the matter.
Every time I have every bucked bales it's usually a million degrees outside. I'm also allergic to hay so my face would explode with snot and tears, which made it easier for the hay to stick to my face. Such a wonderful pleasure... Ahhhhhhh.
One of the last times I ever bucked bales was in 1987. I spent the summer working with a kid named Thor on his families' farm on San Juan Island. I needed a job and his family needed someone to work the hay fields. I spent the summer moving irrigation line and feeding cattle. All those glorious things that make rural farm living worthwhile. I can tell you this; after hours of this sort of labor, the mind starts to numb. Your dreams don't extend into the distant future. They linger around the next day or week and they usually only involve easily captured dreams. It's an odd place to find your mind. Much of the world's country music comes from this place.
My family is made up of people without a lick of musical interest. My mother had a few albums mostly early Billy Joel, Bob Seger, Fleetwood Mac and an odd assortment of Jazz records. Odd for a white girl. But she never listened to any of her records. So the world around me wasn't filled with music, I had to discover it all on my own. This lead to a lot of odd interests none of which I am going to name here. The point is, I had no direction, musically speaking.
Thor was a few years older than me so he was driving the tractor. When the trailer was loaded up with hay we would take the hour long drive back to the barn to unload it. It wasn't that far away, but you're only moving two miles an hour. In that time I could either ride on the hay on the trailer stacked up over twenty feet high, or in the cab of the tractor.
After ten hours of bucking bales I was pretty spent and Thor suggested we call it a day.
"Come here. You gotta hear this," he said.
From a small tape deck in the cab of the tractor came the intro to 'Welcome to the Jungle.' A very distinctive piece of music.
"Guess who this is?"
"I have no idea."
"It's Guns and Roses."
"Never heard of them."
Something about the way Axel Rose screeched that made Farming more interesting for me. I made Thor play the whole album while we worked for the rest of the summer. Thor couldn't understand why I wanted to hear it over and over. He seemed annoyed after a while, but didn't say anything. I always thought Thor didn't want much more out of life than a fast car, a woman who said yes more than no, and secretly... to be a dancer. Don't ask me why. Maybe it was just wild imagination, but I could see him moving to a city and becoming a dancer somewhere. And he probably wasn't the only one. There are probably a lot of farmer-dancers out there, hiding in the shadows behind large stacks of hay, or in remote pastures where no one can see them. Just living out the fantasy with fan kicks and spins.
Why not?
After that summer in San Juan, I went back home and I spent my weekends dancing with my friends in pastures around the Kansas City area. We called it Kansas Ballroom Dancing. It involved loud music, alcohol and headlights. For some reason there needed to be a pasture when I heard dance music.
Hmmmm....
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