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| Got muck? |
When I was a kid, I remember watching a “Little Lu-Lu”
cartoon where Little Lu-Lu was lamenting the fact that it kept raining and she
could not go out and play. She wished it
would never rain again. Well, she magically
got her wish. The rest of the cartoon
was devoted to showing her what happened to the land when there was no
rain. The ground cracked and turned to
desert. The trees withered and died. The flowers had their tongues out, panting
and begging for water. Not a pretty
picture. That cartoon has stuck with me
all these years. It was an effective
brain washing tool from Hollywood, I suppose, because even to this day, I
cannot complain about too much rain without having a guilty conscience.
But enough is enough!
It has been raining here for months! I write this on May 20. We have had 10” of rain so far this month
which is double the average amount
for a full month. We are all sick of it. Even our last remaining pet duck was spotted
hiding under the truck to get out of the rain.
It is so wet and humid here that the mildew has mildewed. The mildew has growth rings on it, like a
tree. In fact, I took a core sample and counted
the mildew layers. They dated it all the
way back to the Eisenhower administration.
The sandy soil on our property is so saturated with water
that it is like quicksand. I was walking
in one of the ravines the other day, after another downpour, where the rain
water drains into the creek. I was
wearing tall rain boots, wading in calf deep water when I suddenly sunk up to
my knees in the mushy sand. I instantly
had a vision of being in a Tarzan movie and trapped in quicksand. And, as fate would have it, I had no Cheetah to
throw me a handy vine. Lucky for you, my
avid readers that I was able to extricate myself from the quicksand or you
would not be reading this. OK, so you
are not the lucky ones since you are reading this. But I digress.
Our property has a quarter-mile long dirt road from the
paved street down to our house. A couple
of years ago I had some crushed concrete spread in front of the house and barns
as a driveway. But for most of our road it is just dirt. In dry weather it is just fine. But due to all this rain, it has become a
quagmire.
I fired up my big Case International tractor and angled the box
blade on the rear to scoop a shallow trench on one side of the mud road. I made a few passes with the box blade and
the trench was starting to get deep enough to drain the accumulated water from
the road. But with every pass the
tractor kept getting bogged down more and more.
The mud was like cake batter. At
the end of our dirt road is our entry gate.
I was dragging the muck to a low area on one side of the gate. As I turned the tractor around for another
pass it suddenly sank up to its axle in the loose mud. My efforts to get the tractor unstuck just
buried the rear wheels even deeper.
I spent hours trying to dig the mud from under the tractor
but it was just too mushy to scoop out.
As I pulled out a shovel full, more slush would fill in the spot. I was soon exhausted and had nothing to show
for my work except a tractor buried up to its rear axle in mud. I was hoping none of my neighbors would drive
by and see that the dumbass city boy got his tractor stuck. Luckily I was spared that indignation.
We were leaving the next day for a week out of town, so I
had to leave the tractor there until when we returned. I feared that any of the good old boys in the
area would be skilled enough to get my tractor out of the mud then take off
with it. But then… I thought that it
might be easier to fill out a police report for a stolen tractor than it would
be to dig that damn thing out of the sludge.
But no such luck. The tractor was still there when we got back, tilted
and frozen in position, like it was emerging from the primordial ooze.
I started again on trying to extricate the tractor. I have been told by a wiser person than me (as if that person was hard to find) that
the first thing you should do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Well, I debated with myself as to whether it
would be easier, at this point, to keep digging, or just bury it completely. I decided to keep digging. I disconnected the box blade and dragged it
out of the way from the tractor with my truck.
The mud was more solid now and easier to dig. I shoveled it out from under the tractor body
and then dug a trench for each of the rear wheels.
Where the tractor was stuck was within ten feet of Cherished
Neighbor Liz’s property line. One of her
large pine trees was nearby. I wrapped a
chain around the tree and connected a Come-along, (a manual winch) to the back
end of the tractor. I slowly cranked the handle of the winch. My wife, the fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler,
who had joined in the fun to help me dig, expressed concern that the tree would
be pulled over before the tractor moved.
I said if her tree did fall on our property I would have to charge Liz
with littering or trespassing. Fortunately
for Liz, the tree held, the winch worked and the tractor became unstuck. Free at last.
I figure I spent at least 8 hours total trying to get that
damn machine out of the mud. The good
news is that the trench I created before the tractor got stuck, was draining
the water off of the road. That was
fortunate because it has continued to rain almost daily, ever since. I am sick of it. I am tempted to find that old cartoon and see
what Little Lu-Lu said or did to get it to stop raining. What’s a few dying trees or panting flowers
compared to a mildew-less life?
