My Crazy Life as a Farmer’s Daughter – Part 5

Welcome back to my stroll down memory lane.  Due to some excitement with blog tours and cover reveals, I missed last week, but I’m resuming my regularly scheduled program today.

This particular story is one of those OMG, how did I not die? stories.

As I did often during the latter half of summer, this day I was baling hay in melt-your-bones-hot weather.  The machine was three pieces: the tractor, the bale thrower, and the wagon.  Here’s a picture of the bale thrower courtesy of the CASE International website so you know what I’m talking about below:

My instructions from Dad, as always, were to drive a straight line and keep an eye to make sure the machinery was working okay.  Should be simple enough, right?

Yeah, not so much.  You see, this field was almost entirely a steep hill.  Great for tobogganing down in the winter, but not so much for working on.

Everything was going swimmingly until a bale of hay jammed in between the two spinning tread-mill-type belts that were supposed to launch it into the wagon.

In the middle of the hill.

Of course.

Now, what I should have done is shut the baler off and driven to the top of hill to fix it.  Being a young teen, hot and probably peed-off, I didn’t think of that.

What did I do, you ask?  Something not very bright thinking back on it.  Because the tractor didn’t have a working parking brake, I used a stick we kept for such purposes to wedge between the tractor cab and the brake.  Once I’d secured that, I climbed down from the tractor and onto the bar of the wagon where it attached to the baler.  I commenced reefing on the jammed bale.

I think you can guess what happened next.

Yep, if that dang stick didn’t slip off the brake.

I froze for a split second as I realized I was in the middle of the 3 machines, barreling backwards down a hill.  When I pulled my head out of my rear, I did something equally stupid.  Instead of letting it go and facing Dad’s wrath (kidding, he was as capable of wrath as a teddy bear was capable of turning into a ninja) I jumped up on the baler, ran along the top of it and dove head-first into the back of the tractor’s cab, then jammed both arms down on the brake.  It took a while, and I was almost completely jack-knifed, but I eventually stopped.

I’m pretty sure I choked out my heart and it was laying there on the floor in front of me for a while before it climbed back down my throat.

Of course, Dad had seen the whole thing as he pulled up with an empty wagon.  Damn, I had rotten luck that day.  But I guess I lived to tell the tale, so it wasn’t all bad.  🙂

Next week we’ll learn how NOT to deal with an out of control brush fire.