the Walnut Diary

A few years ago a cow in our pasture worked the cover off a Wood-Miser left unattended overnight.  Then she licked all of the switches to “ON”.  Her vandalism destroyed the electric lift motor, the main circuit board, and our cutting schedule. This meant that my dad and Gus, the saw-mill contractor, had to finish the work without my help, the school year having begun before the last walnut log was sawn.  My seventy-year-old father had little choice but to pile a couple of thousand board feet of cherry and basswood on the outdoor pile.  The more valuable walnut he stacked on the part of the barn floor where I normally stored the fishing boat in winter.

I say he stacked this lumber, because without spacers between the boards it can’t dry. Piling involves placing the spacers, and the careful organization of the boards according to length and thickness.  I resolved to deal with this expensive heap of black, dusty wood at first opportunity.

This turned out to be the following Sunday, so as soon as I figured that my parents were safely away at church, I dragged the sleepy teenager to the farm.  I wanted to pile the lumber on top of a narrow granary on one side of the hay mow in the barn.  A row of straw bales currently occupied the space, and Charlie has a mild dust allergy, so I resolved to get the bales out of there before the kid came sneezing onto the scene.

Leaving him half-asleep in the truck, I shed my rain jacket, and clad only in shorts, T-shirt and boat shoes, made my way by ladder to the top of the granary to make short work of the straw.  I grabbed the first bale and dropped it down to the empty haymow below.  Next bale the same.  Then something hit me from behind, an impact like a blast of birdshot.  All of the sudden I had hornets all over me!  They kept going for my eyes and mouth.  I had to get out of there, fast.  The ladder was out of the question.  I couldn’t wipe bees out of my eyes and climb, too.  I jumped, praying I wouldn’t break a leg.

Any movie stunt man would have been proud of my leap.  I landed on my feet, hopped over a plow and a low wall, then sprinted for the green field beyond the open door.

The bees stayed right with me, chewing religiously on all parts of me they could reach, especially my back.  I dashed past Charlie in the truck, found a patch of smooth grass, and started to roll.  This didn’t work.  The dislodged bees just kept jumping back aboard.  Then Charlie was slapping the bees, killing them in large numbers.  More kept coming.  I remember noticing that the bees weren’t stinging him, just me, and he was killing them by the dozen and I wasn’t hurting them at all. This seemed unfair.

Charlie got me into the truck, still swatting.  Now bee-proof  (or so we thought), the next priority seemed to be a trip to the emergency room in Smiths Falls, a half-hour away.  I thought I’d drive, as Charlie had just gotten his learner’s permit, and I might be able to make better time in traffic.  After a few miles I decided that this wasn’t on.

The words “bee stings” get attention in an E.R., but once they had determined that I wasn’t likely to do anything interesting like dying on them, they were content to ignore me for a while.

The dumbest thing anyone said all day was when the doctor asked me if it hurt.  How does one answer a question like that?  About then I noticed an exhausted hornet falling out of my shirt.  “Odd,” I thought, “that little rascal has been chewing on my armpit all the way to the hospital, and I haven’t noticed.”  I took off the shirt and got two more.

In an examining room where the nurse had placed me after painting my back with lotion — I guess her handiwork made me too ugly for the more public emergency room — I removed my shorts and found another hornet under the waistband.  This understandably led to a thorough examination of the rest of my clothing.  No more hornets.

Just for the record, my offense against the hornet kingdom consisted of tearing their nest apart.  They had built a sort of bee-condominium by hollowing out two bales of straw.  The second bale I picked up contained half of the nest.  In return they decorated me with a total of 75 stings, not counting the ones hidden by hair and beard.  Much itching later, I was left with a spectacular set of scabs over my head and upper body.  For about a year after the event, bees would still home in on me as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my nose.  It must have been pheromones from the venom, or maybe they can smell panic.

I didn’t touch that lumber until I had to pry the frozen boards apart, and then I did it on a weekday.  No more Sunday work on the farm for me.  I got stung the last time I tried that.