I’m leaving soon for Canada to visit friends living on the Canadian Shield, about midway between Toronto and Ottawa. I go for rejuvenation that occurs between friends. Their 100 acre farm, with its 150-200 yr. old log house, will be a perfect setting for putting aside some of the demands on my time in recent months.

Hugh and I will certainly be firing up chain saws and cutting firewood together over the next week or two, all from naturally downed trees in their ‘bush’. (That’s Canada speak for ‘woods’!) By now you’ve guessed I’m segueing to a farm memory, which involves cutting wood for the farmhouse furnace.

Depending on the weather and condition of the ground, we’d either use the team of horses or the tractor to haul logs out of the woods and up to the barn before cutting them into firewood. We had what is known as a buck saw that was driven by a belt running from the pulley on the tractor to a pulley on the shaft of the saw. The action part of the saw was about a 24 inch circular steel blade with sharp, fearsome teeth. The log was placed on a movable platform and could then be pushed toward the whirring saw blade to complete cross cuts of the log into the lengths needed for the furnace. It wouldn’t be unusual for us to start with a log that 10 - 12 feet long. The saw made a deafening noise as the blade tore through the log. There were NO safety features on this antique apparatus, other than the responsibility of the operator to be damn careful!

We’d cut trailer loads full of firewood and then take them to the east side of the house where the wood was pitched into the basement’s coal shed through a small window at ground level.

Today, somewhere in the overgrown feedlot in back of the barn stands that relic of a saw. The blade will be rusted solidly to shaft. The wood platform will have disintegrated by now, and blackberry vines will have entwined themselves throughout the metal frame. It doesn’t take long for nature’s reclamation efforts to bear fruit!

Today it rained in Cincinnati, our first rain in well over a month. The ground has been so dry, so thirsty. This long lapse in rainfall has reminded me of one of our after-school chores, pumping water from the spring for the cows.

In a low area of pasture dotted with willow trees, downhill perhaps two hundred yards from the barn is a natural spring. Unknown decades before mom and dad became the land’s caretakers, someone had dug down ten feet into the spring and lined a two by two foot opening with rock. Clear, cold water flowed naturally from the spring and made it’s way to a nearby creek. During the summer months, at the mouth of the spring, watercress could commonly be found and picked for salads. It still remains so today, only a little worse for wear - and lack of maintenance.

Our cattle roamed 40 of the farm’s 50 acres. When the two creeks were running, water wasn’t a problem, but in the dry summer and fall months the only source of water was the spring. Cows are not delicate creatures! They’ll push, shove, trample, and more to get what they want - in this case water. In the driest of times, water didn’t flow from the spring in sufficient quantity to supply the needs of the cattle.

Dad built a fence around the spring opening, large enough to contain a platform to support a hand crank suction pump - old technology but very efficient. Cranking the pump caused a continuous loop of chain to be lowered into the spring along the side of a two to three inch diameter eight foot tinned pipe, also immersed in the spring. Along the chain links, every foot or so, were rubber suckers which just fit within the pipe on the upward cycle of the chain. As the chain with the attached suckers moved up within the pipe, water was carried along in the tube between the suckers until the pipe opened into a metal box where the water was released and flowed by gravity to the faucet opening of the pump. Attached to the faucet of the pump (with a piece of baling wire) was an eight foot section of old downspouting which ended over a bathtub!

Bathtubs! Those classic clawfoot dinosaurs (two of them) were the holding tanks for the spring water we pumped. The cattle gathered around the bathtubs to drink their fill and were thereby less likely (no guarantee) to damage the area around the spring. Either Wes or I would need to pump water for the cows once a day, often twice, depending on how dry things were. The cows would bawl loudly if there was no water in the tubs. Their cries could be heard through the woods and up to the barn and house. Sometimes you’d have to beat them away from the empty tubs long enough to connect the downspout to the pump and begin pumping. Cows can be very impatient!

We could never leave the downspout connected to the pump when we were finished pumping, as the cows would surely trample it to flatness.

There’s more to the story of the spring than just the pumping, but I’ll save that for one of the ‘summer’ recollections. Just think about clay, wasps, heat, sweat, and being dirty!

This was a beautiful, crystal clear, fall day in Cincinnati, and it was especially evident on my drive to the farm when I topped a hill overlooking a vista which included Chanyata. When the trees are bare of leaves, the farm house is visible in the distance, perhaps 3/4 of a mile away as the crow flies.



