Snake bitten

by Doug Crowe
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 10:27 AM MDT

Putting up hay is the most physically demanding work I have ever done.

Cutting, raking and baling the stuff is not that hard, but stacking bales is a killer job -- or at least it used to be.

Nowadays, I see folks roaring around hay fields sequestered in the air conditioned cabs of mega-balers.

They’re listening to a stereo blaring selections from the latest trillion selling CD by the Iron Jock Strap or the Leprosy Lickin' Idiots or some other gaggle of pre-pubescent gazillionaires.

Every once in a while, this mechanical monster poops out a hay bale bigger than Donald Trump's ego. Then another mechanical monster comes sprinting across the field to pick up this behemoth and deposit it in a stack lot.

All of this is a far cry from what haying was when I worked on Old Jim Grieve's UC ranch in the late '50s. Once the bales were on the ground, we attacked them with nothing but an old flatbed truck and several "hay hands."

Two guys, one on each side of the truck, would walk along grabbing bales and throwing them up to two guys on the flatbed whose job it was to stack them.

When the load was complete, it went to the stack lot and the procedure was reversed -- bales came off the truck and went into the stack. It was hot, dirty, back-breaking work.

One of the hay hands I came to know during this period of my life was known locally as "John the Baptist." If he had any other name, I never heard it.

John's claim to fame was that he had once sat on a hay bale with a rattlesnake in it. Somehow the snake made it through the baler alive, but had been unable to wiggle out of its predicament.

John's bony butt added insult to injury, and the snake bit it. This had precipitated a mad dash to the hospital and a 10-day stay therein.

As a result of this, John was absolutely terrified of rattlesnakes, and the UC hay meadows had more of them than any place I have ever been.

Also pertinent to this story is the fact that our hay baler, which, according to Old Jim had been around "since before dirt," was a bit temperamental. The old gal would occasionally puke out a badly tied or otherwise mutated bale.

When a stacker on the ground encountered one of these abortions, all he had to do was pick the wire out of it so it wouldn't get into the baler later.

That is what John the Baptist was doing when the second rattler bit him!

For a while, no one could figure out what had happened. He just stood transfixed and began shouting, "Oh Lord, Oh Lord ..."

My first thought was that Jesus had made a mistake, revealing himself once again, this time to the wrong John the Baptist.

Then I saw the snake, but didn't know if it had bitten John or just scared the daylights out of him. It turned out to be the former.

Old Jim had seen the commotion and came roaring over in his beat-up Ford truck. We loaded up John the Baptist, and they sped off toward town in a cloud of dust.

We were at supper when Old Jim returned. He reported the doctors had determined John would recover completely, and, in fact, might develop an immunity to rattlesnake venom if he could just manage to get himself bitten another five or six times.

Jim, however, made it clear he would not put up with any of the rest of us adopting this ploy to get out of work.

I think he was being facetious, but truth be told, there were a few hot July afternoons when I seriously considered letting a snake bite me just to get out of that godawful hayfield.

(This column is adapted from Doug's novel, “A Growing Season.”)

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