It was a Sunday afternoon. I was 10 or 11. I had been playing in the backyard with a neighbor kid. I noticed my face feeling funny and my eyes starting to itch. My friend said I looked funny, so I went inside. My mother asked what in the world I had gotten into to make my face all puffy. I didn’t know.
We disturbed Dad’s Sunday afternoon nap and one of them got on the phone and found a doctor who would come in to his office and see me. This was in the late 1950s when a doctor making a house call was still a thing.
Dad drove me downtown. I was holding a wet washcloth loaded with a baking soda paste my mom had made on my swollen face. I don’t know if it helped or not.
Dr. Riordan (why I remember his name, I don’t know) said that something in the backyard had triggered my system resulting in the classic face, hand and arms swelling but without the asthma-like breathing difficulty. He gave me a couple of pills and a prescription for more. Said it would be a good idea if I didn’t go farther from home than school without them. He said if it happened again to both take a couple of pills and do my best to identify what I had been playing in.
I don’t remember having another similar allergy episode, but I dutifully packed the little yellow pills with on all the overnight camping I did with the Boy Scouts. Never did identify the culprit.
I experienced typical hay fever symptoms for a couple of weeks each spring and again each fall for a number of years. The little yellow pills didn’t help, and I discovered that even a half-dose of the popular Contac capsule would make me loopy for a number of days. Strangely, good old garden-variety hay dust didn’t seem to bother me.
Quite by accident, I noticed that peanut butter and chocolate would help. I dunno what’s in the combination, but it’s still helpful today. Driving ready-mix concrete trucks summers while in college I learned to carry a handful of Reese’s chocolate peanut butter cups with in my lunch for allergy season. Yes, the pollen or whatever in the air by Minneapolis got to me too.
One of my brothers had hay fever so bad he got an after-school and weekend job in a pawnshop rather than be miserable helping out on Dad’s farm.
One summer break from college I helped a fellow with his peppermint harvest. The mint fields would be swathed into windrows. Unlike swathing alfalfa hay, there was no conditioner on the swathers. After a day or two to wilt down and lose some moisture, it was chopped into tubs. There was a crew in/on the tubs to spread it and pack it evenly. The loaded tubs were then hauled, under a tarp, to a stationary mint still where a steam-tight cover was attached to each tub. Live steam entered the bottom of the tubs and carried both moisture and the mint oil in a vapor through cooling coils which liquified it again. This liquid was sent through settling vats where the mint oil would rise to the top and be carefully skimmed off into galvanized barrels for sale.
I was the truck driver. The field crew was short a man and my hay-fever-afflicted brother tried out, not sure his allergies would leave him alone. Surprisingly, he worked with the chopped mint with not even a sniffle. Later said that after that summer, his whole hay fever thing seemed to ease.
Decades later while hauling baled hay for a living …
We had hauled a couple of loads of southern Idaho hay into northern Nevada. As we unloaded, planning to sleep in the trucks anyway, the rancher made us an offer. He had purchased a couple of big loads of timothy hay just a few miles away, and since we were there with now empty hay trucks, he asked us for a price to haul the two loads to his ranch. Uh huh.
Next morning, we started loading. We were accustomed to 90- to 100-pound alfalfa hay bales. The timothy bales were closer to 60 pounds and as soft as a pillow. It had also been cut overly mature and was loaded with dust and pollen. Anyone experienced with timothy hay can guess the result. We all started sneezing with noses running like a firehose. It went through my whole system, and I took a handful of trips behind the haystack armed with paper towels. Somehow the effects of the mature timothy allergens had crossed over to the exit portion of my digestive tract. I was still breathing, so I knew I wasn’t gonna die, but I was about to wish I would.
I never again hauled timothy hay.