The only blight on this landscape is a recent housing development, the first anywhere even close to the farm, a scant 1/4 mile away. Several years ago an old farmer, perhaps lured by easy money, sold 90 acres of prime farmland to a developer, even refusing to sell the land to a young farmer who desperately wanted to keep it in agricultural production. How sad for all the surrounding landowners. Herb, the old farmer, was unique, but mostly likable. Our family and his were good neighbors to each other. He’d lived on the same land since he was a boy. I remember his telling of the circus wagons, pulled by teams of horses, that would occasionally pass along Kemper Rd. Herb always spoke of the elephants he’d seen tramping along with the circus caravan. What a great memory to have! Herb was especially knowledgeable about electrical systems on engines. Dad would consult him when he’d encounter a problem beyond his abilities. Neighbors were just that way with each other - ready to help when the need arose. It could be assisting in locating missing cattle, doing chores for a vacationing family, serving as a consultant about a vexing farming dilemma, or the loan of a piece of equipment - even a tractor if necessary.



The farm drew me today for several reasons, primarily to visit my mother, who turns 87 on the 18th. As it was a warmish day, I also wanted to fire up the snow blower and prepare it for winter use. I was also scouting for a piece of old stovepipe sheet metal to convert to a newspaper tube to attach by the mailbox. That search took me up a wooden ladder in the barn and into the haymow, now filled with straw and almost touching the swaybacked roof ridge. There’s so much to share about the haymow, but for now I’ll suffice it to say that its wooden platforms (on either side of the opening where the ladder reaches the mow) represent a virtual time capsule of the the farm. The assorted variety of assembled stuff in storage - tools, sleds, stove pipe, shingles, lanterns, harness, windows, buckets, to name but a few, carry my thoughts back fifty years. I found the piece of sheet metal I sought, leaving the cavernous haymow with all the memories it holds.

It's been encouraging to see that a few folks have glanced at my blog (still can't get used to that word). Thanks! Do you know that it's short for 'web log'? That was news to me.

Cider
Another fall tradition on the farm was taking bushels of apples to be pressed into cider - no preservatives and all that other nonsense we endure today. This was just plain, pure, pleasurable cider!

For cider we didn't use just any apples. As I recall, we always chose apples still hanging in the trees or some which had just fallen. We didn't want spoiled & wormy apples for the cider. We'd pick and wash the apples and cart them in clean containers to Emerson Hook's farm where he had a cider press. When the pressing was complete, Hook would put our cider into a large wooden barrel with a wooden bung. If you turned the bung left or right, cider flowed until you turned it off. The barrel was on loan until it was emptied. Nice touch. We'd drink cider until it came out our pores. Actually, mom always froze many quarts of the amber necter for treats through the winter months. We knew we were drinking the fruits of our labors as well as the fruits of our apple trees!

Halloween
There wasn't much action to be had on Halloween for farm kids. Sure, the two or three neighbors were always kind enough to have treats for us, but that wasn't enough to satisfy. Either mom or dad would drive us into a subdivision and park the car. We'd make the rounds for as long as we could, filling the pillowcase, or whatever we had, with as many treats as we could gather in the given amount of time. It reminds me of someone winning a shopping spree in a grocery store where they have 2-3 minutes to grab as much as they can and stuff it in the shopping cart! One year I wanted to be Zorro - does anyone remember Zorro? I made the costume, came up with a sword from a friend, and thought I was pretty hot stuff! Halloween always made me feel as if I was more closely connected to the real world - the suburbs - than I actually was. Then it was back to being different...

Maybe I should comment on 'being different'. Farm kids were in the distinct minority in my school, especially when I reached high school. We were just a handful, with the vast majority of kids coming from the 'suburbs,' that newish, descriptive word which in my mind signified wealth, prosperity, leisure, and so much more. I knew the kids from the suburbs didn't have to go home from school to hull walnuts, bring up the cows from the pasture, pick corn until dark, shovel manure, pump water from the spring and so much more. I resented being different, and not being able to easily participate in many of the school activities because there was limited transportation available. I was in the marching and concert bands in high school, but not much else - UNLESS you count the dancing lessons I was more or less forced to take in the high school cafeteria. Dancing remains one of my LEAST favorite activities. Before Garrison Keillor & Lake Woebegon became well known, I was the epitome of the shy kid - always sure that someone was saying, "There's that poor farm kid Barry. Don't you feel sorry for that homely boy."

To set the record straight, as you might suspect, I don't feel that way today about my farm upbringing. I've had experiences that are unique, life sustaining, memorable, and of great meaning and value in my life. As an adult I've been able to be a 'jack of all trades,' a mr. fixit, someone who values and appreciates hard, honest, physcial labor - and so much more. I only wish I'd had enough sense as a teenager to realize it! Ah, but who can tell the young anything...!

Pumpkins & Halloween...
Pocket money was hard to come by - and still harder to hang on to, especially for Wes and I. Louise was much better than her brothers in saving her small weekly allowance. Bear with me, there’s a connection to the heading of this section.

