Deeper Yet

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch
photos by Kristi Gilman-Miller

• Dufur Threshing Bee
• A Working Party at the McIntosh Lazy M Ranch
• Appreciating Reminders

I’m an old guy, my ways and ideas should be set by now. Have you ever had a few consecutive days that adjusted your attitude and outlook? This summer I had a couple of weekends that taught me things about patterns, influence, economics, politics, humor, and success.

They were not big weekends, not momentous in any way. They were quiet, restful, working, shared weekends. Started with a road trip: up, down and across the rolling hills of eastern Oregon. That road trip set a rhythm to my observations and altered my perspective slightly.

I had planned to write an editorial for this issue about influence. What part influence sometimes plays in the development and growth of an individual farmer. How we influence others without really trying. How we pick our influences and how they pick us. Mighty important.

And then I thought it would be better to speak of the economic and political climate we find ourselves immersed in. How many of us are having to come up with our own new working definitions of frugality and thrift. Of how frightened some of us are with the turn of politics and the divisions we feel within our communities. And yet how tremendously hopeful many agricultural trends are, how thrilling many people’s farming adventures are, how connected and connecting are the myriad triumphs we see in the rural marketplace. I thought of telling funny stories about farming and its challenges. I thought about sharing the details of highly successful small farm adventures I have recently heard of and seen.

The Road to Dufur

These thoughts and options were all swimming around in my brain when and while I found myself driving through eastern Oregon on my way to the annual Dufur Threshing Bee. It was their thirty-third year, I had not been to the event in thirty years. Kristi and Scout had never been. We wanted to lend our small support to this important, somewhat local, farm process re-enactment. (It takes two and a half hours for us to drive to Dufur, a distance and a time frame that we out West consider somewhat local.)

There are Threshing Bee re-enactments and festivals scattered all over North America. For those who don’t know what I am speaking of, a Threshing Bee, in days of yore, was an event where neighbors gathered together to help each other separate harvested grains. Way back when, a well-equipped farmer, or an individual subcontractor with a steam tractor and threshing machine (two major pieces of equipment), would travel from farm to farm to separate the grain, a job which required many hands. Families would come together at each farm and make a Bee or working party of the chore. Modern events such as the Dufur Threshing Bee have been organized and staged to demonstrate, through a re-creation, the old equipment, horsemanship and individual skills (i.e. sack sewing, shocking, bundle loading, etc.) as well as the entire work party aspect. The events are staged to keep the traditions alive and to educate folks about the heritage. Some of these demonstrations are more tractor than horse related, or vice versa. But they are all guided by a common goal of sharing the actual workings of a colorful and important tradition. I like to think that the highest value of these events is that they keep alive the working knowledge, the skills, the techniques, the secrets, the balancing act. When we put the information about such procedures, no matter how well illustrated, into books and magazines we do a service but it can never match the vitality, complexity, attraction, and information of seeing and possibly participating in the real thing. Being there you realize that it goes deeper.

The first time I attended the Dufur Threshing Bee, the event was just three years old. Way back then I wasn’t paying attention to such details, but in attendance, helping master teamster and header operator Ray Guthrie, was a ten year old boy named Mike MacIntosh. Today he is the master teamster in charge of the Dufur Header with youngsters helping him and learning. But, once again I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was a hot August day, pushing mid-nineties on the high dry-air desert. I was driving a pickup without air conditioning. I was pulling our old travel trailer and a load of books and magazines for our little event tent booth. We were running late. Kristi and Scout had doubled back to the ranch because lightning strikes had started twenty small fires on and near our property. (Yes! Again!) The fire fighters were on the scene but Kristi had to go back to restart our irrigation system so that they could load their fire tenders without having to drive an hour’s round trip for water. I went ahead to try to get to the event on time. (Later we would learn that all the fires had been put out before any of them got big.)

The last half of the road to Dufur, old highway 197, is up and down and sideways for stretched miles which seem longer than normal. There are two lovely, close-in, visual breaks to the endless high desert sage and wheat fields. One is when the road drops sharply to the Deschutes canyon and the little river-rafting mecca of Maupin. Today this town is bustling with tourists all either just out of or just going on to the river. The old town absorbs them nicely but without membership. These visitors to Maupin look out of place, out of their element, passing through, uncommitted.

