By Al Batt, Tribune columnist

Boys were boys and men were men.

We knew our places. We were subject to different expectations.

Boys talked to men about things boys thought were important. Men talked to boys about things men knew were important.

Boys and men were treated differently.

But there was a time on the farm when the boys were treated like men.

A time when the boys ate with the men.

It was a time when wives and mothers did their best to cause working men to fall into a culinary stupor.

This was a wonderful thing in a time when we were only allowed to be hungry when the livestock wasn’t.

This was during baling.

One of my first jobs was pulling a rope behind the tractor that helped levitate a grouping of hay or straw bales and then dump them into the haymow of the barn. I pulled the rope to keep the needy rear tires of the tractor from running over it.

I was pretty new to this thing called life when I first performed this task.

I had watched the men in their blue work shirts drenched dark in sweat and dream of the day when I would be one of them.

I thought how good it must be to be a man. The independence enjoyed by a man was something I envied.

Although it was wishing my life away, I wished to be a man.

Through none of my good work, I became older.

I became old enough to own my own blue work shirts and to work on the hayracks, stacking bales fed to me by a hungry baler.

I became old enough to drench my blue work shirt in sweat.

I was an ardent if unskilled worker. I was just good enough to be hired occasionally by some of the neighbors. People recommended me because I worked cheap.

One day, I was involved in a haying adventure at a neighboring farm. I was working with Richie, who was three years my elder.

Richie and I were stacking the bales on the rack as his father drove the tractor pulling the baler.

There was a technique to stacking the bales in a proper fashion. Richie and I may not have been good at the job, but we weren’t bad.

Once a hayrack was filled with stacked bales, Richie’s uncle pulled it back to the barn with one of the farm’s ubiquitous John Deere tractors.

There, he helped unload the hay into the barn and then brought the empty rack back to the field for refilling.

We were baling wild hay. This was nothing that had been planted by man. It was wild grasses that were as tough as nails.

The old baler, with its howling Wisconsin engine, snorted through the hay, breaking its own parts at a hectic pace.

After a time, the operation was forced to shut down.

Richie’s father and his uncle had to go to town to get parts.

Richie and I were told to remain right where we were because the men would be back in a few minutes and then we would finish the baling.

This was at 11 in the morning.

At about 3 p.m., Richie and I had eaten our bologna sandwiches &045; featuring Wonder Bread drenched in mayonnaise &045; and we had run out of things to explore near the half-filled rack.

I told Richie that his father and his uncle weren’t coming back and that we should go home.

I had heard talk that the two missing men enjoyed an adult beverage, often to excess.

Richie was adamant that we remain where we were because his father had said so.

Richie was my friend.

We waited together.

In those days before cell phones, we had no idea where the men were or what they were doing.

Richie was my friend.

A friend is someone who stays on the hay rack with you in a field of mowed wild hay.

We talked.

We played catch with most everything that could be thrown.

We discussed with serious overtones what we would be like when we became men.

At 5 p.m., I could stay no longer. I had run out of both patience and time.

I didn’t want to go. Richie was my friend. I had to go.

I began walking home.

Looking back, I could see Richie on the hay wagon, still waiting for his father and his uncle to return.

It was at that moment that I realized that becoming a man was not the perfect thing I thought it would be.

Men have problems, too.

(Hartland resident Al Batt writes a column for the Tribune each Wednesday and Sunday.)