Flies Are Here To Stay

Across the Fence #406

I was speaking at a conference recently when a couple of pesky flies kept buzzing around my head. I told the group my next column would be about flies. It’s that time of year when houseflies are most abundant. I’ve often wondered what the purpose of a fly is? The only answer I can come up with is to irritate us.

  

Luckily for us, predators, parasites, fly swatters, fly paper, bug zappers, rolled-up newspapers, and other fly killers, greatly reduce the fly population, or they would probably take over the earth. Next time you see a spider, don’t be so hasty to squish it or knock down its intricate fly-trapping web. They love flies! Nobody has ever said to me, “I love flies.” I think only spiders and another fly could love a fly.

Flies of one kind or another have been around for a long time. The oldest fly fossil, a limoniid crane fly, is some 225 million years old. True houseflies are believed to have evolved in the beginning of the Cenozoic era, about 65 million years ago. I’d bet that the human species has been trying to kill flies since they could first grasp a stick and try to smash them. It doesn’t look like killing a few flies is going to make them extinct real soon. I read that there are more than 100,000 different species of flies! Who’s got the time to sit around and count them? Most of us just swat the pesky critters and are happy to get rid of them.

   

Flies were an everyday part of our lives on the farm. We could predict an approaching storm by their behavior. Flies have great vision, quick reflexes, and are great weather prognosticators. When I was young, we didn’t need the Weather Channel to see if a storm was approaching, we just looked at the kitchen screen door at our farm. “Looks like it’s gonna’ rain. The screen door’s covered with flies.” They seemed to know a storm was coming and they would be safer and dryer if they could get inside the house.

Somehow they always managed to get in the house no matter what we did. We had screens on the windows and doors, but they didn’t fit very tight, allowing flies to find a way into the house. Plus, every time we opened the door, flies would enter too. I can’t blame them; they probably smelled the good food that Ma was cooking inside!

When I was growing up, a fly swatter was an essential part of our house. Fly paper ribbons hanging from the kitchen ceiling were also a fixture. Do you remember using them? Younger people may not be familiar with fly paper. I haven’t seen one hanging around for a long time. It wasn’t the most appetizing sight to have those coiled strips full of buzzing flies stuck to them, but it was better than having the flies parading through our food while we were trying to eat. The flies loved Ma’s cooking as much as we did.

The old two-holer during the summer, was also a favorite gathering place for flies. Spiders knew it was a great source of food too. There were plenty of spider webs decorating every corner with an abundance of trapped flies, that had been searching for a meal. Now they waited to become a meal. Man’s irritation is a spiders delight. I remember always checking the hole before sitting down in case a spider had spun a web across the hole. A trip to the outhouse was always an adventure.

We had an overabundance of flies in the barn. Needless to say, manure and flies go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of either around the barn!

Every person who’s milked a cow during hot summer days knows the irritation and perils of flies buzzing around cows. There’s nothing like the stinging slap of a cow’s tail alongside your face, as she tries to swat the flies away. We won’t even talk about the fun of getting a soggy, you-know-what-soaked tail across the face! Now I see most cows have had their tails clipped. That would have kept the tail from whipping you across the face, but how does a cow without a tail swat at the flies that are constantly buzzing around them?

When I think of flies in the barn I’m also reminded of the use of DDT to control them. Each morning and evening after we brought the cows in from the pasture and put them in the barn, we used a hand-pump sprayer and went down the line, spraying each cow. The mist from the DDT spray would hang like fog in the air. Soon, hundreds of dying flies covered the barn floor and we’d sweep them into the gutter. If only we had known about the health hazards of breathing in all that DDT. I can still “taste” that spray when I think about it.

It’s a wonder we’ve lived this long, growing up with filthy flies that shared our food, breathing in poisonous DDT, being smacked upside the head by soggy cow’s tails, and dealing with outhouse-dwelling spiders!

