Baling Hay on Shaw Island, 2005 OSU

Every year for the last four years I've gone with my family to Shaw Island, Washington. We go with a pile of friends from Seattle, where we all live. The trip to Shaw involves a two hour drive and then a 45 minute ferry trip out to the island.

While we're on Shaw we stay at Our Lady of the Rock monastery, or OLR as they abbreviate it. The Benedictine nuns there put us up in their guest house and we spend four or five days helping them bring in their hay. We work hard but it's a lot of fun.

Here are some of the many beautiful things we see every year on Shaw:

			Abigail, the world's most intelligent and beautiful chicken.

This year we met a Japanese named Sadayuki Fujisaki (he had us call him "Sada") at OLR. We worked in the fields with him, ate with him and laughed with him. He taught us the greeting "OSU," pronounced ooo-issss in as low, gravelly a tone as you can manage. The kanji symbol for OSU at the top of this page combines the symbol for "push" (which can be found on doors in Japanese cities) with the symbol for "endurance." Warriors used to use this expression as a war cry. To this day martial artists use it as a greeting or in the classroom to signal the beginning of their excercises. Those kanji characters would not be out of place on the front gate to the monastery . . . or on the gates to Heaven, for that matter. That's Sada, to the right, removing thistles from the llama's corral. (He taught us a song. See below)

Every year our vacation is different, and every year it is very much the same. The Benedictine order has been around for 1500 years and has changed remarkably little in that time. The nuns on OLR still wear full black habits with white wimples, although they typically change to denim habits and rubber farm boots when the occasion calls for it. They milk their own cows, muck the stalls, gather eggs from their chickens, raise a few pigs that they slaughter every fall, and raise llamas, alpacas and sheep for wool. They sing Lauds every morning, and Vespers every evening, as well as daily mass in their beautiful chapel. To Benedictines, work is also prayer so they're praying all day long. And we get to work and pray with them.

You don't have to be a Roman Catholic to stay at OLR, but you will get a lot more out of your stay if you are. We pray a lot while we're there. We pray for the safety of our kids. The farm can be a dangerous place, as we stack hay high on wagons and ride the wagons back to one of the barns, where we heave and wrestle the bales into stacks fifteen feet high. But mostly we pray for good weather. The hay can't be mowed, raked, baled, or bucked unless the sun is shining. If the hay has been mowed and then it starts to rain, all work comes to a stop and the hay is often ruined. Farmers stay closer to God than most of the rest of us because it's easier for a farmer to see just how dependent he is on God's providence. The rest of us get our food from the grocery store, all wrapped in plastic and we may forget to be grateful for God's love or for the farmer's hard work. Now, I'm a city boy, born and raised. I enjoy the bustle and noise and danger of the city and it's hard for me to imagine living without shopping malls, movie theaters and crowds of people. And yet, I have to respect the decision of the island people to deprive themselves of the comfort and convenience of life on the mainland.

For the people who live here, every trip to the store is a major expedition, driving to the ferry terminal, waiting for the ferry, etc. When they need a gallon of milk or a part for the tractor they cannot run down to Safeway or Home Depot.		O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead! The Time needs heart -- 'tis tired of head: . . . When all's done, what hast thou won Of the only sweet that's under the sun?         -- Sidney Lanier             The Symphony
Shaw Island hasn't got a hospital or a doctor's office or a Burger King. And that's the way the people of Shaw Island want it. They have fought every attempt to bring such conveniences to the island. Why? It certainly causes them to be more self-reliant, and also it helps them, like farmers, to know how much they ought to be grateful to God for every-day miracles. It also insulates them from a lot of the frantic buy-and-sell that permeates our days on the mainland.

Until recently I didn't know anything about farm work so I've learned a lot during my stays at Shaw: running a tractor killing and plucking a turkey stacking hay shovelling manure and moving piles of it in wheel barrows.

Did you know there's an art to stacking hay? We've learned a lot about it in our vacations at OLR. If they aren't stacked correctly, the hay bales fall over, especially while we're transporting them on the wagon. In the barn the bales in the first course are always placed on their sides, i.e. so their baling strings are not against the floor, where the rats will sometimes chew through them. Other than that, bales in one layer must be oriented perpendicular to the bales in the layer below. Sounds easy enough, but there's always something that makes it a challenge, whether it's the width of the hay wagon or the support pillars in the barn. This is a picture of Hannah and Angela stacking hay. They're only 9 and 10 years old but they've learned to work hard and to stack hay well.

