Out To Pastoral

By John Idol

HILLSBOROUGH, NC—(Weekly Hubris)—5/3/10—Claude Monet had an eye for haystacks. So did I in my boyhood and teen years. His purpose for looking differed from mine: his, to capture the beauty of stacks in the French countryside; mine, to check whether I’d rounded a stack well enough to shed rainwater. Cows and horses, I was told, didn’t like moldy hay. “Don’t leave any flat or saggy spots,” my elders insisted, as they taught me stacking techniques.

Yet, after studying several photographs of Monet’s haystack paintings, I’m convinced that stacking techniques appealed to him as well—surely not to the degree that color and setting did, but to the point where he noted how French farmers shaped stacks to shed water. His series depicting stacks in different seasons and at different times of day reveal close attention to conventional form, some with virtual cones capping a mound that appears to be but a few feet tall, a few with rounded tops, the best example being “Haystack at Giverny,” which hangs in the Pushkin Museum of Art in Moscow.

It was the form of the Giverny stack that passed to me, a form allowing me to cap a stack without having to acquire the balancing skills of a tightrope walker. Those conical ones Monet depicts surely must have been finished by a stacker standing on a hay wagon or ladder. The peak is far too slender to support a stacker’s feet.

From what I gather from books on stacking hay, and from a train ride through Austria during the hay season, the Giverny form, if I may use that taxonomy, must have been around ever since farmers, with their symbiotic relations to cattle and horses, set aside part of their farms for meadows and sweated while the sun shone to keep their part of the bargain with livestock.  Hay mounded around a pole, some ten to twelve feet tall, took essentially the same form century to century, nation to nation, farm to farm. And that hay had to be stacked in a way to keep farm animals happy, free from mold, and, if possible, unsavory weeds,

As a child old enough to help during the hay season, I pitch-forked hay onto a sled or wagon, then leapt aboard for a hayride to poles set up by my dad or Grandfather Rufus Idol. At the poles, I watched Dad build a mound around a locust pole, using his fork handle to establish the circumference. When the mound reached the height of eight feet or so, he began to draw a smaller circle, once again using the fork handle as a makeshift ruler. Smaller and smaller the circle grew, until he scarcely had room to stand. At last, fashioning a wreath of sorts, he pressed it down hard around the pole and, with Rufus’s help, dismounted the stack. The wreath pinched the uppermost level of hay and served to guide rainwater downward.

When I reached 13, Dad asked if I wanted to learn how to cap off a stack. I answered with an eager “Yes,” partly because capping seemed to combine elements of fun and danger. But Dad didn’t reveal that the dangerous part was not in capping but in building the mound around a pole. The danger lay, I painfully and quickly learned, in the way Grandad Rufus forked hay until the capping stage.

Like some mechanical gear designed to fork hay to a designated spot, Rufus, chawing on his plug of tobacco, brown juice streaking from his mouth, pitched rapidly, not looking to see where I was in my attempt to build a mound without sags or jagged roundness. Dad’s method differed greatly in that he pitched to spots where I needed hay. The prongs of his fork never punctured my naked shins or thighs. Rufus’s did, time and again, if I failed to move quickly from the spot where he pitched. I seasoned a good bit of hay with my blood.

But when the time came to cap a stack, Rufus proved to be a master mentor, far better than Dad or any of the neighboring farmers who asked me to help them. Changing forks, one with a long handle and a three-pronged head, he slowly and carefully placed hay where I needed it as my circle shrank. He walked around the stack, looking for sags or unevenness, telling me how to repair any he spied. Seeing me wobble as my footing became less and less certain, he told me to use the pole’s tip as a kind of cane while I lowered my fork to gather the tufts of hay he fed me during those final moments before I wove a wreath made from long stalks of hay he gathered and forked up to me.

“Be careful,” he cautioned, “and don’t lose your balance, but stomp hard everything I fetch up to you before you make the wreath and wrap it around the pole. That wreath should cover every last inch of the pole.”

By this time, I hoped I was sprouting wings, for there was little between earth and me. Then, he slowed his pace once more, hopped on the bed of a sled or wagon, and stuck his fork a couple of feet from where I was performing my aerial dance. “Now, Johnny, grab the pole and slowly lower yourself to my fork.” Meanwhile, he instructed one of my brothers to plunge a fork into the hay two feet below his. “Now come on down as I tell you where the forks are. Careful, careful.” These forks became a kind of stepladder.

Down I went, trusting his directions, clinging to the pole’s tip, and swinging my feet until they touched his fork’s handle. Getting to the second handle was easy. From there, I dropped to the ground, backed away from the stack, and admired my handiwork, receiving a pat on head from Rufus. “Good job, Johnny,” he said, as he cut himself another chew of tobacco. The pride I felt in a well-shaped and rain-shedding stack surely had a bit of kinship with Monet’s satisfaction with his series on French haystacks.

His and Dad’s mentoring served me well, for over the next five years I earned local fame for my hay-stacking and a few dollars from neighboring farmers. When I left to join the US Air Force, my family and neighbors asked, “Who’s gonna stack our hay? Nobody can beat Johnny at it.”

As I now know, well over a half century later, no one among the artists I’ve learned to admire can beat Monet as a painter of haystacks. Perhaps Brueghel could have if he had tried his hand at depicting stacks. But why try nudging Monet out of first place? Why try passing down what I know about stacking hay when specially designed machines spare stackers pricked shins and thighs and rural red badges of courage for their achievements?

Rufus and Dad went down to defeat before the efficient clamor of John Deere. So did I.  But where is the beauty in fat, round bales rolled to a corner of a meadow? I doubt that Monet would spend days painting them.

Postscript: Several Internet sites present images of Monet’s haystacks and, as well, offer bibliographies on the history of haymaking. Check them out.