Inevitably
“Are you stuck again?” the young neighbor man joked when I called him Monday evening, because I had called him last Thursday morning for just that very reason when Chairman Joe and I found ourselves unexpectedly stationary, in a ditch bank. This neighbor has some big pickups and tractors, and has offered his help in the past, should I have issues.
That morning, we were in Joe's car on 210th Avenue NE, and its intersection with 450th Street NE, in Marshall County, Minnesota, known to locals and county highway engineers as Marshall County Highway 48, three miles west of Honker Flats Greenhouse, which is, as a landmark, approximately 13 miles, west southwest, where the neighbor I called lives as I do myself, a mile north of him.
"Hello neighbor!" the neighbor had said cheerfully, on Monday, after reading the caller ID on his phone.
"Would you happen to be home?" I queried, tentatively.
He said, he wasn’t. He was at Super-One buying dozens of cupcakes for his little daughter’s Valentine Day party she was having at home that very afternoon. "Why?" he ventured, carefully.
"Well, Joe and I are stuck off a road ditch west of Thief Lake," I told him, trying to describe exactly where we were so he had an idea, remotely thinking that it wasn't all that far for him to drive, having a 'I'd do it for you' sort of thing playing out unsaid in my head, besides we'd pay him for his trouble.
He said he had other errands and plans and that he was sorry, but he wouldn't be home for a couple hours, at least. I understood. What had I been thinking?
Oh well, it was a long shot. Somebody will be by here eventually, even if only on a snowmobile. Joe had recently purchased Triple A Insurance, but it wasn't in force yet, so typical tow charges this far from anywhere reeled as big dollar signs in his head. We would just wait it out. Maybe Big Foot would walk by . . .
Nonetheless, after shoveling for 45 minutes, we were rescued at long last by a passing mailman, who, serendipitously, I had known at the toy facory where I had worked for over 30 years; and despite that had offered to pull us from our predicament with his Jeep. That took all of fifteen seconds, including the time to hook the vehicles together.
Check out the whole story in The Blogings of Chairman Joe: “It Could’ve Been Worse.” http://goodoldjoe.blogspot.com/
“Yes, I am stuck again,” I answered the neighbor. “I am related to Gene Palm, one of your relation as well, who is notorious for getting stuck when he is visiting up here, but this time I am less than a mile from your house. Is it possible you could maybe assist me?”
“You’re where?” I remember saying to him on my cellphone. “You're picking up how many bales of toilet paper? Uffda . . . There’s a lot of that flu stuff going around. Hope your folks get over their illnesses. Well, if you have time. Don’t make any special trip.”
I was stuck in the snow with my tractor. I was just off the northwest corner of Jerry’s shop where there’s a 10-cord stack of poplar sticks that have been awaiting the buzzsaw since last summer. I was just finishing working on the shoulder of the road, just opposite his shop, driving in reverse with my snowblower, when right side of the tractor slid into the shallow ditch and got stuck.
The tractor was leaning a little, its right side hard against the snow. I didn’t think there was any problem as I don’t often get stuck with it in the wintertime, (Don’t ask me about mud.) but when I tried to back out with the snowblower high off the ground, the left side rear wheel spun, and the right side wheel didn’t. I tried to push the differential lock pedal down, but it wouldn’t move.
“Oh yeah, that doesn’t work! Damn! I could use it now,” I thought to myself. A differential lock forces both wheels to turn in unison, regardless of the traction or loss of it, available to either wheel. Had I maintained it, I could’ve gotten out almost right away.
“Gotta walk to Marion’s shovel at the house,” I thought. “Nice night for it though.” Knowing it was an aluminum grain shovel shortened the 200-yard walk, as a shovel like that is the absolute best tool to have for manually removing snow, I think. What makes it even better is having someone else use it -- but that was not happening in this situation, and then there was the matter of the long walk back.
Returning in short order, hope against hope, the tractor hadn’t gotten itself out; so I set to work digging through the white stuff; some of its consistency like grains of sugar, some of it like blocks of chalk. Easy does it.
You know, a lot of old people like me die, shoveling snow. I’m quite aware of the risks, so I don’t hurry much. If it’s a situation like this one, throwing myself into a bunch of hard physical work I’m not used to doing, can lead to a heart attack or stroke. The only sane thing to do is phone for help.
Otherwise, take your time and rest when you need it. Dig a little, rest a little. Try not to ingest tons of cold arctic air into your lungs. Cover your mouth and nose, even with the palms of your hands. On cold days, I wear a full length baclava-type facemask and breathe through that as much as I can.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, of digging, although I wasn’t gasping for breath, I took a shot of my Albuterol inhaler that I use for my asthma and felt great for the rest of the night; it really improved things. I don’t over use it.
I called Joe to help me, who doesn’t live too far from where I live. He was home, so I asked him to drive to my house and get my pickup for me, which in this case, was not enough to pull it out. Due to prior family commitments he had made, I had him drive me back to my house so he could go home and I could return with more tools.