Pulling the slow winding grade up from the river bottom, I drive by modest abandoned hundred year old dark red and silvered grey pine-boarded buildings, specific in their once-upon-a-time utility and now as much a part of the landscape as the rocks and the sagebrush. And I also drive by newer mobile home influenced architecture of the deliberately affordable type. Some of these are perched precariously on the side hill, perhaps to give the best possible view of the river below. The old woman on that porch is surely the sweetest thing I’ve seen in quite a while, talking to the local, they’re probably going to share some food later. And, sitting on the curb is a very modern teary-eyed young woman who has just broken up with someone. The man approaching her, flip flops on his feet, baggy low hanging flowered shorts, and a bandana tied round and over his head – he’s a city boy here for a hot weekend of rafting and partying.

Like that Jerry Jeff Walker train song, this town, she’s so easy to read, it’s so easy to peg the visitors and the locals. Their stories, transparent, are right out front to read. But when the evidence arrives, I find out I was wrong about most all of it. The flashy visitor turns out to be a local and the local turns out to be a lost salesman on the road to Madras. The heart broke girl turns out to be happy as a clam, her visage was artificial, that mascara-enhanced photoready artificial power-angst that youth simply must project. And the sweet old lady is nothing of the sort, she’s bitter and sarcastic and vengeful. The hundred year old weathered pine shed was built two years ago out of used materials to house the raku supplies for the local Polish potter. What do I know, what information can I trust, maybe it goes deeper? None of it could be true. Should I care? What’s more important, my first impression fitting snugly into my demanding expectation? Or the truth of it all?

But on that long slow hot road the theater of passing through the town was lovely diversion.

Up top again for another long haul until I drop down into the pristine little landscape of Tygh Valley. The rolling yellow wheat fields and dusty saged bunch grass cascade down to the dark green willow and cotton wood trees which stretch out, meandering and sheltering, on either side of the creek. Its easy to imagine kids sitting in the shade and fishing for rainbows. A scene more reminiscent of the early landscapes of Northern California’s Napa Valley, back before easy money and rock hard new-found sophistication fell into viticulture. Grapes and wine have become synonymous with BMWs, plastic surgery and a dominance over the landscape.

Reminded me of the lost enchantment of Jack London’s Glen Eden Beauty Ranch in Napa, and all of the dream farm gymnastics he cultivated. His Shire horses, his rock piggery, the ingenious covered manure-tea still, the cultivated Eucylyptus and Cactus groves. He poured his writing profits, from books like Call of the Wild, into that horse-powered organic dream decades before the rest of us were old enough to even imagine such magic. And he did it in a way that came after the landscape not upon it or in spite of it. Of his adventure there, he made a life more song than working.

Funny where your mind can take you. I see Tygh valley and conjure up like views, London’s ranch – my home place, and rationales for wanting all of it to remain a secret, happy to see many people drive the highway oblivious, anxious to get some place real, some place else.

Dufur Threshing Bee

I pull the grade out of Tygh Valley watching for the little sign that will point out the left-turn side-road to the town of Dufur. Coming from the south, you can’t see the town from the highway. It is protected from view by the rolling hills. I turn left and wind into the town’s edge at the exact moment that the Threshing Bee parade is being set up. I manage to join, curb side, with friend Jim Jensen, of Oxbow Trading Company, to watch what’s to become one of my more treasured parade experiences. I have been in several parades and have watched many more over my six decades, but none that served me up such an appropriate small, understated, living poignancy as this one. Maybe I was open to it; jaded, tired, exhausted by the current anxieties, perhaps I had a hole in me that only a genuine, sincere, small, poetic, comic procession could fill. Rags and jewels, stomping feet, pets, horses, shiny new and old tractors, wagons, toys, steam whistling out of the steam tractor, beautiful side-saddled woman in flowing hat and skirts atop a fine-boned zebra dun mule of perfect proportions, a dusty dirty old model-T convertible with bicycle and boxes strapped to its sides and a grinning whiskered old guy who seemed to enjoy a private joke that grew as he wheeled forward. I imagined, easily, that this fellow in the old car had just been passing through town and the parade had swallowed him up and carried him along, in between shiny classic cars and Nascar wanna-bees. He was enjoying the folks on the curbside, waving to him in generous appreciation of his existence. Then came someone I know, little Jacob McIntosh ground driving his family’s big team of Belgian geldings with papa Mike following behind to make sure the lines didn’t drag on the pavement. No band, no majorettes, no politicians in cadillac convertibles, no pretense of any kind, no corporate advertisements or sponsorships, just a sweet old-fashioned down-the-middle of the street parade, in a small, still proud and elegant little American town, nestled in its own hollow, amidst the rolling open wheat hills a very long ways from the rest of the world. Lovely.

