This boat driving not a leisurely day on the lake

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I don’t count sheep at night to sleep. I count fields.

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This boat driving not a leisurely day on the lake Back to video

Grow up in tobacco country and there’s a very good chance that, at some point, you are going to work in the stuff – or there used to be. Mechanization and bulk kilns did away with the need for primers and table gangs, which hurt a lot of old-line families who made a living wage by working the field during planting, growing and harvest of the stuff and then working in tobacco factories in Simcoe, Delhi and Tillsonburg during winter.

During the last two years of the ’70s and much of the ’80s, I probably did most jobs associated with growing the long green, as I called it. I was newly married, and it was either that or the Foreign Legion.

I pulled plants, planted, irrigated, hoed, re-planted and hoed some more in fine dust that found its way to every crease and crevice on your frame.

It was hard work keeping the slender weed upright long enough to make it to harvest, not to mention the ever-present threat of hail, wind and blue mould. 

Harvest was the turn of primers, table gang, kiln hanger and boat-driver. I sucked at the first three, but I could drive. Not your cruise down the 401, take the kids to school and drive to the office driving. Boat driving is like rally racing, with a ton of baled tobacco more or less piled on the back of a flatbed truck, which usually had started out as a pickup until its useful life ended and then it became a doorless, springless, shock-less, sometime brakeless, baggy truck.

Some shade tree mechanic well into the “Fifty” got the gears back in ‘er but they don’t work in the same order. In and up should be first gear, not reverse; back and down should be second not first while third was up and off to the right.

Boat driving is the best driver’s-ed course in the world, good as the army’s in most ways, better in some.

You have to get from the kiln yard to wherever the priming machine was, and back, as fast as you could, possibly haul ass in an era that saw farms that ambled across and along concession roads and through trails used once a year, onto smooth headland where you could practise the four-wheel drift. You had to move or somebody at one end or the other is going to be pissed off.

We have more of them now of course, but boat driving could cure most neuroses of the time.

You have not lived until you’ve had an 80-some-year-old woman put you under a curse that may still be in effect.

And primers get brutal when they have to wait in the 37.7 C (100 F) sun for water that, if you valued your manly bits, had better be aboard that truck.

One way to make it through sand leaves and “seconds” was to envision cold beer at the end of the row.

It was a fantasy mostly, but once in a while when it was boiling Frank would show up with a cold 12–pack.

On those days when rain and wind numbed your fingers, he would bring out a bottle of “swish,” the whisky that was embedded in the oak barrels it aged in. Swish was the product of rinsing the barrels, letting the stuff settle and then partake. Two shots apiece and you could feel your fingers again.

gordchristmas@outlook.com