Bravery

She has interested me slightly in the two years she has weighed us in and out at the elevator we hauled Brent’s harvest to.  I knew she was back again this year when I saw her black Dodge short bed truck with the same small dent in the otherwise flawless finish. 

I think she recognized me this year, but it is hard to tell.  She is so quiet and doesn’t smile much, if at all.

I tried to chat with her a bit, this time involving her children who were spending some of the days with her at work, since school was called off.  But I hardly got anywhere.  Not that I felt like I had to.  I was trying to be friendly and courteous.

Until today. 

She had her daughter there whom I hadn’t seen yet.  I asked her if these were all her children.  She said no, she had one more, but he was too young to be there. 

She paused a bit, thinking something over, and then said, “Actually, I have four children.  My oldest was killed by a drunk driver when he was 2 years, 3 months old.”

“Oh, No!”

“Yes,” she said, “he would be eleven years old now.”

“Were you with him in the wreck?”   

“No, he was playing on the side of the street in front of our house, and a guy left the bar and drove down our street and hit him.”

“You have been on a journey,” I replied.

“Yes,” she said quietly. 

I stepped back into my truck, distraught.

All the way to the field and back her news weighed heavily upon me. 

I stepped off the truck again to get my ticket from her.

I removed my sunglasses and looked kindly at her.  When she met my gaze, I said, “It takes a brave person to tell me what you said on the last load.”

“Yes,” she said.  And her eyes shone ever so slightly. 

And she gave me a Mona Lisa smile.

I stepped back into the truck humbled.  Her loss is beyond my comprehension.  Her poise and quietness of the last two years now understood.

****

To My Canadian Friends . . .

I learned something the other day about you good folks on the other side of the 49^th.  Just give me a little space here and I’ll get around to telling you what it was.

For the past ten years or so, I have helped my friend Brent and his family in the fall harvest.  It’s been an enjoyable tenure; I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve learned how to drive a semi a little better.  Learned how to unload a graincart full of corn in less than five minutes with minimal spillage, most of the time.  Learned how to scoop up that spillage when I did spill, and laugh about it.  Learned how to have some very good times together and ate some really good food along the way. 

We haul to an elevator named Missler.  I realize that name is probably foreign to most of you northern folk.  Although I’d be willing to guess that a slight variation of it has whispered across the lips of any number of young dandies when the beauty they were following for the last several months slipped just beyond their reach.

The elevator is about 9 miles from most of Brent’s fields.  It’s a little one-horse affair that I wouldn’t trade for the bigger affairs any day.  At the most, there might be 5 trucks there at one time.  Most of the time, there are only one or two, as compared to the 15-20 at your regular elevators. 

You get to know the folks on a first name basis there.  Time is in your favor.

Obviously, it was built long before semis existed; the doors to the dumping pit are way too narrow, and the exit from the pit is blocked off by more bins that only a small bobtail truck could navigate past.  So, you must back up a hill, into a narrow opening, without scratching your truck or the elevator. 

Numerous gouges and chunks of missing concrete in the side of the door bear mute witness to unfortunate individuals who thought they were lined up but really weren’t.  It’s often that you’ll see someone backing up the hill, stop, look things over, start lurching in reverse towards the door, only to pull all the way forward to start all over again.  One harvest, Brent and I had a contest to see who had the fewest times to start over backing up, but that is a story for another time.

There was a new dude there, running the pit and dumping the trucks.  He struck me as rather interesting.  Ball cap was always on bill backwards.  Hefty chew either in his bottom lip or cheek. Orange seemed to be his favorite color.  Beer belly, an easy size 6.  Electronic equipment his weakness.  For a while, every day showed a new gadget.  His new earbuds must have had some kind of power.  I’d often get a mirror portrait of him jamming out to what must have been some bad heavy metal. 

I hopped out one day and started visiting with him.  Sounded like his life had been rather interesting, if not tragic.  We talked for a while, comparing likes and dislikes and backgrounds.  I told him I hated heights and wouldn’t do well climbing the bins like he had to.  He told me he loved em’.  Felt so free and good way up there.  Turns out he used to be a truck driver.  Of course, he was a bit braggy about most things, so the truck driving thing was really emphasized.  I guess he thought I needed a few ideas on the finer points of it. 

