Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 0 86 Some ouches are common: e stubbed toe, the finger shut in the door or a burn from a sloshed cup of hot coffee. Others must be nearly unique. It is, for example, probably safe to assume that very few ladies have been pecked by a hungry, runaway circus ostrich in Kalispell. Regardless, ouch may elicit sympathy, but it is often a sympathy accompanied by stifled laughter. e exclamation has been around for a long time, but the accidents which call it forth have changed. In Montana's agricultural past, manual labor—par- ticularly farm accidents—accounted for a preponderance of ouches. ough not many people today know its name or purpose, millions of Americans are familiar with the horse-drawn implement called a dump rake. It is that piece of haying equipment on which Judy Garland leaned while singing the wistful song, "Over the Rainbow" in e Wizard of Oz. Its long, curved teeth raked up cut hay and dumped it into long rows, where it would be picked up by a buck rake and taken to be stacked. Back in the horse-haying heyday, Montana teamsters were frequent victims of runaway dump rakes. Draft horses, stung by horseflies, were prone to bolt, and as they began their headlong run, the teamster would often be pitched forward, falling between the team and the rake to be scooped up (but fortunately not impaled) by the 3' long curved teeth. Trapped and tumbled, the most common escape from the battering was the raised edge of an irrigation ditch. e tips of the teeth would hit the rise and be kicked up just long enough to drop the cap- tive. Housework in the 1800s had its own perils. Flat irons, heated atop a wood stove, were "sissed." A finger would be licked and touched as quickly as possible to the bottom of the iron. e moisture on the fingertip would briefly sizzle if the iron was hot enough. If it was too hot, the sizzle was accompanied by a presumably ladylike "ouch." Even after electric irons were invented, "sissing" was a common practice, but permanent press or disregarded wrinkles have done away with that. Wringer washers squeezed wet clothes between two hard rollers. is labor-saving device had one serious disadvantage when a woman's blouse or apron was caught up with the wet clothes and pulled into the rollers. is was not a matter of a simple ouch, and it gave rise to the expression, "been through the wringer." A quick-release system was added, but was not proof against older brothers luring younger sisters into putting their tiny hands into the rollers. (I name no names…) Around the beginning of the 1900s, car ouches were becoming com- mon. Without power steering, a car accidently driven over a large rock could turn the tire and send the steering wheel spinning. Wise drivers kept all five fingers on the same side of the steering wheel to avoid a broken thumb. As a Drummond-area rancher discovered, pre-power steering on a tractor was even more hazardous when he was twisted in the seat to see behind him as he backed up. e abrupt spin of the wheel was enough to dislocate his shoulder. One ouch could be attributed to a very odd throttle design on a White Steamer. In 1908, a Billings real estate man was teaching a friend how to drive his new-fangled car. Some bright engineer had conceived the jolly notion of designing a throttle shaped like the steering wheel but small enough to fit just inside it. When the friend tried to steer away from an approaching team and wagon, he grabbed the throttle instead of the steering wheel and suddenly the car jumped ahead and, according to the article in the Billings Gazette, didn't stop until it started climbing a telephone pole. ere may also have been an "ouch" over the repair bill, but that's a different sort of pain. Before safety matches, a match could be struck on any rough surface. is was a practice which continued at least into the 1950s. A major fire was nothing to laugh at, but there were frequent, small incidents which could permit an observer to snicker with a clear conscience. A common way of lighting such a match was to hold it tightly in a curl of fingers and strike it with a flick of a thumbnail. is was often accompanied by An unexpected painful event may call forth a loud "aiee!", an abrupt "ow!" or—in a more serious accident, a primal, unspellable shriek. However, if the sufferer has had a moment to reflect on the pain, the Montana state cry is typically "ouch!" A PREPONDERANCE OF PAINFUL PROBLEMS by LYNDEL MEIKLE U C H ! D E PA R T M E N T H E R I TA G E

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