Before I went back to the tractor, I took a few potassium tablets, drank a good sixteen ounces of water to refill my electrolytes I had sweated out shoveling, and ate a plate of food my wife had cooked for me. I had the presence of mind to grab two headlamps
I had bought in Florida last year with Jerry, when we went to Harbor Freight. He had told me they only cost three dollars each -- and they work most of the time, so I grabbed two.
It was a nice night. The temperature was about 10 above and there was no real wind. A yard light by the shop shone, fifty or so yards away, so things weren’t in complete darkness.
I was wearing a black Guinness stocking cap Jerry had given me that he said he had bought in Dublin when he and Marion were there while on a sailing trip one of those years. He said he had thought of me when he purchased it; wearing it frequently as the years came on. He gave the cap to me after a welding job we had completed last spring, adding, “You might want to wash it first.”
Well, I did that of course, as it had seen the bottom side of a quite a few field cultivators, and harrows as it braved welding sparks from under the protection of his welding helmet. It cleaned up pretty good considering its history, but I think there’s something residual of Jerry woven through it as I get some pretty good 'Jerry-rig' ideas when I wear it, as happened while studying my stuck tractor dilemma located almost out the door of his welding shop.
“Wrap the chain around the wheel that spins, eh,” I could practically hear him say. “It’ll give it better grip.”
“Hmmm,” I thought. “That could work...”
I had a thirty-foot high tensile strength chain, that cousin Gene had given me years ago, that is light and handy in most circumstances, so I wrapped it around the tire and rim to start, tied a knot into it, then began pushing it through slots between the hub and the wheel, serpentine-like, until I had gone all the way around.
Looking at my work again, I dug the snow away to the gravel of the road on both sides of that wheel, then spent another ten minutes or so shoveling snow away from the front wheels and underneath the tractor even more, trying to eliminate as much resistance to forward and backward motion as I could; the tractor, all the while, idling happily along.
I was glad I had put fifteen more gallons of fuel in it before I left home. This tractor is so fuel efficient with its little Perkins 4-cylinder diesel engine, it could idle all night long if need be and still have plenty of fuel to get me back home in the morning.
I stuck the shovel in a nearby snowpile, then climbed up onto the seat. Making sure the snowblower was up out of the way, I put the tractor into high-side first gear and slowly gave it a try--and it did move ahead a little. Then I put it into reverse, and moved a foot or two that direction.
Having a two-wheel drive tractor versus a four-wheel drive tractor is a big disadvantage, as per this example. Not that a person can’t get a four wheel drive tractor stuck too; but having two relatively useless front wheels to push or pull against like I was having to do, doesn’t make the job any easier.
So after that, I got hopeful. I had the tractor lurching at least, when the hook end of the knotted part of the chain came loose from along the tire and began striking the fender now and again.
Not wanting to break momentum after all the work I had done, I just let it happen, “THWUMP” . . . “THWUMP,” I hear it hit the fender somewhere. I glanced at the fender, but it didn’t look bad for wear and tear considering it was being loudly bludgeoned with chain.
When back and forth momentum was at its greatest, and it was very apparent I wasn’t going to be going backwards, I just drove forwards through the drift ahead of me into uncharted territory and kept it moving, the right rear wheel driving too at times, then the left again, virtually swimming it out and back onto the road by the shop.
“I’M OUT!!” I shouted to no one there; save Jerry maybe, standing invisibly by the door of his long-shuttered shop. I called my wife right away because I know she worries about me when I'm working alone somewhere, and called the nearby neighbor, still in Roseau, who had expressed with some sincerity he was sad he wasn’t available to help me. It was then that I saw that my success had come at the expense of a LED headlight and an amber marker light. Maybe I had been lucky not to have been hit by the chain myself.
But there was still the matter of the chain around the wheel, so now high and dry below the shop light there, I pulled off my gloves and started disconnecting the part of the chain that had remained tight, pulling its length from around the tire and rim, its whole width, until I got to the knotted end and began working at the tight little knot, still using my cold bare fingers on such a relatively mild night in February.
Looking at my hands at work, I thought about people working alone with chains and equipment, outdoors in the dead of winter, with very little light to help them see, except perhaps a kerosene lantern, a Coleman gas lantern, headlights of a vehicle, or the radiance of the moon and its glow against the snow. I thought of specific people too, many whom have walked-on from around our area of Wannaska and elsewhere, even if I didn’t know them personally.
I could imagine men’s hard-looking whiskered faces, or those with beards, under felt caps with earflaps, or hand-knitted woolen tuques; people whose sun-darkened necks were covered by the collars of heavy sweaters, enwrapped by scarves, or just by thin, well-worn, sweatshirts under dirty denim coveralls, canvas chore jackets; wool makinaws and bibs, the people standing or crouching as silhouettes, their feet in felt shoes and galoshes, knee-high insulated boots, Sorels, uninsulated leather workboots, cowboy boots, even tennis shoes; men and woman alike, hitching trace chains to wagons, securing loads to bobsleds, draping tire chains over tractor tires, securing corral gates; doing anything the situation demanded for what needed to be done right then.
