Rants from the Hollow

The valley in front of Heiser Hollow has always been farmed, but in our time, the family across the valley has always planted corn or soybeans. Whatever the relative economic merits of the different crops, from an aesthetic point of view, a scraggly looking field of hairy little soy plants can’t compare with a golden field of ripe golden wheat.

The field, which hasn’t been planted with wheat since the 60s, was harvested over a period of several days, mostly with a late model Deere combine. It trundled up and down the field, raising huge clouds of dust, leaving behind neat rows of golden straw, more than filling up a semi-trailer.

The Moore family has farmed this valley for generations, and they’ve still got some of their original farming equipment. Sporting a new coat of orange paint and Allis-Chalmers decals, this pre-war AC tractor took a nostalgia tour across the wheat field, pulling an equally old, and equally authentic AC combine.

Kirk, my parents, and I, arrived at the Hollow on July 3–Elizabeth couldn’t make it this year.

We spent some time the first couple days doing some maintenance. Before setting up the tent on top of the dam, we used the tractor to yank the willow bushes from the front of the dam.

Between the chain saw, the tractor, a lot of sweat, and a bit of poison ivy, we managed to open up some of the trails that were blocked by fallen trees during last summer’s mini-nado and the big ice storm a few years earlier. The one we call the Ridge Trail, along the eastern edge of our property, had been blocked by a number of large birch branches for at least 4 years.

We cleared several downed maples between The Valley and the Ridge Trail (shown at left) and then tackled the big birch. After all those years, the branches had shrunk a bit, and were somewhat rotted, making it a lot easier to trim them and then push the logs out of the way with the tractor.

The trail on the western edge of The Hollow, leading up to the Upper Meadow, has been blocked for a number of years by a large tree, and its half-uprooted stump, that blocked the trail just before a very sharp hairpin. In the past, I’d been able to drive the tractor around that spot, but it was too wet last year, and I wasn’t able to mow the grass in the upper meadow, the highest spot in The Hollow.

It took about an hour to saw the end off this big log, and to attack the tree stump with a shovel, cleaning off much of the clay that was still stuck to the roots. Figuring we’d have to saw the trunk off right next to the stump, I dug a hole under it saw that we could saw it without dulling the blade. As it turned out, we were able to pop it right out of the ground with the tractor’s front end loader.

The biggest project involved the felling of a 28-year old, 40 foot high pine tree. After the Northeast Blackout of 2003, the power companies have been a lot more aggressive in preventing trees from interfering with power lines. They finally reached The Hollow last year, spraying some sort of herbicide on everything within site of the incoming electric wires. Whether or not this pine tree would ever recover, it would always be horribly scarred by the loss of most of its branches, and it would always represent a threat to the power line, so we decided to take it out.

Felling a tree uphill is a bit of a trick, especially when it is bigger than a telephone pole. If we failed, the falling tree would take the power lines down with it, so I climbed up the side of the tree with a ladder, attached a chain to it, and attached the chain to a come along winch tied to the base of another tree. Taking a big notch out of the uphill side of the tree, Dad tightened up the winch, and the tree started to lean uphill. I finished sawing the other side of the trunk, while Dad continued to winch, and we managed to drop it exactly where we’d planned, without loss of human limb, or power.

The English revere their industrial heritage and glory in their eccentricity, two traits that indulged to the nth degree at what is reputedly the largest event of its kind, The Great Dorset Steam Fair. I’ve been to steam fairs before, but nothing on this grand scale. where else can you go to see a couple dozen steam rollers, all merrily driving around a couple miles of pasture land? A veritable orgy of steam and rivets, the air thick with the acrid coal smoke of hundreds of fireboxes, the air rent with the shrill sound of steam whistles, the rattling of chains and gears, and the cloying sound of colliopes, the overall effect of the thing is beyond words. 200,000 people were expected to visit this year’s 40th anniversary event. [see my full photo gallery]

Central stage at GDSF is the Heavy Haulage Area. All day long, steam engines of various sorts, along with the occaisional Diesel interloper, circle around about a 2 mile loop, the far end of which is relatively steep. Although there are some steam rollers (see the two at the far left), the real stars are the transport engines, the road locomotives that hauled heavy wagons, or short trains of lighter wagons, on public roads. Loads being pulled in the Heavy Haulage Area included a large generator, a huge tree, and big bulldozer on a trailer. Shown coming up the steepest part of the hill in the picture at the top, a train of 3 traction engines, 2 in the front and 1 in the back, chuffed out huge clouds of dense black smoke hauling this load.

Other traction engines, although they could haul themselves and their attachments to the job site, were used primarily as stationary power, running threshers, balers, and saw mills. Steam rollers were demonstrated not only smoothing down a road being constructed at the site, but were also used to pull grader blades and tar wagons, and were demonstrated powering a rock crusher. The most powerful steam engines working at the fair were the plough engines. Even as late as the 1950s, traction machines were used to plow large fields in the UK. A matched set of engines, right handed and left handed, with huge winches located under the boiler, alternated pulling a multi-gang plow.

Most of the engines, and their owners, were eager to get their hands dirty, but one class of engines are in a class apart. A showman’s tractor has an electrical generator and is traditionally used to power the rides and calliopes at fairs, carnivals and other events. Decked out in gleaming paint, with ornate twisted brass brackets, they were also used as tractors to haul fairground equipment between events. Many of these were in evidence at Dorset, powering calliopes big and small, and fair ground rides.

