When the power went out - Part 1
There was a winter once, when we were deep into the dairy farming years, when we had a big snowstorm each and every week, on Wednesdays. For some reason I remember that. It would snow lightly daily in between these weekly snowstorms, which usually dumped 6-8 inches of thick heavy snow, blown around so that each morning the landscape had changed slightly. Each time Dave would spend several hours on the tractor plowing the driveway and piling the snow higher and higher, in newer places, so that finally the driveway was flanked on both sides with 8-10 feet piles. Saying this now, I can hardly believe it. But I have photos of that winter so I can reassure myself that in this, my memory is OK.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had gotten all the wood cut and stacked before the snow came. The ten foot lengths were buried under feet of ice and snow in the middle of my garden 40 feet away from the house. Dave would walk on the surface of the snow to the heap and kick at a section of log until the snow was knocked off, start up the chainsaw, and cut lengths for our wood stove. I would stand in the kitchen, looking out of the kitchen window facing the garden and watch him, hand on my phone, ready to call for help if he slipped and cut more that the wood. When he was done, I would wait for him to collect the logs and carry them to the house, opening our battered door to the basement and then the flimsy outside door for him to walk in with his load. He would heave the four or 5 logs down the steps to the basement and turn back to go outside for another armful. After several trips he would stop, go down stairs to throw a few logs on the fire and stand there, watching the logs catch and finally close the firebox door. He’d climb those stairs without stacking the wood, so that when I would walk down there with my baskets of laundry I had to slide my feet along the cement floor and push the wood out of my way.
The power went out just after the morning milking and breakfast but before Dave cleaned the barn. The cows had been fed and milked, so that was something. Dave let them out to romp around in the fresh snow and romp they did. The hot breath blowing out of their noses made them look like dragons. They would plunge their huge heads into drifts of snow, tossing the snow up into the air and breathe out and I was transfixed by the games they engaged in. Dave had seen all this when he was a boy and now was more interested in getting the chores done than standing in a blizzard watching them play.
I went up to the house and that’s when everything stopped. No running water in the house meant no water in the barn, a minor problem unless it continued. Cows need gallons of water all the time. they are big animals and all they eat is dry, so water is essential for their continued health. And for ours, because milk production depended on water consumption. We weren’t worried, though. This had happened before and the power always came on pretty soon. The kids were excited about the new snow, so they had planned the day around that, and I wasn’t too unhappy about the lack of water since that meant I could postpone dishes for a while.
And so the day progressed, the snow stopped, the clouds passed and the sun streamed into our house and the barn adding little warmth but lots of cheer. Still no power, though.
Dave brought the cows back into the barn, gave them fresh hay, fed the rest of the livestock and did what he could. The gutters in the barn were full now and since we had graduated to an electric barn cleaner we couldn’t go back and shovel the manure by hand. And the lack of water was no longer an issue, it was reaching major headache time. Not quite a crises, but we were headed there.
When the power went out – Part 2
Dave said not to worry, so I didn’t worry. Instead I dressed the kids and we went outside to scoop snow into pots and pans and carried them into the house. We had a gas and wood combination kitchen stove and the snow melted fast enough to take care of the cooking and drinking needs. I didn’t care that I couldn’t wash dishes, since I didn’t like washing dishes. And the kids had fun on all the mountains of snow.
As the afternoon wore on, though, I could tell that Dave was worrying. And the lack of water was rapidly losing it’s status as the number one problem. Milking the cows was on the top of that list, now.
Milking started at 5:00 pm. It was getting close to the 4:00 feeding time and the cows hadn’t had water all day. But worse. Modern (at that time, early 1980′s) dairy barns had either milking parlors or pipelines, and we were pretty modern. We milked using a transfer station. That meant that we were automated, to a point. A pipeline system would take the milk directly from the cow and through a series of stainless steel pipes transport the milk into the milk house and the bulk tank. We used a milking pail and then after milking the cow, carry that pail over the gutter, take off the lid and then pour the milk into a larger container that was connected to the bulk tank by a plastic hose. The milk was sucked into the bulk tank, saving me the chore of carrying a bucket full of milk into the milk house and lifting it and pouring it into a filter perched over the hole in the bulk tank. I was short enough that Dave built me a little step so I could pour the milk without spilling it.
When we first moved to the farm and began milking, we had that simple system in place to put the milk into the bulk tank. Dave shoveled the gutters by hand, I pitched the haylage and silage out of the silos by hand, we pitched the feed into the truck by hand. As time went on we were slowly replacing our labor with machines. All well and good for us, until there was no electricity. Then it was back beyond my experience and venturing into Dave’s. He knew how to milk a cow by hand, and was good at it. I didn’t know the first thing about milking a cow by hand. Our cows were used to the machines, which could milk her quickly, efficiently and safely in three to four minutes. Dave was also fast and efficient. I was a bumbling oaf, and they didn’t like that one bit.
