By David Horst sandhill7@gmail.com
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| Delores and Russell Miller and what's left of their barn. |
It's part of the job description for a farmer who sells hay. When he cuts his alfalfa, he's betting against nature that he can put together four straight dry days to be able to claim: "Hay for sale. Not rained on. No mold."
On April 10, Russell and his wife Delores beat nature in a big way, though they willingly admit it was luck or divine intervention.
At 6:30 p.m. that warm and pleasant Sunday, the Millers were enjoying an ice cream at Charlie's Drive-In in Hortonville. An hour later, they were watching a lifetime of farming be wiped out in seconds.
When a tornado decided to drop out of the evening sky over Dale, it chose their farm as its victim. It took the top off of their 40-by-143-foot barn, spread 300 bales of last year's hay to the wind and tossed hay wagons and pickup trucks around like Tonka trucks.
Russell was in the kitchen, watching a maple tree standing eerily still as the storm approached. When he saw a piece of sheet metal fly through the yard, he yelled for Delores to head for the basement. As she passed the back door, she saw a strange cloud whoosh down their driveway.
"It was just green. It was a green wind," Delores said. They estimate it passed 10 feet from their door.
"You don't want to be any closer than that," Russell said.
He described hearing not a train-like roar — that's for people on the outside of a tornado — but rather a loud "whack."
"We never got to the basement," Delores said. The barn was gone before they could take a step.
It took a 90-foot garage down to the footings and damaged two concrete silos, a tool shed and a large metal machine shed. Antiques moved to the garage out of the way of a new floor installation were all lost, including a 100-year-old Fernwood piano smashed to bits.
The tornado drove a 2-by-4 from who knows where 4 feet deep into their lawn.
It did little damage to their house, and none to them.
"I guess He wants us to work a while yet," Russell concluded.
That work may no longer include making hay, including for our llamas.
Even though the storm spared the tractors, haybine and bailers in the machine shed, Russell has no place to store his hay, not dry anyway. At age 78, he's not going to rebuild.
The plan at this point is to bale the first crop and have his regular customers pick up the hay as he makes it, and then let someone else take it off the fields the rest of the year. This could be cause for celebration for Delores, who at a healthy 72 has been ready to end her hay-making career for some time.
A few years back, she told Russell she couldn't get up on the hay wagons anymore. He bought her a stool.
"For 15 years I've been saying I'm too old to make hay," she said. "The good Lord decided it for us."
Still, she's sad it ended this way. To lose the barn means the grandchildren have lost their playground.
It also has left the swallows very confused. The barn hasn't been occupied by cows since 1993 so it was an open, quiet place to nest. Fifty nests were typical. The swallows came back Easter morning looking for a roost on the power line to the yard light. Not there. The barn — only half there.
Now, people are picking through the rubble at the Miller place, digging out barn beams for construction projects and red barn wood for flower boxes and bluebird houses.
The tornado was followed by another whirlwind — a parade of neighbors offering to help clean up or carrying bread, meat loaf, cakes and cookies. That's part of farm life, too.
Russell left just enough doubt about whether his days trailing a kicker wagon are over. He's sizing up how to get the 20-foot-long hay wagon off of the other hay wagon that the tornado placed it on top of. That's about a ton of wagon to get back upright.
Why would a man keep doing the hot, back-breaking work of making hay well into his 70s?
"So I didn't get too old too fast," Russell explained. "It's just the farming that's in your genes."
And for the chance to outsmart nature for one more year.
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