As the parade wound down, I went to set up our little book booth on the town’s curbside and was helped by my buddy Ed Joseph. He had shown up with his family to take in the weekend. As we set up the tent and unloaded boxes we had a brief conversation about challenges he was having, or had had, with his team of work horses; a conversation laced with his desire to get more happening with his working horses and farming dream. It felt good to see in Ed the future of all the Journal has worked on and stood for. I kept the sentiment to myself, it can kill a conversation. Each positive look into the future warms me, I feel it like a puff of air lifting us on. But that’s not something you want to say out loud.

Kristi and Scout arrived and set off to take photos of the field demonstrations while I sat at the booth, visiting with folks. Directly across the street from where I sat, a family sliced chunks of watermelon and cantaloupe to sell to passing people. Just to the left of them and adjacent to the entrance to the threshing area sat a seventies vintage Ford station wagon with shaving cream writing on it’s windows. ‘For sale, project car, runs, $75’. Everybody who went into the demonstration area had to pass that car. To the left of our booth a stationary baler sat as sentinel to the historical museum behind us. It attracted many people of various ages who either bragged at having a working knowledge of it or wondered after its purpose. Further down a dozen or so craft booths displayed their wares.

It was a hot late morning, sun shining and smells wafting up from the food vendors. Then I saw her for the first time. Maybe fourteen years old, black hair cut in an odd angular fashion atop a head whose sole purpose seemed to be as display-hanger for as many piercings and rings as possible. Attractive girl with an extreme tattoo on her upper arm, a cut-off tank top and low hanging jeans which together seemed to push out her slight belly in an exposed fashionable roll. What drew my attention to her was the fact that she was walking down the middle of the road, head up, proud as can be, just as if she were walking in the parade? But the parade was over. Cars had to go around her. She made me smile. It was after all her town, no doubt quiet most of the year, and strangers had come to town this weekend to be entertained. She, by golly, was going to be seen.

At that point five people all zeroed in on the Journal booth. One man, who looked to be 35, tapped a cover of the Journal with one finger as he nodded his head in approval, recognition, or both. The man and woman with him bent over looking at book and Journal covers with a projected sense of ownership. One of the men wore a Portland Farmer’s Market cap.

But it was the young man, maybe 19 – blond – tall – angular – poised – polite but insistent, who drew my full attention. He stood back a few feet and looked from book to Journal to book as if to say ‘what is this?’ I spoke to him offering an invitation to look and a short description of what the Journal was about.

“I’m not a farmer, I live in the city, but I care about these issues.” He said. “What’s the best way to support these issues, the farmers?”

The question caught me a little off guard because it was so direct and, in a way, generous. I couldn’t help but sense other questions just under the surface.

“The quickest, easiest, most direct way to help is to think about how and where you buy your food and make positive changes there.” I offered.

“I don’t understand.” He answered and I noticed that the other folks still perusing the booth had become keenly interested in the discussion. He told me he was from Portland and I offered that he should visit the city’s farmer’s market and take time to talk to the vendors, take time to ask about the produce and the farms.

“If you start buying direct from certain farmers, either at the market or from the farm, the food will mean more to you, it will taste different because it is fresher but also because you will put flavor in from your new found knowledge and familiarity,” I added.

“That’s right,” chimed in one of the other men, “you should check out the Sauvie’s Island doings. That’s the best scene…” And he went on to share several particulars as I moved sideways to sell a couple of books to another visitor to the booth. At that moment I heard my name in a hello, looking up I greeted old friend Mike Johnson driving an ATV which pulled a long chain-train of barrel cars. Each little car was made of a poly barrel set sideways on a fabricated wheeled axle. A rounded opening section was cut in the topside of the horizontal barrels allowing children, one each, to sit in the cars and be pulled around. It looked all the world like an old fashioned carnival ride that had escaped its moorings.