I asked him where all he had traveled during his trucking days.  He named most of the U.S. and parts of Canada.  Said he liked driving in Canada better anyways.  Talked about hauling to a little town called Brandon, west of Winnipeg. 

“Really,” I said, “I have two sisters who live up there and use that as their shopping town.” 

He must have figured I was still a little wet behind the ears.  He leaned in and told me, as the smell of his chew wafted around me, that one has to be really careful driving truck in Canada. 

“Especially in the winter.  So many horses.” 

“Huh?”

“Yeah, you know, they get lots of snow up there, man.  Gets so deep, man, they have use horses and sleighs to get around.”

“Mmmhmm.” (non-convinced)

He worked there a couple more years.  By the end though, his pants hardly stayed up around his midsection anymore.  I counted him hitching them up 23 times during one time while I unloaded.  And his attitude about life in general seemed to need some hitching up also. 

So, there you have it, my northern friends.  And, since I’m planning on visiting some of you fine folks up there come November, I’d recommend that you keep your horses in good shape. 

I don’t want to be stranded up to my armpits in the snow somewhere on the other side of Brandon.

Wishes

Sometimes, when I have plenty of time to think, I start making wishes.  Not the negative kind of wishing, where all a person does is pine away for something that wouldn’t be good for them.  Really, I think the right kind of wishing is a good thing. 

I usually do this wishing in sort of a conversation with myself, although it has involved others if we’re all just sitting around, shooting the breeze.  My conversation with myself goes something like this. 

“If I could go eat out at the place of my choosing this evening, where would it be?”  There are no holds barred with that question.  It’s a deal where expenses would be paid, and you would be transported at warp speed to the restaurant of your choice and back home again in time to tuck yourself in for night.  Of course, you are thinking that someone my age going down this track is also partially senile.  And, of course, you may be partially justified in your thought process. 

The answer to that question, for me, has been interesting.  For quite some time I would have been back to India in a heartbeat, driving up on the sidewalk beside the only good two miles of four lane road for miles around. I’d get out of the vehicle and walk back down the way we had come, maybe some 500 feet, because there is no parking nearby, and enter the courtyard of a little building complex.  I’d walk downhill on the pavers that have grass growing through the cracks here and there, to the building straightaway from the entrance I had come into.  I’d enter the door and would be greeted by the waitress and be seated near the door.  I would have to ask Bryce to order for me, as I don’t speak the language.  I’d order an orange pop, because that is probably all they have for pop, and more than likely it would be warm.  Then I’d order their fried chili potato strips.  I’d probably be tempted to make a meal out of these, and if they are as spicy as the last time, I’d probably be too smoked and sweated up by the time I was done with them to order anything else.  But, just for the taste of it, I’d order chicken tikka masala.  I’d eat a little and then the waitress would offer to ‘package’ my food to take home.  My drink would never be empty, nor would my plate never loose it’s bounty, because as was then, so now, the waitress would come ask what I needed, even if I had accidentally, only momentarily glanced her way.

Closer home, I’d slip over to Ardmore Oklahoma and find my way to a little joint we happened in on one afternoon.  Catfish Corral.  Their fish was incredible, and their hushpuppies were mysteriously good.  I left there with the roof of my mouth scorched, either because I couldn’t control myself and ate too fast, or else because the food was too hot.  After that, I’d stop by the convenience store just down the street to get what I say is about the best candy bar made.  Wrapped in red plastic, and if you get the King size, you get 4 neat little bars.  Silky smooth dark chocolate with creamy coconut couched inside, just waiting to give you the burst of flavor it always does.  I’d eat two of those neat little bars, and then I’d do like I normally have to do, sneak the other two inside once I get home, and hide them way in the back of the fridge, lest the daughter who lives at this house find them and immediately make them disappear.  But the real reason for stopping at that convenience store would be to see if my singing friend still worked there.  As I stepped in the first time, I heard the most wonderful singing, in voice so clear and beautiful.  I found its source in a colored man who worked behind the counter and told him how much I enjoyed his voice and singing.  He was singing Gospel, by the way.  He told me he had spent a number of years in the pen and had found out singing helped get him through the dreary days.  “Now, I just sing for de Lawd, an try to point de way out to others.  Ain’t never going back to jail.  Learned myself a lesson dere.”   

