With a lot of time to kill, I figured I’d try to strike up conversation where I could. “Got your eye on something?” I asked the man in the red tee shirt standing next to me. He grinned and said, “I was here for three things. The manure spreader’s no good. So, I’m down to two.” Before I could ask what those two were, a press of folks nudged us apart and the low trill of the auctioneer resumed, this time offering a set of pitch forks, some with broken handles, others with missing tines, and a few in decent if not ancient condition.
I’d cut out and put the Valley News ad for the C.W. Gray & Son’s auction on the fridge a few weeks ago, drawn by the listing, “Sheep or Goat sorting gates.” The auction was set to take place at a farm a few towns over and it had enough heavy equipment listed that I figured it was going to be a decent sized farm and decent sized event. Once in town, the signs took me down a dirt road far enough that I began to think I’d screwed up until I saw a row of trucks parked along the side and I pulled Moby, our ridiculously large white F250 truck, over and climbed out. I passed every kind of truck in every state of decay as I walked down the sloping dirt road to the farm’s entrance. The auction was set to start in 30 minutes.
Blue sky, bright morning sun, tractors arranged in an ark outside a giant shed, assorted attachments lay on overgrown grass, rust creeping along the edge of just about everything. More open sheds, tools, machinery, walk in refrigerator, a stack of unopened, yellowed boxes of baling twine, a utility wood stove, anvils, scales and tires. The uniform of worn Carhartts, oil stained hats, full white beards, muck boots and chew mingled with a little youth, a few women, and two dogs. One white trailer was selling mounds of French fries and one was providing auction numbers to those who had a driver’s license. On my way to the farm, I’d stopped for coffee and fell for a glorious apple cider donut dipped in sugar so resisting the fries was easy.
I tucked my Vermont license back in my wallet and received my paper “paddle” with number 74 marked across the top. A young man with “Gray & Sons” stitched on his shirt told me the sheep stuff was on the other side of the enormous blue barn. Behind the barn were rusting gates of all sizes, set up in paddocks that looked like they’d been put in place a decade earlier. I thought, “We need it all, I can’t lift any of it, I don’t think half of it will fit in the truck, what are the rules around getting stuff off the property, maybe it’s all too rusty.”
A small animal scale, release gates, and swinging door gates along with odd looking wooden feeders, chicken incubators, chicken cages, a giant galvanized tub and some sci fi-worthy machine lay about the fencing. “Were all the gates going as a single lot? Maybe I just watch and learn. Maybe this stuff is crap and I should head home.” As I left to go back to the auction site, I saw for the first time a small set of four rusty panels with an additional four leaning on a wood post fence. Those were mine!
The auction got underway about 15 minutes late and when they started with a single post digger, I thought, this will take an eternity to get through all this junk. But once the action started, the sing song demand for money never stopped, and items were picked off quickly. Five dollars for a set of hammers, a thousand dollars for the walk in freezer, two bucks for a wooden bench with leather staps whose purpose had the auctioneer stumped. A mom and son had purchased the freezer and I sought them out. I learned they raise sheep and sell their lamb meat to the Co-Op. And that’s all she wanted to say.
“Okay, we’re going across the street!” And with that declaration, the crowd shuffled behind the auctioneer and we were headed to the sheep pens. My friend in the red tee shirt stood near me as the auction resumed. No one wanted the wooden feeders and when the galvanized tub and odd machine came up, it sold in seconds for $150 to my friend in red. He ducked his head, leaned in to me and said, “It’s a chicken scourer and new sells for six thousand bucks. Now I just need the plucker on the other side.” I didn’t stay to see if he got it because once the Auctioneer said, “sold,” and read my paper paddle number, I was busy loading my eight panels in the back of Moby. I did also purchase from a fellow sheep farmer one of three mineral feeders he’d bought as a batch. This weekend I’ll head to the hardware store for a wire brush to clean up the gates and I’ll keep my eye out for the next farm auction because I really should have bid on those release gates.
Peggy