When I came back around to my young friend, he looked disjointed and awkward. I tried to change the subject and asked him about his life and plans. He was in college and trying to decide what his future might be. He was here at the Threshing Bee because something itched, something pulled at him, he didn’t know quite what it was. Our conversation came back around to this first issue of how he might help small farmers, and I began to tell him something of the phenomenon of farm produce subscription sales or what are sometimes called CSAs. He seemed to tighten in on the idea as he gently fingered the current issue of the Journal. I looked around, we were alone for the moment. I handed him that Journal. “I want you to take this copy as a gift.”

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Yes, you can, because I’m confident that you will read part of it and want to come back and buy an issue or a subscription. So you see I’m not being generous, I’m being sneaky.”

He thanked me, smiled and turned to walk away towards the field demonstrations. He didn’t get far. He came back and said with some difficulty, “You see, what I really want is to find out if I could be a farmer. If farming is something a person could do today. I mean, is it reasonable? After all, I would want to be a good farmer. Thank you again.” And with that he walked away.

I had not said a word to the last set of statements and questions. I couldn’t. I felt like I had witnessed something private and fragile. I had witnessed this young person’s life choice. Not discovery but choice. He hadn’t signed up or enlisted or volunteered yet, he had simply chosen. He had finally seen something in the near distance that had given him permission to follow an attraction. His statement, “I would want to be a good farmer,” reverberated. He wasn’t talking about being a successful farmer in any profit-oriented model. He was talking about being good for farming, good at farming, good because of farming, good with farming. The more I thought about it the more emotional I got. I had been present at, and a small participant in, the beginning visions of a new farmer.

A trickle of folks visited the booth and looked and sometimes purchased items. The talk was light and undemanding. I was arranged emotionally to observe and respond. Every ten minutes or so a horse-drawn wagon, either Joyce Sharp or Dave Peterson or the Harmans clopped by with a load of relaxed happy people. Time passed slow, refreshing and thick like a cold fruit nectar. Friends had come by the booth to give us tickets for the steak dinner in the park that evening.

Then she came back again, this time from the other direction and again right down the middle of the street. Same head up, eyes averted, strut. No shuffle here. Only this time she wore a pretty, sleeveless, patterned cotton dress. There seemed to be less jewelry and her hair was brushed back wet. It was the same young teenager transformed. But still on display in her own parade.

A woman thumbed through a book on wheel-wrighting when the first siren blew. Her husband rushed to her side in anxious whispers. She said to me, “I’ll be back, I want to get this book for him, but they just told us that maybe the wheat next to our house is on fire.” She rushed off.

Kristi came to the booth to relieve me. Scout, she said, was swimming in the creek with the McIntosh kids. Would I check on her? I went, with her camera, to check on our daughter and towards the threshing area to visit Mike McIntosh. He had suggested that I might try his six Belgians in the field demonstration on the two bottom plow. More sirens went off and the polished fire trucks, parked in display after the parade, peeled out with lights and warning horns as a bearded man directed them on to the street. I went up to him, he was crying.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

With his good arm he kept directing traffic. As he spoke I could see that one side of his face was contorted by nature and that the arm and hand of that same side curved tight to the body and was difficult to manipulate. His words were slurred.

“The fire’s up by my friend’s house. I should be going with them.” He was overcome with his limitations, with concern and uselessness.

I took a few steps and stopped, looking up to the near horizon where a column of smoke was visible. All around me, most people were continuing with the event and the day’s doings. Looking back at the crying man I felt odd, sad and odd. I walked past the many craft demonstrations and the Threshing machine lost in thought and blind to the goings on. Worrying about the wheat field fire set me to worrying about our own lightning started fires back home and somehow caused me to focus on worrying about our nine year old daughter swimming in the creek.

At the creek I had to chuckle to find the half dozen kids, my daughter included, stomping their feet in water that could not have been more than six inches deep. A few feet to their left, under a canopy of Willows and Cottonwood, someone held the lead rope on a draft horse which drank with hesitation.