But lately, I’ve been hankering to visit a little joint somewhere east of Pickensville, Alabama.  I have no clue what the name of it is, and I wonder if it is still in business.  We were on our way home from Huntsville, the way I recall, when my brother-in-law Galen mentioned knowing of this place.  I was looking for some big sign and a place with vehicles crowded around, since I was a bit unacquainted with southern style cooking yet at that point. 

We dropped off the little two lane we were on, to an even lesser traveled two lane road and headed north, the way it seemed to me.  And for the next few miles, we passed nary a sign about restaurants, and not much more of civilization.  We rolled up to a little cabin style building, with rough sawn walls, both inside and out, and were welcomed in and seated in a side room to the main building.  And then it happened.  The food started getting plopped on our table, and the smell and taste were something I have yet to find again.  I do believe it was there I first tried what has become a staple to any barbeque for me, fried okra.  Red and white plastic checkered tablecloths, paper towel rolls here and there for napkins as we needed, and the smokiest, juiciest, best tasting meat I have ever eaten.  Of course, the saying is, “The older I get, the better it was,” but I don’t think my memory is playing jokes on me tonight.  That’s where I’d be if I had my wish tonight. 

I could name other places, definitely.  But I’ll spare you the agony. 

Oh, and one more, I wish you a good night, free of indigestion from the meal you just had.

Disfunctional Welder

The welder of today is a sweet looking affair.  The machine, that is, although, perchance, that description could include the one doing the welding.  The welders from the 1980’s got their styling, I suppose, from necessity.  They were large boxy things that took up a lot of space, were heavy on their feet and generally talked trash to you anytime you tried to move them around the shop. 

They were simpler; I didn’t see a one of them that I ever found a computer board on.  Just a series of wires connected to resistors and coils.  But sometimes those connections exposed the worst in some of us.

The welder we used, back in the combine shop at the local John Deere where I worked, was a bit dysfunctional at times.  Of course, the same description could be applied to those of us who used it if you wished to.

There were three of us who worked back there.  I worked in the middle bay.  The fella on the one side of me was your normal, friendly and helpful type.  He and I had lots of good times working side by side and got along most generally.  He once left the service call he was on to come help me on my service call, some 30 miles from where he was, and that at 11:30 at night.  I tried to do the same for him. 

The guy on the other side of me was from a different time and place entirely.  One might describe him as a bit churlish.  We tried to involve him in our shop banter and back and forth, but he would have nothing of it.  He came to work 20 minutes early in the morning and came back 20 minutes early from lunch every day.  He always worked long and hard right up to closing time.  He turned more money for that dealership than I can imagine in his 30 plus years working there.  But, if I needed help with something, I knew it was probably best not to ask him.  Although he didn’t have any scruples asking the rest of us for help.  I did ask him for help several times and got enough riff-raff back that I didn’t care to ask again.  He could be very demeaning when he wanted to be and didn’t seem to have any sense humor whatsoever.   

I was intrigued with him.  And that aura of mystique that he carried about himself only piqued my curiosity more every day, to the point that it seemed necessary to lighten up his world a bit; draw him out, so to speak.

Back to the welder in our shop.  It had developed a maddening problem of losing contact with itself somewhere deep inside.  In each section of the shop, there was one person designated to keep the shop equipment serviced and maintained.  This person happened to be our humorless friend, and so we looked to him to get this welder fixed.

But since the problem was so intermittent, he had a very hard time finding and fixing it.  He finally told us that if it acted up while we were using it, to kick the side of it and that usually got it back up and going. 

So, we kicked.  For several weeks.

Now I don’t want to sound rude or disrespectful; rather, I would like to appear as somewhat sympathetic to the betterment of humanity, and thus I took up an experiment to prove what really made this man that worked to the east of me tick, er, kick.

