Crab Nebula

[I wrote this about twenty years ago, it was on the antique version of my blog. You can still find it here. - MF]

One winter when I was in high school, I wanted a job (i.e. money). A friend's mom's brother-in-law, Lindsay Ridge, needed someone to work around his farm, and she hooked me up with him. He wanted me to do two things, help run the sugarbush and clean out a barn.

American Forest Scene: Maple Sugaring,
Currier & Ives

It was almost February, and maple syrup season is around the full moon in February, so helping with the sugarbush mostly meant walking around his woods, following a big Farmall tractor with caterpillar treads strung over the wheels, which carried a giant vat behind it on a wagon. Three or four of us would walk along in the snow -- post-holing to the kneecaps -- carrying two five-gallon buckets each. Each sugar maple along the route had a small hole drilled into it, into which a spile had been tapped. A bucket hung on each spile, and each tin bucket had a little peaked roof which clipped onto the top, sheltering the sap from snowfall. We'd go from tree to tree, remove each little roof, tip the sap into our bigger buckets, and then walk down to the tractor-vat and dump our load of sap in every now and then. When the vat was full, or we'd completed a circuit, we'd head back to the sugarbush, which was a long, low shack where the evaporator was going full time. The smell in that place was incredible, a sensory overload of woodsmoke, warm humid air and the most incredibly delicious smell of maple sap being boiled down into syrup.

But that's beside the point.

The other thing he wanted me to do was to clean out this barn he'd inherited from his father-in-law. The barn had been used to house various animals for many years. There had been no maintaining the barn. Inside were pigs, cows, veal calf, chickens and rats. The place had filled up with straw bedding and manure to as much as five feet deep in some places. I was given a pair of foul overalls, a pitchfork, and an empty manure spreader.

Manure spreader

The manure spreader is a fantastic contraption. It's this big metal cylinder on wheels, with one longitudinal quadrant of the cylinder being hinged, forming a door that lifts up. The cylinder is roughly 5' in diameter by 12' in length. Inside the cylinder is a metal shaft, to shich are welded lengths of 1" chain, each about 2-1/2' long. The shaft is coupled to the tractor's PTO (Power Take-Off unit, the splined stub of a driveshaft that sticks out of the back of a tractor's differential, which can be connected to all manner of hitched farm equipment) so that the chains spin around really fast. With the manure spreader full of manure and the tractor rev-ing at about 1000rpm, shit just flies everywhere.

I labored for two or three months, with pickaxe, shovel and pitchfork, filling and re-filling that damn manure spreader. I was alone, except for when Lindsay would return from the fields with the empty manure spreader -- it's horrific maw open and ready for me. He was an almost silent guy, real inscrutable and remote. He called the manure "buckwheat cakes and honey," and he had twinkly eyes.

The work I did for him had two advantages; it cleaned out the barn, which meant better shelter for his stock, and the manure would melt the snow, giving him a chance for earlier planting and a more fertile bed for his seed.

It was beneficial for him that I help him spread his crap around, and he helped me by giving me something to do and some money.