What I did on my summer vacation

In current times, kids are excused from school for the summer, but for what? To play Wii, spend hours on Facebook, accompany their parents to Florida, and otherwise squander their free hours away? It obviously has nothing to do with industriousness – just try to hire a generously-allowanced neighborhood kid to mow your lawn.

Not so, many years ago. In farm country, we were let out of school in early June and didn’t return till early September. In between, we certainly found some time to camp out in the woods and ride our bikes down shady lanes, but that was not the main event. No, we were let out of school to work. Whenever our own farm work was completed, we hired ourselves out to the neighbors. As the season progressed, we went from picking strawberries to harvesting raspberries, blackberries, and grapes, each in their season. The pay was minimal – a few cents per quart basket – but it added up as long hours passed in the hot sun.

But of course the main event for the older children was haying. A serious affair, for cows must survive the long, cold winter and continue to produce high quality milk throughout that dead season. The only way to ensure their health and productivity was to feed them stored sunshine in the form of hay.

There are typically three harvests of hay – roughly May, June, and July. First, tractors pull mowers through a fragrant mix of timothy, alfalfa, red clover, and birdsfoot trefoil. Then the freshly mown hay is conditioned (crimped and fluffed) to encourage drying. If the hay were baled and stored with too great a moisture content, it would be subject to spoilage, or worse, spontaneous combustion. More than a few horses have succumbed to the former (cattle are hardier) and many a barn lost to the latter.

After a few days, the hay is raked and baled into rectangular bales weighing about 75 pounds, just enough so that the older teens, mostly high school football players and wrestlers, grunted while heaving them up onto the truck. A younger kid could be put to work guiding the truck, in double-granny low, between the rows of bales as they were heaved up and stacked. No need for short legs to reach the brake, clutch, or accelerator pedals… the only requirement was to steer through the gently winding rows of bales. At the end of the field, one of the farmers or an older teen would jump into the cab to wheel the truck around and another pass would begin.

This was hot work, and the farmers took care that their charges had plentiful water, both for drinking and for pouring over glistening, sweaty faces and bare chests and backs. It was a rare pleasure when a hayfield contained an ice-cold spring, usually marked by a green thicket on a hillside, containing a small pool of brilliantly clean, frigid water burbling straight from the earth. Almost as good were the fields that bordered on a farm pond, where cannonball dives were performed amid great uproar during short breaks from the relentless, dusty bales.

When the truck was full, it was driven slowly over farm roads to a barn where it must be unloaded and stacked into a hayloft. If the crew were really lucky, the barn was built into a hillside so the truck could be backed directly into the second-story loft. This part of the operation was, if at all possible, even hotter than those preceding as the barn baked in the midday sun. But given the resilience of youth, a brief pickup basketball game often formed around a rusty hoop nailed to the barn planking after the stacking was done.

So were our summer days, such that a late supper on a wide farmhouse porch, as the gloom thickened and temperatures moderated, was treasured as much as today’s trip to an air conditioned mall on a sultry afternoon.

An Independence Day to Remember

In northwestern Pennsylvania there is a small, blue-collared lake community that in summer draws hot, tired urbanites like flies from Erie and Pittsburgh. The lake is surrounded by forests and fields and it is not unusual to see deer or even a black bear make an early morning pilgrimage down among the cottages for a refreshing slurp of water.

We are there for a festive family reunion and one night the community stages an impressive fireworks display, funded by intensely loyal contributors who, by golly, love their country and their fireworks. As the skies slowly darken (10pm for full nightfall in this region), the children dance about and swoosh and swirl their sparklers, anticipating the big show. Then it begins, with glorious cascading colors and earth-shaking booms from the ridge above the western side of the lake. But to the great discomfort of Yogi, a little black Schipperke who thinks the world is coming to an end. He is barking incessantly, in distress, and definitely not enhancing the experience of the assembled throng.

So Yogi and master retire to a car parked down by the road. There, ensconced with the windows rolled up, he feels safe and relaxes while master still has a stellar view of the proceedings. Clicking on the radio and randomly tuning the nearest station, the lovely strains of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Number 4 blend with the muffled bangs and pops and colorful, flowing blooms in the sky. As both symphony and grand finale come to an end, smoke drifting away under the stars, the radio announcer thanks the source of audio loveliness, a live orchestra at the Chautauqua Institute, only 50 miles away.

Chautauqua is at once a county in western New York state, a lake, a village on that lake, an Institute, and a cultural touchstone. In 1874, businessman Lewis Miller and minister (to become Bishop) John Heyl Vincent started a summer camp on Chautauqua Lake to “educate and uplift” the public. In the days before television and radio and the internet, these programs became immensely popular and “Chautauquas” were mimicked around the country. Touring Chautauquas came into being, bringing lectures and music and poetry to the small-town, rural masses, all to great acclaim.

At their peak in the mid-1920s, Chautauquas educated, informed, and entertained over 45 million people in 10,000 communities in 45 states. Although traveling Chautauquas are a vestige of the past, the Chautauqua Institute persists to this day and caters to over 140,000 people each year with concerts and lectures and courses in art, music, dance, theater, writing skills and a wide variety of other interests.

Later, near midnight, driving back to our pet-friendly motel 15 miles distant, we witness a fantastic display of lightning from a storm rolling in from Lake Erie and points west in Ohio. Cloud to ground, ground to cloud, and cloud to cloud lightening rend the western sky with blinding streaks of light. Towering cumulonimbus clouds are lit from within with flashes of purple and red and white. It’s as if God, after witnessing our puny fireworks a bit earlier, is saying “behold, this is the real thing!”