By Mike Donahue
Last weekend I had the privilege of hanging around Glen Hardy’s farm in Logandale while a bunch of youngsters and their parents from all over Southern Nevada (Clark, Nye and Lincoln counties) weighed their yearling steers and entered them in the Junior Livestock Show for next April’s Clark County Fair.
It happens every year and on the surface it was really nothing special for the crowd that had gathered to help. The kids registered their names with Shirley Hardy sitting at a nearby table, unloaded their steers and weighed them on a scale manned by Clark County Junior Livestock Association president Scott Wade. They then re-loaded the animals to take back home.
It was a beautiful, blue sky day. The yard was full of hats, pickups, boots and stock trailers loaded with young cattle. The pungent aroma of farm animals wafted over everyone and an occasional bawl from an ornery steer completed the picture.
While it seemed all in a day’s work for those doing the job, I was suddenly struck by the overwhelming pride and sense of rural camaraderie that blanketed the scene like grandma’s best quilt — warm and inviting.
It brought home the idea that this was what rural living is all about.
And I don’t mean just the sight, the sounds and the smells of rural country an hour’s drive from the middle of two million people, although that’s probably part of it.
I mean seeing kids, parents, neighbors and friends working together to perpetuate a way of life that’s part of our heritage – part of everyone’s heritage whether they live on a farm or a ranch or in a city subdivision or apartment. If you go back far enough, we all share a piece of the same heritage.
When I was young (and this is probably going to date me) my school, and all the others in the surrounding small rural communities where I lived, allowed unscheduled “hay days.”
These were generally autumn days when kids all the way from elementary to high school were allowed to miss school, without getting a black mark, to help dad, uncle, some other distant relative or, more often than not, an unrelated neighbor get a crop in, move sheep or cattle from summer ranges or do other important chores on the farm or ranch that had to get done now, today, immediately.
For example, if there was alfalfa down in the fields being threatened by an incoming major snow storm, everyone was expected to drop everything, including school, and get out to help get the hay put up.
Of course this was eons before one farmer on a tractor equipped with modern machinery could cut, rake, bale and pick up a field (or 10) of hay all by himself or herself.
In the not so distant past, one person could generally do the initial work of cutting, raking and baling, each in their proscribed turn, but for efficiency sake, it took a crew of at least three to get the hay in. One to drive the tractor pulling the wagon, one (or more) walking beside the wagon picking up the bales and tossing them up and one person on top of the wagon stacking the hay on the wagon as it was thrown up.
Hay days were usually a community endeavor. Generally, if one farmer was racing to get the hay in, so was everyone else. And once you got your job done, it was just natural, kind of expected really, to head down the road to help your neighbor get his crop in too.
Hay days used to produce in me the same feeling of rural camaraderie that I recognized last Saturday at the Hardy’s place; unexpected, though very welcome.
In a nut shell, it was all about people doing something worthwhile and important with children, with family, with friends, with neighbors. I would like to give a big thanks to all who contributed last Saturday, knowingly or unknowingly.
And to all who read this column, have very Merry (rural) Christmas.
