5/20/2009:
Home Grown: German-Russian Farm Kids Remember
"Making Hay"
Orion Aryln Rudolph
Interviewed: Ashley, ND, 14 May 2008
Born: Ferdonia, ND, 01 June 1938
Well, there was haymaking time; me personally I didn’t got involved because I was just a little bit too young. There was haymaking time when my dad would cut hay with the horses and old horse mower which was only, probably a seven-foot cutter bar, and he would mow and then course the raking of the hay into windrows and then they would push these windrows together and put them on haystacks. I was a little bit too young to get involved with that.
The only little tiny bit I got involved in was the hay raking and that was not much at all, maybe a couple of days. Because I was just literally too young to sit on that dump rake. I thought I could really do it because they said all you have to do is gitty up and when you get to the place with the rest of the hay you just press this handle down and it will dump and you keep going. Oh, I think I can do that.
So I got on this dump rake and gitty up and pretty soon got to this place where the dumper was supposed to dump and I didn’t have enough power, I was too light weight. I couldn’t get that thing down so Fergie said ‘HOOO’ by that time I drugged the hay 10-15 feet further than if should have been. Well then after the horses stopped, I still kept trying and then it went pretty easy. It dumped right there, so, I kept going and I got to the next one, I still couldn’t press it, so again that bunch again I pulled 10-15-30 feet further than I should of. Got the horses to stop and then I pressed it.
Pretty soon I got little smart and when I got to the next one, right where it is supposed to be dumped and told the horses to STOP, pressed this thing down, everything worked fine. So now I got it figured out I thought, and well coming around the next way and doing the same thing, got the horses to stop every time and I got the thing open because I was just strong enough.
Well, I think this was during noon hour because everyone was left and I was out in the field with the two horses and the dumper. It was kind of a lucky thing, I was real close by the road on our farmstead where we were at, and all of a sudden I get to looking down and one of these things that are hitched from the horses harness to the hay rig, two from each horse, the inside one was unhitched, of course that was pulling a little sideways. There was no way I was going to get down between those horses to hitch that thing on there. So I sat on the hay rake and waited for something, I figured they should be coming from the homestead pretty soon.
As luck would have it there was a lady that came driving along, and the road was not very far away and I waved, this lady stopped and hollered out in German “Was ist los?” What’s wrong. I said that this strap is unhitched, and she said well hitch it on. Uh uh, I’m not gonna go in there, so she gets out of her car and walks over there and she walks behind that horse reaches around back there and grabs that thing and hitches it on again, just like nothing ever happened. There was no way I was gonna go behind those horses legs and do that thing. I’ve never been a horse person.
I don’t know, because my older brother, he would ride horses, but not, I… In our barn where my dad kept the two draft horses for work horses when you pushed the door open the first thing you saw was this big long leg standing there. If that door would have gone the other direction then I could have gone in there and seen the horses on the other end which would have been fine, but those big legs always scared me. Maybe as a child growing up I just didn’t have too much love for horses so as a result I’m not much of a horse person. I was always visualizing, walk in that barn and this one horse would just wait for me and give me a good kick I’d probably have flown half a mile you know, but that’s how it is. The only experience I had with working with horses on the farm, that little bit of noon hour thing there which was not my bag.