It just goes to show, you’ve gotta’ be darn tough to share this world with pesky, irritating flies and survive. Now, if you’ll kindly pass me the flyswatter, here comes another one.

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Tobacco Harvest Was Hard Work

Across the Fence #205

Tobacco used to be king in Vernon County where we live. Dairy farming was the main source of income on most farms, but the tobacco crop helped pay the taxes and in many cases paid off the mortgage. Today it’d be hard to find a tobacco plant in the whole county. 

The countryside is filled with tobacco sheds that stand empty and are deteriorating from lack of use and maintenance. Those old shed were starting to fill up this time of year when I was young.

My father was a dairy farmer, but he was also well known as a tobacco farmer, just as his father and grandfather had been. I know he actually enjoyed raising tobacco and was proud of the quality of the tobacco he produced. We raised 12 acres for many years while I was growing up. It was big, heavy tobacco. We had a huge field west of the barn that looked like a sea of tobacco when it was full grown in August. It seemed even bigger when we were young and had to cut and pile those long rows.

People who have raised tobacco know, it’s a labor-intensive crop. Harvesting was the toughest time. Dad always hired a crew to help with the harvest. He’d place an ad in the paper advertising for experienced help. Novices need not apply. There was no time to teach them what to do and he didn’t want someone who didn’t know what they were doing, damaging the leaves. Hired help got the standard rate of a dollar an hour. They also got a noon and evening meal, plus coffee mid-morning and afternoon. As many of you know, coffee was more like the main meal we eat today. Eventually they eliminated the evening meal. I never gave it any thought at the time, but Ma must have been cooking and baking constantly from before sunup to after sundown. People loved to work at our place because they knew they would get some great meals.

Dad made sure they earned those meals. People who had worked for him before knew they’d be putting in some long, hard days, but many came back every year. How many of you would work that hard today for a dollar an hour? As I’ve heard said many times, “It helps to have a weak mind and a strong back if you’re going to work in tobacco.”

For those not familiar with tobacco harvesting, there were several phases, or jobs, all physical. The first job was to remove the suckers that grew on the plant after it was topped. That’s when you broke off the blooming part on top. Many people used a spray to control the suckers, but Dad thought the spray also stunted the growth of the leaves, so we usually removed them by hand. We all hated suckering. Your hands got so black from the tobacco juice that even Lava soap couldn’t get them clean.

The next step was to cut the plants down. This was always done with one eye on the weather. We felt like we’d joined the ranks of the grownups when we got to wield a tomahawk-like tobacco axe with a very thin, extremely sharp blade. Each person took a row, bent over, pushed the plant to the side with one hand, and chopped it off with the axe. The chop, chop, chop sound went quickly down the rows. You didn’t straighten up until you reached the end of the row. If you got careless you could easily plant that axe in your foot or chop a finger off.

After the plants had time to wilt in the hot sun so the leaves wouldn’t be damaged, they were ready to be gathered up and placed in piles. As young kids we usually got stuck with piling and we hated it.

Next came the spearing of the plants onto tobacco laths. We usually had very big tobacco, so five or six plants was the limit per lath or they’d get too crowded and heavy. This job seemed to fall to the older workers who weren’t able to climb in the shed anymore. Spearing still involved a lot of bending up and down. Most people used a spear horse, but I preferred to spear without one because it was faster. With all the bending from the jobs I’ve mentioned, it’s no wonder we were sore and stiff at the end of the day.

The next step was to pick up the speared tobacco and put it on the tobacco rack to be hauled to the shed and hung up to cure. Even though hauling and hanging were the hardest jobs physically, I liked hanging the best. You felt like you’d arrived when you were trusted to climb up in the shed, balance on two wobbly poles, and hang the heavy tobacco. You knew you had done something at the end of the day, when you were so tired you could hardly move.

Of course after the big supper meal, all the hired help went home and we headed for the barn to do chores and milking. While we were in the barn, Ma was in the house cleaning everything up and starting to cook and bake for the next day. Uff da, how did she do it?