Earlier I mentioned the pumpkins we’d often plant with the corn. A good harvest would result in a great quantity of these potential pies or jack-0-lanterns. Dad would hitch the trailer to the car and we’d load it up pumpkins and head into a subdivision a few miles away. Then we kids would go door to door hawking pumpkins, often selling several at a time to a family. Mom and dad let us divvy up the proceeds between the three of us, which helped our personal finances, especially with Christmas not too far away. Pumpkins that didn’t sell were stored in the cool, dark basement until they were needed for pies or until they started to rot. In the case of the latter, they were fed to the cows. They thought they’d died and gone to heaven with such delicacies!

We've just entered the fall season and that may be a fine place to begin this loosely connected series of reflections.

I shared with Kate and David my recollections re. black walnuts and will include them here. There's a bumper crop of black walnuts at the farm this year. When I was growing up we'd always haul bushel baskets full of these super hard nuts, still in their green/brown/black hulls (depending on decay level), from the woods and spread them out in the gravel driveway near the farmhouse. As cars drove in/out over the nuts, the outer hulls would gradually be worn off. Then we kids (brother, sister, & I) would wear gloves and finish removing the hulls and put the remaining whole nuts into baskets for storage in the basement before the first hard frost of the season. Walnut hulls have a powerful, almost permanent dark, coffee colored, nearly black, pigment which stains your hands, clothes, etc. If you didn't wear gloves, your hands would be dark for months until the stain wore off. No amount of washing & soap will remove it! All this is leading up to the fact that I've been hauling up a few bucketfulls of walnuts this past week and putting them in the driveway at the farm. Mostly for nostalgia, but also because I hope to hull them, dry them and eventually crack the nuts and pick out nutmeats for holiday baking. Black walnut nutmeats are terribly expensive in the stores because there is so much work in digging the nuts out of the shells. There was many a fall or winter night when everyone in the family could be found sitting around the kitchen table picking the delicate nutmeats from the walnuts that dad had cracked using the vise in the barn. These nuts are REALLY hard, believe me.

Fall meant many things on the farm in the 50's and 60's. Corn would need to be picked, as well the pumpkins we'd often plant among the rows of corn. We never owned a mechanical corn picker. Our hands performed that task. Before dad bought a tractor, the team of horses would pull a wagon along the rows of corn. We'd husk the field corn by hand and pitch the ears into the wagon. When we were too far away from the wagon to consitently hit the target, dad would move the wagon forward and we'd continue the work. A full wagon, or lack of daylight was the signal to haul the corn up to the barn for storage in a metal, circular corn crib, about 10 ft. in diameter and perhaps 10 ft. in height at the center. The walls of the corn bin had tiny slits in the metal, large enough to permit air flow but small enough to keep out rodents - although somehow they always managed to find a way in - which always was unnerving when cleaning out the corn crib in late spring.

Wes (my younger brother) and I would experiment with smoking by tightly rolling corn husks into cigar shapes and lighting them with matches we'd taken from the house. Oh, these poor substitutes for tobacco were godawful. The smoke seared our throats something fierce. We also would try the same trick with dried iron weed which grew in the pasture. You could break off a length of the dried woody stalk, light it, and draw on it as one would a cigarette. Another truly awful experience, but it was the novelty of it - and that we could be sneaky and get away with it!

October always brought about a rush to harvest the garden vegetables before the first killling frost. Potatoes would already have been dug and stored in the basement by this time. Onions were already hanging on a bamboo pole in the tractor garage and drying, but would soon be brough indoors before a hard freeze. Tomatoes are so sensitive to a frost. The last thing mom wanted to see was more of them to can or freeze. She was just as happy to leave some in the field to rot by this time of the year. Wes and I had some wonderful tomato fights with those unharvested red and green fruits remaining in the garden!

My daughter encouraged me to begin this blog adventure after I wrote her and my son a brief account of how my family harvested black walnuts on the farm when I was a boy.

The map this collection of memories will follow has yet to be drawn. It will likely have its own evolution.

Chanyata - the farm where I grew up. My parents gave it that name in 1941, five years before I born. My mother, Ruth, tells the story that she and my father, Jean, went to the library and found the Sioux word, "chanyata," which means, "at the woods." My father carved a sign to hang over the mailbox at the beginning of farm's gravel lane, identifying it as Chanyata Farm.

Today it would be uncommon to find farms of 50 acres or more in Hamilton Co., Ohio, where most of the land is occupied by Cincinnati and its surrounding suburbs. When Ruth and Jean moved to their farm in 1941, they did so with the knowledge that there would be no electricity or running water. Those utilities came later. Ruth cooked on an open fire outside the house and the original outhouse is still intact and usable in 2004 (although it needs a new roof, as mom often reminds me).

It's difficult to know where to begin this history. I'm afraid I'll have the tendency to wander through time. For now I'll just let my memories determine the path and see where they take me.