Out at the field I watched as Rocky Hegele, Jeb Michaelson and Josh Kezele plowed. Thirty years before Jeb and I had both been in attendance at Dufur when a universal joint went out on my pickup. He stayed behind a while and fixed it to get me on the road again. We go way back, so to speak. Today he, and his fine team, strike a very strong figure on the walking plow and header box.

Everett Metzentine, Tygh Valley rancher and legendary wheelwright, had been instrumental in getting the Dufur Bee started thirty-three years hence. On this day he was talking to folks, explaining all the various aspects of the field demonstrations. Mike McIntosh drove his six Belgians on the plow over by Everett for the explanations. Later, on the other side of the field, Mike handed me the lines and I got a chance with his wonderful four and five year beauties. The McIntosh family shows their horses around the state in six and eight horse hitches. They also demonstrate every year at Dufur.

Yard Sale Race

I believe it was later that evening, sitting and swapping stories with the entire McIntosh contingent, in the center court formed by their circled travel trailers, that I first got an inkling of what I am certain will become a new American sensation, a competitive sport so daring, so exciting that Olympic status is most definitely on the horizon. You need a little more background on the Dufur parade and community in order to understand this amazing development.

Dufur is a small town which is all but taken over by the yearly Threshing Bee. Many people come from neighboring towns and the city of Portland. Recognizing the golden opportunity, a few town’s people set up garage and yard sales during the weekend. This had grown to be community wide. The biggest concentration of visitors, spread throughout Dufur, is usually during the parade. The parade makes a circuitous route through town, past many of these sales.

As the history of this new sport goes, it seems one of the McIntosh group, Cameron to be exact, had, a year or so ago, been in the back of a wagon during the Dufur parade when he spied, ahead, a yard sale. He bailed off the wagon and made a beeline to that yard while Mac warned him that they wouldn’t be able to wait for him, horses and wagon would be continuing on. Cam hollered “I’ll be right back, keep going.” Then he did an amazing thing. He managed to make a deal on a vacuum cleaner WITH attachments, pay for it, gather it up and get back on the wagon, without the wagon having slowed or stopped. The parade did not skip a single beat. Come to find out that he had done it many more times, “scoring” as he likes to say many great deals. Now he counts on the parade as a unique shopping opportunity. We all laughed comfortably with the tale.

I could see the serious future of it clearly. To all of them, Carnahan, Clay, Cam, Becky, Josh, Mac, Mike, Joanna, and Kristi, it was a funny tale to tell. To me it was obviously the beginning of something big, really BIG. So I sketched out to them how we could develop this into a formal rule-structured competition that might be played out across America. There would be members of the local Historical Museum Staff which would need to be drafted as judges. Contestants would be restricted in this manner: once a yard or garage sale was spotted along the route, they would have to call out their “target” item, jump off the parade vehicle, purchase the item, and get back on the vehicle without it stopping. They would do this repeatedly with a goal of having not only the most items but also the best deals and an exhibition of courage matched with guile and bargaining skills. When the parade concluded the judges would tally the items, grade their relative quality and the “deal” making, and mix in any eye witness accounts of bravery and derring do, and come up with a winner who would receive a trophy looking suspiciously like one of the yard sale signs. Scoring would be standardized so that winners from Dufur could be measured against winners from other parts of the country for a national champion. The only thing lacking in the plan was a name that measured up to the entire concept. What would we call this sport? Yarding? Scavenging Race? Jump Off Racing? I still don’t know why they all laughed at my idea. I think it could work and perhaps develop into a team sport.

Word came to us that the wheat field fire of that afternoon ended nicely. The owner of the field had simply turned on the irrigation system and snuffed it out immediately. We went to our travel trailer and bunked down for the night. It had been a good day.

Next morning sweet Joanna and happy Mike, made everybody breakfast. Then we went together to the church service.

“Red wire blue wire, red wire blue wire, which one do I cut? If you see me running, you’d better get a move on.” These words repeated bracketed the bearded preacher’s Sunday morning service in the tent. The post script came when the lovely older pump organ player in bonnet and apron asked if she could take a photograph of us all for their scrapbook.