But we didn’t milk them at 5:00 pm. Dave wanted to wait until the power came on, so we waited. Until about 8:00 pm, when he finally came into the house to get me. Well, I asked, what about lights? Flashlights and candles, he said. In the barn? Candles in the barn? Fire was one of my biggest worries in the barn. Well, Dave’s cleverness solved that easily. Of course, he had been thinking about this, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
When the power went out – Part 3
We put tall white candles in half dozen five gallon white buckets and lined them up on the walk in the middle of the barn. We each got a flashlight to take with us as we milked. Dave picked out the cows that he wanted milked first, and then it was time for my first lesson in milking by hand.
I have to say I was bad at this. Bad. In fact, bad doesn’t even touch how bad I was. Dismally bad. Horribly horrible. Useless. Really.
Dave decided we would milk the freshest cows first. A fresh cow is one who had given birth recently therefore making the most milk. In other words her production was high, and the longer she would go with a full udder the worse it would be by actually cutting her production permanently. The pressure of all that milk sent a signal to her body to slow down production and it would be hard to get back to her production level before the late milking. There was an unpleasant sense of urgency that, added to the worry about the lack of water, had ratcheted up the tension in the barn.
It was mid-winter and there was no moonlight streaming in, causing cool shadows in the barn and helping us negotiate. It was black; the kind of black when you thought your eyes were closed and had to touch them to prove to yourself that they were open. The candles made yellow pools of isolated light evenly spaced on the walk and the light from our flashlights bounced off the rafters and stanchions. Human and cattle shadows loomed and danced and I would lose all perspective, occasionally feeling dizzy.
The real problem became clear to me as soon as I washed my first cow. Her name was Alyce, which is a Dutch, or Freisland name. She was my mother’s cow, a Brown Swiss, and had beautiful browns, creams and whites in her hide. Her brown soft eyes hid an animal with a more stubborn personality than I thought possible in a cow. She embodied that word: stubborn. No matter what, no matter who, no matter when. If she didn’t want to, she just didn’t.
Tonight she didn’t want to be milked by hand by me. My fumbling and bumbling uncertain hands had her turning repeatedly to look at me and my pathetic efforts to relieve her pain. I washed her as I always did, in the modern days of milking that had existed just hours before. She was standing there, chewing, calmly waiting for the whole process to be completed. She wasn’t a badly behaved cow, and she didn’t kick or hit you in the face with her tail, as many other cows will do, expressing themselves or flicking off a fly. She just had clear ideas of what she would tolerate.
When the power went out – Part 4
I missed the window of opportunity when her milk let down, and soon, my tugging on her teats pushed her over the edge. She kicked the bucket that had maybe 2 cups of milk in it and the milk spilled all over my lower legs, chilling me.
So, Dave stepped in to rescue that poor animal. He was kind enough to not snicker at me. He had managed to milk 4 cows while I tortured Alyce and I thought maybe it was my uncertainty that caused my failure, so I went to the next cow, a calm Holstein, named Phoebe.
I was wrong. I started the same way, hand patting her gently on her rump, talking to her steadily, getting my equipment in place. I dunked the brown paper towel into the icy cold sanitized water and then held it in my hand to warm it, something Dave insisted was unnecessary. But I shivered thinking of that freezing towel rubbing her udder and being a nursing mother myself who had experienced icy fingers stunning me into silence, I couldn’t do it to her. She didn’t care, of course. And as soon as the milk let down I tried once again to take advantage that. But Dave had shown me wasn’t in me. Not like him. I tried and found that I had more success with Phoebe , but then, she was older and also had a more forgiving personality. But I couldn’t get the milk out of her. He finally accepted that I would never be an expert and accepted that I was at least relieving her, and that was enough.
As we moved down the line, taking care of one cow after another, I stopped worrying and began listening to the cows eating, belching, pissing, drinking, filling the milking bucket, lying down or standing up. I could hear what the barn must sound like in the middle of the night, in the dark, something the cows and barn cats heard each night. No radio. No vacuum pump. No silo un-loader. No tractor. No barn cleaner. Just the living creatures in their home and I felt at home, too.
The lights came on then. I cheered. Dave looked relieved. Secretly, of course, I was disappointed. My romantic imaginings of how life on the farm had been fed for a few minutes. The natural ease with the cows that I was developing was furthered with my foray into hand milking. Dave won hand milking contests as a boy in 4-H in DeKalb , IL and I was more in touch with what that meant, finally. I could hear and feel how it must have been for farmers decades before, milking the cows with lanterns hanging from the rafters. The peaceful rhythm and slower pace was something to experience and I somewhat mourned what had past.
But, the cows could be milked and they could drink and we were all saved. And that was important, too.
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