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For someone who thinks that suburban lawns are a silly and wastefully affectation, I take far too much pleasure in nuking brush with a tractor. It comes down to this: as far as woods are concerned, I like that freshly grazed look. Lacking cows, goats, horses, or sheep, the only remaining choice is diesel.

When we first bought Heiser Hollow in ’71, it hadn’t been lived in for a couple decades, and most of the flat parts were jungle like. We could get part way up the drive, but beyond that, it was a wall of weeds. My folks bought a scythe at the hardware store in Killbuck (another victim of Walmart), and started at it. They actually made quite a bit of progress, getting as far as the woods, where we camped in pup tents the first time we stayed overnight.

Then my dad either got smart, or totally frustrated, hiring a young farmer up the valley to come in with a vintage Fordson and a bush hog. Bush hog is a generic name for a heavy-duty mower that attaches to a 3-point hitch, allowing you to power it, and raise & lower it. It doesn’t mow lawn flat–for that you need an attachment that sits under the center of the tractor. What it does is mow hard, chopping up grass, weeds, saplings, ant hills, and anything else that gets in its way. Tractors are heavy and have sturdy wheels that crunch up bushes and sticks. Small trees fall prey to the loader bucket, or the chassis, and get chopped up by the bush hog. Logs and even downed trees can often be pushed aside with the front end loader.

Eventually, Dad bought his own tractor, a Kubota. It’s only 15 HP or so, but with 4 wheel drive, a 3-point hitch pulling a bush hog, and a front end loader, its amazing how much work can be done on a gallon of diesel oil. One pass down a trail makes it grandmother-friendly, whacking down all the weeds, chopping up loose sticks, and even flattening some of the humps in the ground. There are a lot of places here you just wouldn’t go if Dad or I hadn’t bush hogged it first. I especially enjoy mowing down multiflora rose, an especially annoying introduced species.

Kubotas are pretty handy, but they can’t do everything. Tractors tend to be tippy, so they don’t work laterally on hills. Ours has the front wheels mounted as far out as possible, and the back wheels were mounted in reverse, increasing the wheel base, but it still has a relatively high center of gravity, and you need to be careful to avoid an accident. Big stumps are a problem, and need to be avoided.

Big trees are down on trails in several places, and only a bulldozer would be able to flatten out those root balls and fill in the holes. Or time. If you wait long enough, whatever falls on the trail will decay to the point where the Kubota can break it up, push it out of the way, chop it up, or drive over it. I was able to get to the upper meadow last year for the first time since the ice storm 3-4 years ago, crunching through a tree that was downed over the trail. The trail makes a switchback and begins a steep ascent up to the end of the trail, which was the worst possible spot for a large tree to fall, filling the trail with a trunk too big to drive over, a large ball of dirt and root, and a Kubota-eating hole. Last year, I was very carefully able to detour by taking an even steeper route straight up, but this week, it was too wet, and I couldn’t get enough traction.

Today: singing milkweed beetles, scarlet tananger, ruby throated hummingbird

Dad and I drove down to the Hollow today to make sure that everything would be ready for next week’s stay. We arrived to find two pickups from the power company parked in the drive ahead of us–we don’t get a lot of visitors, although we’re never sure what happens when we aren’t there.

They were there to spray the plants underneath our power lines, and their trucks were full of all kinds of maintenance equipment. Its always useful to have a friend with a chain saw. It turned out that there had been a big storm a couple of days ago, and a maple tree had come down on the drive. They offered to clear it out for us, and 5 minutes later, the road was open again.

We were planning on weedeating and bushhogging, but the drive was rutted from the heavy rains this week, so we decided to pull the bushog off the back of the Kubota and mount the blade. To make a long story short, it turned out that the tractor wasn’t broken, it only had a loose battery cable. This was successfully diagnosed remotely by the farmer across the valley, who still came over to supervise our wrenchwork.

There’s a reason that road graders have such long chassis with the blade mounted in the center, instead of at the end of a long lever hanging off the back. When you use a blade on a tractor, every little bump in the road surface causes a wild fluctuation in the height of the blade. It goes better with one person standing on blade, sometimes leaning towards the high side, yelling height instructions to the tractor driver. Inside of 15 minutes, we’d made a pretty good work out of the road, neatly filling in the ruts.

We put the bushhog back on tractor, and Dad mowed the meadow while I went over the drive with a rake. Dad bought a new Stihl weedeater, and I gotta tell ya, a new Stihl chops up a lot more weeds, a lot faster, than its 25 year old predecessor. I did the face of the dam, and some of the surrounding areas.

The pond was more full than I’ve ever seen it. A couple years ago, when the standpipe rusted out, we enlarged the pond by setting the outlet of the new pipe a couple feet higher. Also, we had 30 years worth of silt pulled out of the back of the pond, and also had it dug out a bit wider and longer in the back. After the big storm, the crick was still running into the back of the pond. The water is usually a couple feet below the outlet by July, so its pretty unusual to see it full up at this time of year.

The guys from the power company said that someone had sighted a funnel cloud nearby during the recent storm. There musta been some funky winds, because there were an unusual number of trees down–mostly at the top half. Besides the one on the drive, there were three down on the drive to the meadow. Two big branches came down with a thump, a few hundred yards from me while I was working. I haven’t seen this many trees and branches down since the big ice storm a few years ago.

Sighting: great blue heron