I’m sure glad I don’t have to harvest tobacco anymore. Just the thought of it tires me out!

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Twilight Memories Surround Me

Across the Fence #404

I’m sitting on our back deck again as I write this. The air is fresh and it’s not hot and humid, as most of these summer evenings have been. The wind is rustling the leaves in the cornfield behind the house and clouds sail lazily overhead, highlighted with brilliant yellow and gold from the setting sun. Barn swallows are still darting back and forth across the lawn looking for a snack of bugs before settling down for the night. As daylight begins to give way to the encroaching darkness, I’m surrounded by a symphony of sound as the crickets begin their evening serenade. I’ve said before that this is my favorite time of day.

Maybe that goes back to when I was young, when we could finally relax after the days chores and fieldwork were done. We would relax before heading off to bed, by sitting on the lawn under the big maple tree or lying in the cool grass because it was cooler and more comfortable outside than in the house.

From where I sit I can see the farm where I was born and spent the first nine years of my life. It’s about a mile as the crow flies. I still call it the Hauge place because a Mrs. Hauge owned it and rented it to my folks. The original house and red barn are still standing.

In between that farm and the corner of the back forty where our house sits, is the small farm where my grandparents, Oscar and Julia Hanson, lived after they moved from their farm on Clinton Ridge. The house, garage, and tobacco shed are still there. The barn was falling down and demolished a few years ago, another of those old barns gone from the rural landscape.

Across the road from their farm was Smith School where I spent eight years in that one-room school. It now exists only in the memory of those of us who were students there. It stood on that corner for over 100 years before it got in the way of the new “Uff Da Bahn” highway. Just north of the school was the Iverson farm, where Sandra (Iverson) Peterson, lived when we were in grade school. That farm lives only in my memory too. The buildings are all gone, also a victim of the new road.

I can still picture all of us kids playing hide and seek at night during 4-H meetings or neighborhood get-togethers at their farm and other farms. The nice thing about playing Hide and Seek on a farm is that there are plenty of interesting places to hide. It could be kind of spooky too. It gets really dark in the country and we worried a little about running into a skunk that was out for an evening stroll.

Did you hear that when they tore down the buildings to build the road last year, they found the bones of Little Ole who had hidden in one of the sheds almost 60 years ago? We wondered what ever happened to him. When everyone else had been found, we called, “Ole, Ole, oxen free,” but he never came out. I guess this makes him king of the hide and seekers.

I recently heard of another version of Hide and Seek called “Sardines.” In this game only one person hides and the rest try to find him. When a person finds the hider, they join him. I can see why it’s called Sardines. As more people found the hiding place, it could get mighty cramped quarters. This would have been much more fun than ordinary Hide and Seek, if we could have hid together like a bunch of Sardines with the girls. Darn, why didn’t someone tell us about this version when we were young? In the Sardines version, the last person to find the hiding place was the loser.

Summer evenings were also the time for fireflies, or as some people call them, lightning bugs. We weren’t content to just watch them, we had to try and catch them in glass jars. When we had several of them in a jar, they lit it up like a lantern. I wonder if kids still chase fireflies these days. Maybe there are too many other things to keep them occupied. I hope a few of them still have the curiosity to chase after fireflies. I’ve noticed a lot of fireflies on these warm summer evenings around our place. I hope when our grandson, Sean, gets a little older, we can sit in the dark in the backyard and let him experience the magic of trying to catch fireflies in a glass jar. We’ll also teach him to release them unharmed after observing them for a few minutes. Nature and the creatures that inhabit it, are meant to be observed and appreciated, not destroyed.

Maybe I’ll even tell him how we played Hide and Seek in the darkness of the countryside, and tell him about the Sardine version too. By the way, that part about finding the bones of Ole was just a joke. Never can tell, someone might have thought I was reporting the news and not writing historical fiction.