A prime opportunity presented itself not to long thereafter.  My humorless friend needed to do some repairs inside the bin of the combine he was working on.  These repairs involved the use of the aforesaid welder to do so. 

I waited until he was well down into the bin and had started welding before I made my way over to the load center and located the circuit breaker that was labeled, “welder.” 

I flipped it to the off position.

My other colleague, the helpful friendly one, watched with a questioning look on his face, but he quickly caught on to what my plan was and joined in by starting a conversation with me in the leeside of his combine. 

Our humorless colleague, muttering dire threats and implications against said welder, climbed up and out of the bin, down from the top of his combine and over to the welder.  The instant he delivered a kick to its side, I flipped the circuit breaker to the on position and right on cue it started running again. 

Again, I waited until he was deeply ensconced in his welding job down in the bin before flipping the breaker.  Again, we visited in the leeside of the combine.  Again, mutterings and dire threats.  Again, a swift kick.  Again, I flipped the breaker on.  Again, the welder ran.

And all over again the third time, except by this time, the threats had turned into curses and the implications into promises. 

I stepped out from the leeside of the combine in time so my colleague could see me before he delivered the kick that I was afraid would injure his toes and mentioned casually that I would probably stop flipping the breaker to the welder now and get back to my work.

In the rarest of instants, chivalry trumped churlishness, and he smiled. 

And it was soon afterwards that our welder was fixed.

Disturbin’ the Peace

There are those, namely my daughter, who have lately cast a certain smudge upon my name with a reference to me being a wild child back in my teen years.  It seems rather preposterous that such comments would be made, first of all, in the face of one who is largely innocent, and secondly, those who make such charges weren’t even around at the time of which they speak.  I say, if they want to make such charges, they need to have been there and witnessed it.  Those same folks say I snore; well, it may be that they think they hear me snore, but since I have never really heard myself snore, it can’t be proven.  I think I make myself clear in this matter.

Now on to my story.  I have found it interesting to read the police reports from time to time in the local newspaper of where I happen to be at the time.  In a paper some years ago, I read of several who had either been arrested or given citations for disturbing the peace.  Most of these police encounters were a result of a neighbor complaining of loud noises, arguments, etc, etc. I had never heard of such citations, as the paper of the town in which I reside has never had to run police reports for disturbing the peace.  Leading me to believe, then, that I live in a rather peaceful locale.  Also leading me to believe, since there were no articles of such listed in the paper during my teen years, more than likely I wasn’t the wild child some make me out to be.  But on with my story, as it seems I have gotten a bit sidetracked in that last sentence. 

There were some enterprising young men from down south who regularly came to spend their winter with their relation here in southwest Kansas.  Their time here sometimes needed something to fill it with to keep it from becoming tedious.  One day, these young men devised what we later called, ‘The Cannon.’  This was a very simple piece of construction, made from two 3-foot pieces of approximately ½ inch wall pipe welded together and a plate on one end. 

A small pinhole was drilled in the end with the cap and experiments, for them, began.  The first challenge was finding enough gunpowder, and the right kind, to do what they had in mind.  Namely, make a big boom and propel something out of it far and away.  Times back then were a fair bit more relaxed than today; we lived simply, without cell phones or internet, so quick references and background checks couldn’t be made.  Gunpowder, rifle gunpowder that is, was obtained in bulk quantity quite easily. 

At first, the thing was a fail.  The powder didn’t ignite properly, actually not at all, so a larger pinhole was drilled.  Now things were moving along nicely, sound effects and all.  They started with small amounts of powder and gradually worked up to a decent quantity.  These guys were engineers in the bravest sense of the word.  Rather than work it out on paper, they simply worked it out of the cannon, with a bit more powder each time.