This day I was able to take in a little of the crafting displays which included two different rope making displays, one with our old friend John Reser of Condon, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, and a bunch more. Mike had suggested he might let me try my hand on the Header and Kristi wanted to take more pictures, so Cam and Becky volunteered to run our booth for a little while.

That Sunday morning while at the booth, I had a chance to feel the constraints of our wider general economy and the financial rigors of the little agricultural community we were visiting. People expressed strong interest in the materials we had but could not justify the expense at this moment. Times are tough especially when so much depends on a single crop like wheat. I had to wonder of the health of Dufur, was it peopled mostly with old folks, were the youngsters anxious to get out? So when Kristi told me later of her engaging talk with the local librarian I was heartened. The discovery of our Journal and books thrilled her as she had been looking for materials for those kids in town who were asking for anything they could read or look at which told of how farming used to be. Kristi donated a subscription and the lady purchased additional books.

It was late morning and just before I set off to visit the Header I was surprised to see the girl again. I shouldn’t have been. But this time she had an entourage. Again down the middle of the street, in shorts and T shirt, bejeweled and with some sort of glistening wax in her now spiked hair, she sported an entirely new upper arm tatoo! I wondered for half a second if I was confusing this apparition with the girl from yesterday but there was no mistaking the posture. And this time she was followed by a line of younger children marching along as if to a “follow the leader” rhythm. As she parted traffic, I noticed that the cars were all waxed and shiny classic hot rods entering town from the city of The Dalles, here for a display at the city park. The visual juxtaposition of this young lady against the flat-topped sixty year old hot rodders was a delight. Pure Americana.

I walked slowly down through the display area heading out to the field demonstrations. It was hotter than the previous day, classic dry high desert summer heat punctuated by smells and sounds. One sound was particularly sweet. In the tent where church service had been there now played a wind quintet doing old summer show tunes. Peaking through the corner of the tent I thought I could see a lovely older woman wrapped up in the glistening pipes of a French horn. It was fine, mighty fine.

My chance to drive the Header was indeed memorable. This contraption goes by different principles than most of the stuff we’re used to employing with horses. I once heard it said that flying a helicopter is like rubbing your belly, slapping the top of your head, tapping out a four – four rhythm with your feet, and whistling the Blue Danube waltz all at the same time. I wouldn’t know but I can tell you that driving the header, or trying to, is something like that. I was honored that good friend Mike trusted me enough with his magnificent horses to give it a try, even if I still hear him chuckling behind me at my ineptitude.

I made it back to the booth during a quiet time, it was afternoon and things were winding down. A little ways away I noticed the young man from the day before. He was intent, arms wrapped around, looking down. When he caught my eye he came over.

“Did you get a chance to read anything?”

“Yes, I did. I really had no idea. So much to think about.”

“My name’s Lynn.” I offered.

“Mine is Joseph.” (Two Josephs in one weekend, Ed Joseph and now this young man.) He picked up another Journal and handed me some money, it was more than the price by a couple of single dollar bills. When I said so he remarked with a smile that he wanted me to have it all. I had the distinct impression that it was all the money he had at the moment. I was once again speechless.

I looked up and around, feeling good and wanting to remember Dufur this way. I was hoping to seal the deal by seeing that young girl marching down the center of the street one last time, but it was not to be. I’ll just have to come back next year, enter the yard sale race, and sit down in the tent to listen to the wind quintet at the Dufur Threshing Bee.

A Working Party at the McIntosh Lazy M Ranch

Dufur was delightful and useful to me. I’m still processing what I learned. So when my buddy Mike asked if we would come to his ranch the following weekend to help and enjoy their own little threshing bee I said “you bet.”

The extended McIntosh family of Terrebonne, Oregon are our friends and neighbors. (They live 18 miles away, across the creek and the river, past farms and town, but they are still neighbors in western terms.) Mac McIntosh, Grandpa, is a preacher and also works by choice riding herd for large cow outfits eastwards out by Paulina and Post. Mike, Mac’s son, is the principal of a local school. One of Mike’s many claims to fame is that he volunteers as a ringman for our annual horsedrawn auction. I had hoped, a few years ago, that roping him into the ring man’s job would remove him as a heckler from the crowd. It worked and we got the extra benefit of outstanding help. Just goes to show…

Three generations of the McIntosh family brought covered wagons and saddle animals to our ranch, over the fourth of July week, to do some wagon training. I missed that fun, being as I was announcing at Horse Progress Days in Indiana, but Kristi and Scout enjoyed the shared time – especially with Joanna and the kids. So I sure didn’t want to miss out on the Threshing. Kristi, Scout and I made sure we’d be there with work clothes and camera.