As I scan the twilight countryside around me and remember, I realize how much of my history and rural roots are out there. It’s a good feeling.

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Rural Icons Are Disappearing

Across the Fence #403

While writing my story about robotic milking, I realized that most of the things associated with milking cows when I grew up have disappeared. That’s life. Time keeps moving forward and things that were once vital in our lives are now gone.

There are still dairy farmers who use milking machines, just as we did, except the milk now goes through a pipeline into a bulk tank. Most other things have changed. Those cans we filled with milk every morning and evening are gone. 

They are relegated to antique stores or used as painted, decorative items in homes. The day is coming when most people won’t know what those cans were used for. Along with the cans, the milk strainers are gone. Even the stainless steel milk pails are no longer needed. The water-filled cooling tank in the milkhouse where we kept the milk in the cans cold, until the milk hauler picked them up, are gone. The milk haulers who hauled two hundred or more cans to the creamery each day are gone, replaced by bulk tank haulers.

As I sit on our back deck writing this, I can see lights in the neighbor’s barn to our west. As I look around the countryside that I can see from our house, there are 17 farms that once milked cows. Now there is only one active dairy farm where the lights shine in the barn in the evening as they still milk cows. The majority of the old red barns on the other farms are gone. Those are just the rural icons in my little corner of the world that have disappeared.

Red, timber-frame barns that once stood as the centerpiece of every farm are quickly disappearing. Most of those that remain standing are no longer used and stand empty, rotting, and falling apart. The day is coming when finding an old timber-frame barn still standing and in good shape, will become a Kodak moment. I guess that’s the wrong term to use. Kodak film has also gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced by digital cameras.

Barns aren’t the only old icons that are disappearing. When was the last time you saw a working windmill, other than on an Amish farm? They were once the lifeblood of every farm. I’ve mentioned that soothing sound of the windmill pumping water, in many stories. I get thirsty for a drink of cold water just thinking about it. I could use the old tin cup to drink from that Sid gave me from the windmill on his farm near Middleton. At the time we had never met, but he read my story about windmills and thought I should have his cup. He’s a friend I’d never have known if I wasn’t writing this column. After we moved to Westby from Madison he coined the word “Sherpeland” to describe where we live. Unfortunately, he died before he was able to visit us in Sherpeland. We often talked about how the rural countryside was changing and how most of the fences that surrounded every farm were disappearing. In reference to the name of my column, he said that it wouldn’t be long before most people wouldn’t know what it meant to talk “across the fence.”

  

Another rural icon that’s as scarce as hen’s teeth to find, is an outhouse, or two-holer, as I like to call them. They are pretty much gone except in Amish country. You’d have to search the countryside trying to find one to tip over on Halloween. Also gone are corn shocks and bundles of oats piled up in a field. They were still being used when I was young. Farming has progressed and found new and better ways to do all these things. Now I watch huge cornfields around us disappear in a matter of hours as huge, self-propelled combines harvest the corn and blow it into a truck driving alongside. I’m always amazed to see how fast and efficiently the harvest is completed.

One thing missing is the camaraderie of neighbors as they worked together to help each other with the harvest. It was a special time in rural communities. A big part of the harvest was the meal that everyone enjoyed at noon. I’m not so sure the women enjoyed all the slaving over hot wood stoves in the heat of a summer day. Wood stoves, used for cooking in most homes, not that many years ago, are now gone. I still remember when they sold my mother’s wood stove during her parent’s farm auction after they died. She had spent hours cleaning and polishing it up for the auction. A junk dealer bought it for a few dollars and proceeded to smash it into pieces and throw them in his truck. Ma sat down on the porch steps and cried. That old stove had been an important part of her and our lives for many years. Things change and time marches on.

Those are just a handful of the many things that were once so much a part of our lives and are now disappearing. What other rural icons will be joining that list? I think of rural mailboxes. What will become of them? They were at one time our main source of news from beyond the borders of our farm. But that’s a story for another day.

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