Their main objective with the thing was to see how destructive it could be.  Once they had established a good ignition sequence of the gunpowder, they started using it to push more than just wadded up rags.  One day, they took numerous shotgun shells apart to harvest the shot that each one had inside of it.  An aerosol paint can lid did nicely to hold the shot.  They set this whole thing up approximately 30 feet from a piece of metal they wished to make a damage assessment on once the blast had been set off.  Engineers though they were, they didn’t expect the strain to be as great as it was on their weld in the midsection joining the two pipes.  The relentless force did a number to it and what was once one long pipe now reverted to the original two.  But they were not to be outdone and simply welded it back together and experimentation resumed.  As the fields were drying up down south, they soon left and bequeathed their legacy to my friend Ron and me.  Whether they gave us the injunctions to carry on with the R & D phase, I do not remember, but we felt it our duty to do so, nonetheless.

We continued to perfect their brainchild by building an appropriately sized ramrod to tamp the powder down and then to ram the intended projectile home to the wad lying on top of the powder.  We had been testing different weight and sized projectiles, and one day we found the ideal match for our cannon.  It was just your ordinary tennis ball.  Suddenly, the nearby Walmart did a blistering business in tennis ball sales.  The bore of this cannon was exactly 2.5 inches in diameter.  A tennis ball is a wee bit less than 2 5/8-inch diameter.  This size was the best you could get.  It provided a decent amount of drag on the sides of the cannon whilst ramming the tennis ball home.  That drag was just enough to build a rather high amount of head pressure against the ball once the powder had been ignited.  Between the head pressure and the explosive idea in the gunpowder, you had a first-class tennis ball launcher. It sent the balls off so far away and so fast that we never did find one again.  Occasionally we would aim it straight up, and then, once in a while, if you were lucky and had good eyesight, you might see a speck of that ball now and then.

You might say our next idea was a loose cannon.  I’ll give you that if you want to call it as much, but don’t go down the wild child line of thought.  I recalled at this point of R & D, some experimentation I had done earlier exploring the effects of a 30/30 slug ramming at high speed into a tin can full of water.  If you don’t know what happens, allow me to explain.  Water does not compress.  So, when a high-speed slug enters the tin can, the force of the slug has to be dissipated.  Either the force will continue in the line it has begun, or else, in this case, be exerted at right angles of the original trajectory since the non-compressibility of water acts as an impenetrable wall.  The can blows up, and you will often find the slug unscratched, lying on the ground about in the middle of where the can used to be.   

Why not, I intimated to my friend, use the same concept with our cannon?  Brilliant, we thought.  Or at least I did.  Field trials were begun immediately, and test results started sputtering in.  It soon became apparent to us that we had something on our hands that could be taken to the next step. 

That next step was this. . .

Load the cannon with aforesaid gun powder, wadding and tennis ball.  Tamp down tightly to ensure maximum projectability.  Lay an extra-long ridge of fuse powder. (What we had in mind had the potential to do harm, or so we thought.) Prop the cannon up on a three-inch block of wood so the front end is angled up.  Find a five-gallon bucket that we didn’t ever plan to use again.  Fill the five-gallon bucket approximately two thirds full of gasoline and place within two feet of the cannon’s muzzle end.  Light the fuse and run the 100-meter dash in record time, all the while casting fearful/inquiring looks over your shoulder.

In a tremendous flash of flame and sound, we realized this was the epitome of all craziness.  Only at night could the true dimensions be verified somewhat correctly.  The fireball stretched an easy 100 feet upwards, although I would guess it was likely more, and extended much the same horizontally. 

Field trials proved successful on several later occasions, with more and more spectators gathering each time.  I wish I could be around, some 1,000 or 1,500 years in the future, when archeologists are conducting a dig somewhere in what used to be my back yard. I’d like to see the puzzlement on their faces as they try to deduce what went on anyway, based on the fossil fuel sediment and scorch marks.  I bet they’ll decide this is what made dinosaurs go extinct and that it happened millions of years ago.

* * *

I would hope that the common sense of my reader is verified in the fact that he/she does not attempt to emulate the above scenario in its raw form.  While it was fun, and hair raising, it would be best if such things were, ahem, a little less flamboyant, could we say. 

A couple of years later, the cannon proved its dangerous capabilities when a cousin of mine was using it in much the same manner as we had.  It fired prematurely, before the 100-yard dash had been completed, and my cousin sustained severe enough burns to spend some time in a burn unit.  I suppose I am partially responsible for his pain and agony.