And here's a wagon load of carefully stacked hay being brought to the barn. No seatbelts!

And then there are the tractors, my beloved tractors. The nuns at OLR have a John Deere tractor and an old Ford tractor. Their neighbors have a John Deere, larger and newer than the nuns', and an International Harvester. When it's haying time, everyone helps bring in his neighbor's hay and everyone drives whatever equipment is operational. I've driven all the tractors and used them to pull hay wagons and to operate the hay balers. That's me, grinning like an idiot, driving the nuns' John Deere tractor.

The hay is raked, tetted (i.e. fluffed), left to dry for a while, and then made into bales. All this is done with equipment towed behind, and powered by the tractor. The baler has got to be the coolest device ever invented, at least until the advent of the turbo-charger. The most interesting part of the baler is the automatic knotter, which knots the two pieces of twine that hold the bale together.

To the left is a picture of a baler. To the right is a picture of the knotters on a baler.

The two little black gears in the center, that look a little like the tops of toothpaste tubes, do the knotting. To me it's like a small miracle every time I see them turn and a knot magically appear!

Here's a little history: A man named John Appleby worked for 25 years on the knotter before he managed to patent one in 1875. By then there were lots of machines that would harvest wheat, mow hay and lots of other important advances. But the invention of the baler proved to be so elusive that a good, reliable model was not made until 1939! It was invented mostly by Edward Nolt, who sold the rights to a company called New Holland, which started to mass produce balers in 1940. Up until that time, hay was still raked manually into big haystacks and left in the field. You can read more about the history of balers in History of Twine and at agrabilityproject.org

Farm machinery is used preposterously hard and breaks down frequently. Of the two hay balers (the nuns have one and one of their neighbors have another) usually only one is working at any given time. For me, half the fun of our Shaw Island vacations is adjusting and fixing hay balers. This is a picture of some broken shear pins. The balers have these pins holding the fly wheel to the rest of the drive train so if any unusually large load is put on the system (because for instance the hay is too wet, the baler was fed too much hay at one time, etc.) the shear pin breaks to save the rest of the drive train. When they break we have to replace them. We also have to remove the excess hay from the baler before we can get started again.

You know what Red Green always says:

<Gravelly Voice>If the ladies don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. </Gravelly Voice>

A fellow has a lot of time to think while he's driving round and round a hay field at a half a mile per hour. At first it's pure exhileration. After a while I began thinking that maybe it wasn't quite as much fun as it had been six hours before. So then I got a chance to think about just what the heck I was doing out there... In such a situation, my mind will often drift to faith and works and the nature of salvation. No, seriously. I've been a Roman Catholic for over 20 years now, and I've read the Bible, many times through, and the Catechism too. But I've never seen a good, simple Catholic explanation of salvation. Now, the words Catholic and simple should probably never be juxtaposed. The Lord did not create a simple universe and Catholic theology reflects that fact. All the same, here is my back-of-the-tractor synthesis of Catholic salvation dogma:

I welcome your input about whether the monologue above is, in fact, a "good, simple Catholic explanation of salvation." It certainly doesn't look simple to me anymore. I guess I need a few more hours on the tractor.   :-)

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Besides baling and hauling hay, we do lots of other things at OLR.

Here's Adam leading one of the llamas to its new pen.		And Katie holding one of the babies.
This is Abigail enjoying the lavender in the nuns' herb garden.		And Vernon, taking a well-earned break in the sunshine.
Here are Sarah, Kelly, and Miriam, playing in the hay.

We did have a couple of casualties this year. Joe fell off a ladder and broke his arm. And Vernon may have inhaled a few too many toxic agricultural substances. We're not sure.

Patti made a splint out of cardboard and duct tape for Joe's arm. He went to the doctor and got a cast a couple of days later, when we got back to the mainland.

The doctors say there will probably be no permanent damage.

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Sada, who we met at OLR this year (see above) was taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip to see the United States and spent several weeks doing farm work at OLR. He'd bought a beautiful Little Martin travelling guitar and he loved to play for us when the work day was over. He taught us this song in Japanese, about the coming of Spring time:

Creator: Mike Fox Updated: Mon, Sept 19, 2005 All photos (except the ferries, the red baler, the map, and Red Green) were taken by, and are the property of Patti Fox or Bonnie Damey.