8/5/98.. Mitch and Max.

The steaming hots have been cut by a norther or two, and the temperature at night makes you pull up a blanket. You can hear the locals sighing. August 1 marks the top of the hill in Maine. We still have days when it pushes 90, but the worst misery is over. The rose of Sharon is in flower. Kingfishers swoop and glimmer along the river. Swallows are flocking in the wild rice. Crickets are out to fiddle us down to Fall.

This run of dry summer weather has been perfect for haymaking, and the farm crews have been straight out, playing catchup. A lot of gardens got drowned in the June drench, but the greenstuff in general is lush. Even ice-blasted trees are sprouting branches, and look like teens with Mohawks. The candles on the conifers are long as your arm. If you're worried about the health of the planet, a dose of New England green right now might reassure you.

Max quoted George Carlin to me this morning. "Save Mother Earth? Someday Mother Earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas." Max isn't a candidate for Green Party membership. Which might surprise you, when you see him out farming with his "hosses."

Guys who work with horses are getting scarce as hen's teeth. But Max and Mitch and Cornish still have working teams, and they share round the labor. This week they're harvesting their oats, and I jumped on the wagon for a ride.

Max pulled up the drive yesterday morning, after the dew was off, his pickup loaded with sheaves of oats, and I bailed in the cab with Digital Olympus primed and loaded. We drove over to Mitch's farm in Bowdoin, with Max providing commentary. It's always fun to ride with Max. His view of the landscape is full of chicken manure, and the state of clover hay. Who's bringing up which field, or letting it go to waste. Through his eyes I see the scrubby secondgrowth cut back to its nineteenth century fence rows, and imagine an agricultural Maine, with the classic vistas of Vermont, or the Midlands.

I can barely imagine the backbreaking labor of clearing this land, and piling up the rocks. Those Revolutionary War vets who took their pay in allotments of Maine bush, and set out to remake the world with an ax and a stone boat, must have been a stubborn lot. Any of their kids who stayed on after "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death," the year it frosted every month and they lost three plantings, must have been downright mulish. What they'd think of this seedy looking landscape, strangled in pulpwood or coming up in goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, where the most common crop is subdivisions, would be unprintable. Or maybe they'd be happy with a doublewide and a satellite dish.

Mitch lives down a long drive on the perfect horse acreage. A long narrow parcel where you don't have to turn the team too often. Here he's built a steeply gabled homestead with metal roofed horsebarn, implement sheds, and a sugar house, clustered together in a romantic image of self-sufficiency. Mitch is a superb landscape painter, and his artist's eye is evidenced all over the property. But he's much too rough-hewn and raucous for the gallery scene, and would rather live hand-to-mouth as a farmer. Rather talk to horses than aht dealers.

So he does a little of this, and a bit of that, to get by. Mitch tried horse logging a few years back, working his team in the woods, but he couldn't make it pay, despite the low overhead. So he bought a skidder, then got trapped on the treadmill of skidder payments. After running himself ragged for a few years, he sold up the whole works. Now he takes out firewood with his critters, and pays the bills elsewise. He sugars in the Spring, which means that this year was a bust in the sweet money department, but, irrepressible, Mitch has leased a big sugarbush over in Auburn for next season. He's doing some renovation contracting this month, with days off to run the farm.

Mitch was up to his elbows in a bailer when we pulled in, and he nudged his glasses up with a greasy thumb, tossed back his long hair, by way of greeting. Max drove his load over to a flat spot where they'll set up the thresher, and we began to unload the sheaves.

Oats feel more animal than vegetable when you embrace an armful, and the traditional lore surrounding them is full of anthropomorphism. Freshcut oats are bundled into armloads (sheaves) and bound with twine, then the sheaves are stood upright and leaned together, grain up, to form shocks for drying. The first two sheaves tilted together, Mitch told me, are the bride and groom. The next two are the couple standing up for the bride, then two for the groom. Finally a seventh sheave is spread over the top, as the minister.

Max had cut his oats a few days since, and they were half-cured in his field already. This truckload was about a third of his harvest, which he'll move in stages to the common threshing site. Max is one of the premier cabinetmakers in these parts, making his nut doing kitchens and installations in the big houses on the Gold Coast, but now it's time to make horsefeed.

While Mitch and Max got the boys into harness, I roamed with Olympus, doing candids of Mitch's collected machinery. Tractor-driven and horsepowered. I got enough digitals to fuel a week of winter sketching, and an eyeful of Yankee ingenuity (although the Virginian Cyrus McCormick might object to that moniker). The 19th century explosion of iron cleverness is a delight to an observing Homo faber.

Mitch trailed the team over to the reaper-binder, which is a vision out of American Heritage, if you ignore the big Goodyear tire. A set of windmilling arms to lay the stalks against the cutting knives, a canvas bed to convey the cut stalks into the binder, where they are tied into sheaves, which are dumped on command. The whole rig pulled by two eager Morgans. Mitch and Max put the wiffletrees onto the binder's tongue, hitch up the harness, and are ready to go. Dog romping around. Cameraman scuffling.