Mike had got the Case Threshing machine from Everett Metzentine of Tygh Valley and the John Deere Binder from Ray Guthrie. We had a manual for the binder that I gave to them. Mike was anxious to use the binder and thresher this year and get Ray and Everett to join in and help get everything tuned and set.

Lots of folks showed up that day. Four Belgians were hitched to the binder and two teams were rigged to bundle wagons. Once we got the knotter lined out, the binder, under Mac’s control, worked lovely. Ray Guthrie looked on with running commentary. Nick Kezele drove one team on forecart and wagon and Josh Kezele drove the other. Joanna and Rachel were shuffling back and forth, to watch, take pictures and prepare for the threshing meals.

Mike, under Everett’s watchful eye, got everything set for the Thresher. I climbed on one of the wagons and set to building a bundle load with the fork help of Ed Joseph, Rocky Hegele, and a youngster only twice the size of the bundles.

Along the country road which split the ranch, cars and pickups slowed and stopped to take in the sight. Several men came out to say they hadn’t seen anything like this in years. Cameras were everywhere.

Things went smooth that morning. Then Mac said he had to leave to perform a wedding and asked if I would run the binder for the rest of the day. Boy, would I?! With good horses, a good crop and a smooth running binder, this is one fun job.

We broke for a fabulous spread of sandwich fixings and salads under the apple trees in Mac’s front yard.

Binding went so well that I finished the little field early and set to helping with the Thresher. Mike was pleased with how everything worked and surprised to have substantially more oats than estimated. He’d be taking them in to sell at the elevator. Unlike Dufur, this was not a re-enactment but an actual working party, an actual BEE. Friends and neighbors got together to help separate grain and it went exceedingly well.

Across the road we unharnessed and towed the thresher in the shed. Then five of us made short work of converting the binder to road position and backing it in the shed. The grain was trucked into a barn and we all sat down for bar-b-qued hamburgers and hot dogs PLUS a big cake. It was a great time, and it was all in perfect time, because that night a severe thunderstorm hit with high winds, heavy rain and lots of lightning. The crop was in and the equipment stowed, all right on the money.

Appreciating Reminders

This writing has been more of a travel log than an editorial. But maybe not. Friend Rod Gould speaks in his letter of appreciating reminders. And the experience of those two back-to-back weekends served up to me lots of reminders. I too need to return to why I do things, why I work, struggle, strive, keep at it. I need to be reminded. These weekends served up lots of reminders.

I said at the beginning of this writing that I had been thinking about the subjects of influence, economics, politics, frugality, thrift, and farming adventures, but chose instead to share the story of my weekends. At this point in my life I am more interested in the actual workings than in the rationales, apologies, or theories. I’m looking for the good stuff. I believe the stories of our lives can give us a useful and constructive view of economics and politics. Economy is more than making money, it’s about balance and true value. Good economy is about the folks at Dufur selling slices of watermelon, the girl claiming the middle of the street, the old Ford for sale, yard sales, children playing in the creek, and a work party helping to get the oats to market. Good economy is generations working together with the pure power of happy accomplishment like the father and son team of McIntosh at their Threshing. And good politics is not about politicians lying to us and jerking our lives around and scaring us into voting a certain way. It’s about people finding collaborative ways of sharing and helping one another. Good politics is about the physically impaired man helping to direct the fire trucks. Good politics is the strikingly handsome form of Jeb Michaelson comfortable on the handles of his walking plow. Good politics is the country preacher reaching for poetry to share a conviction. The best politics is about the volunteer wind quintet playing music in the tent on a summer afternoon in a small town that refuses to die.

For me it’s about keeping my eyes, ears, nose and heart open while I’m working. All about observations; how we see what we see, what definitions we assign to those observations, what we allow ourselves to discover on down the road, and what we learn or unlearn from our observations. It’s about going back beyond. It’s about going deeper yet…