Max loves to recount the tale of the guy who invented a device to tie knots. Nothing could be more useless, his neighbors thought. Until McCormick came up with a reaper that worked, a dozen years later. He sought out the knotsmith, and bought his patent. Only trouble, there wasn't a sufficient supply of twine to run the new bailer he cooked up. So McCormick made a deal with a cordage manufacturer to buy railroad cars of bailing twine, and loose hay got blown away.

The temperature is back up in the 80s now, but there's a steady norther keeping the flies down as Mitch guides the outfit round and round the oatfield. Max and I work opposite sides, picking up sheaves and making shocks. Pretty soon Cornish shows up, with HIS pickup loaded with oats, and another camera. It's gotten so that doing farmwork is a tourist attraction. It's a treat to watch these beautiful animals sidestepping together around a corner, but a surprisingly hard subject to capture.

A fat toad hops out of the way and a big rodent scuttles furtively out of the standing oats and under a shock. Sparrows are lighting on the preachers for free lunch. I'm chewing an oat hull.

Mitch's oats only took a couple of hours to reap, and we retreated to his cool kitchen for chow and liquid. Mitch is one of the loudest talespinners I know, and folks push their chairs back when he holds forth in the restaurant. Max is no mean liar, himself, and Cornish has a stock of jokes that would turn a salesman green.

I tell them about the fiasco at the Common Ground's new headquarters and fairgrounds. Torbert and I drove up to Unity last Saturday to volunteer labor, building pole barns for the animals at the Fair. MOFGA (the Maine Organic Farmers' and Gardeners' Association) has run the Common Ground Fair since its inception in hippier days. The original vision of Marshall Dodge, the Maine humorist who made a bundle with his Bert and I recordings, was for an annual event where all the back-to-the-landers and all the Maine artists would foregather, entertain each other, and charge the public to watch. It quickly became apparent that an arts fair should happen at High Summer, Lughnasa in fact, and a Farmers' Fair should happen at harvest time. And never the twain have met again.

The Common Ground has been held on the Windsor Fairgrounds for 20 years, and a more dusty, unshaded, ungreen place would be hard to imagine. MOFGA has made noises about finding a permanent site, where it can have events year-round, do experimental farming, etc, since day one. But getting loose change out of organic farmers is like squeezing blood out of a turnip. These are eleemosnary days, however. And some deep pockets have been touched in the right places. So, this year, MOFGA has purchased a tract up in Unity, and proceeded to build the dream Green center.

The site sits on top of an esker, with rolling gravel pits for company, and the treeless fairground-to-be has all the windblown ambiance of Windsor. You have to wonder what they were thinking. The first structure up is a million dollar barn. This has to be one of the world's most elaborate post-and-beam edifices, forty odd feet from exhibition floor to cupola. Three different PandB outfits collaborated in the erection. For insurance and zoning reasons all construction is gloriously overbuilt, with cables to backup the framing, emergency fire stairs, the whole megillah. You can't just build a post-and-beam barn anymore.

So MOFGA blew its wad on a showplace, and now is trying to put up animal barns with volunteer labor, and nickels and dimes. When Torbert and I plumed our dust in, there were 5 people on the site, bolting upright 8X8 hemlock posts onto lapjoints cut in short posts already set in rows in the ground. This design is to allow for pressure-treated bases, and ordinary timbers above, but in this case everything was green hemlock. Guess they'll be able to jack the building up and replace the bases when they rot.

Ours was not to reason why, and neither Jim nor I thought twice about jumping in and doing whatever was on the go. Russell, the MOFGA director, was in charge, we discovered, and he set us the task of installing "headers," the longitudinal timbers at the top of the posts, that the purlins which support the roof rafters lie on. These are actually called girt timbers (around the perimeter), ridgepole (at the peak), and something else between, but this wasn't a linguistic exercise.

We put together pipe staging to get us up the 16 feet in the air necessary to install the first header, ran planks between for a walkway, and hoisted up a hunk of green hemlock. Jim's staging was wibbling wildly and mine had enough wobble to make it comic. Wished I had the camera handy. Nervously we spiked timbers together. Then began thinking about plumb and vertical, and all that.

This isn't how it's done. You work your way up, squaring and plumbing as you go, instead of riding around like stilites, waving hammers. Good fun, though, and a great sugarburn. After we got three up, even Russell got a bit nervous, and called us down. When a carpenter showed up shortly thereafter, he just shook his head, and set us to bracing and squaring.

Every time I reached for another timber, someone different was handing it up. I got the feeling that MOFGA is going to have a hard time doing it all with volunteers before the Fair in September. Maybe the thought of well-paid crews putting up a million dollar barn had something to do with the dearth of free labor. Or maybe it's just haying season. The horse boys are strong MOFGA supporters, but had harsh words to say about priorities in Unity.

After our lunch break we unload and reshock Cornish's sheaves. Pass around pictures of Galoosa's latest forged sculpture, installed on Cornish's new hearth. He's built a massive firebox/oven/mass storage out of masonry at the heart of his house, and gotten our local smith/sculptor to do the hardware. Makers of lives, these farm boys. Good company to sweat with.

We toss on some bales of spoiled hay for the Muir's compost, and proceed crosslots for back. I'll try and get over to see the threshing machine in action. It's another massive antique. Memorial to a passing time: the age of the independent farmer.