I wrapped the chain around the front grill guard on the little tractor, looping it a few times, round and round, until I was confident it would stay there. I zipped up my vest collar, pulled my Guinness cap down over my ears, snuggled the baclava hood over that, its facemask over my mouth and nose; and, loosing the inside earflaps of my red & black plaid insulated cap, pulled that down over it all, then over that, my outside tie- down earflaps so I had but a slit to see through.
Saving the best til last, I got my headlamp working after a few tries, and secured it tight to the top of my cap. Zipping up my jacket to my chin, slipping on both my gloves, I put the tractor into road gear and headed home, two miles by road away, my only light a headlamp.
“Are you stuck again?” the young neighbor man joked when I called him Monday evening, because I had called him last Thursday morning for just that very reason when Chairman Joe and I found ourselves unexpectedly stationary, in a ditch bank. This neighbor has some big pickups and tractors, and has offered his help in the past, should I have issues.
That morning, we were in Joe's car on 210th Avenue NE, and its intersection with 450th Street NE, in Marshall County, Minnesota, known to locals and county highway engineers as Marshall County Highway 48, three miles west of Honker Flats Greenhouse, which is, as a landmark, approximately 13 miles, west southwest, where the neighbor I called lives as I do myself, a mile north of him.
"Hello neighbor!" the neighbor had said cheerfully, on Monday, after reading the caller ID on his phone.
"Would you happen to be home?" I queried, tentatively.
He said, he wasn’t. He was at Super-One buying dozens of cupcakes for his little daughter’s Valentine Day party she was having at home that very afternoon. "Why?" he ventured, carefully.
"Well, Joe and I are stuck off a road ditch west of Thief Lake," I told him, trying to describe exactly where we were so he had an idea, remotely thinking that it wasn't all that far for him to drive, having a 'I'd do it for you' sort of thing playing out unsaid in my head, besides we'd pay him for his trouble.
He said he had other errands and plans and that he was sorry, but he wouldn't be home for a couple hours, at least. I understood. What had I been thinking?
Oh well, it was a long shot. Somebody will be by here eventually, even if only on a snowmobile. Joe had recently purchased Triple A Insurance, but it wasn't in force yet, so typical tow charges this far from anywhere reeled as big dollar signs in his head. We would just wait it out. Maybe Big Foot would walk by . . .
Nonetheless, after shoveling for 45 minutes, we were rescued at long last by a passing mailman, who, serendipitously, I had known at the toy facory where I had worked for over 30 years; and despite that had offered to pull us from our predicament with his Jeep. That took all of fifteen seconds, including the time to hook the vehicles together.
Check out the whole story in The Blogings of Chairman Joe: “It Could’ve Been Worse.” http://goodoldjoe.blogspot.com/
“Yes, I am stuck again,” I answered the neighbor. “I am related to Gene Palm, one of your relation as well, who is notorious for getting stuck when he is visiting up here, but this time I am less than a mile from your house. Is it possible you could maybe assist me?”
“You’re where?” I remember saying to him on my cellphone. “You're picking up how many bales of toilet paper? Uffda . . . There’s a lot of that flu stuff going around. Hope your folks get over their illnesses. Well, if you have time. Don’t make any special trip.”
I was stuck in the snow with my tractor. I was just off the northwest corner of Jerry’s shop where there’s a 10-cord stack of poplar sticks that have been awaiting the buzzsaw since last summer. I was just finishing working on the shoulder of the road, just opposite his shop, driving in reverse with my snowblower, when right side of the tractor slid into the shallow ditch and got stuck.
The tractor was leaning a little, its right side hard against the snow. I didn’t think there was any problem as I don’t often get stuck with it in the wintertime, (Don’t ask me about mud.) but when I tried to back out with the snowblower high off the ground, the left side rear wheel spun, and the right side wheel didn’t. I tried to push the differential lock pedal down, but it wouldn’t move.
“Oh yeah, that doesn’t work! Damn! I could use it now,” I thought to myself. A differential lock forces both wheels to turn in unison, regardless of the traction or loss of it, available to either wheel. Had I maintained it, I could’ve gotten out almost right away.
“Gotta walk to Marion’s shovel at the house,” I thought. “Nice night for it though.” Knowing it was an aluminum grain shovel shortened the 200-yard walk, as a shovel like that is the absolute best tool to have for manually removing snow, I think. What makes it even better is having someone else use it -- but that was not happening in this situation, and then there was the matter of the long walk back.
Returning in short order, hope against hope, the tractor hadn’t gotten itself out; so I set to work digging through the white stuff; some of its consistency like grains of sugar, some of it like blocks of chalk. Easy does it.
You know, a lot of old people like me die, shoveling snow. I’m quite aware of the risks, so I don’t hurry much. If it’s a situation like this one, throwing myself into a bunch of hard physical work I’m not used to doing, can lead to a heart attack or stroke. The only sane thing to do is phone for help.
Otherwise, take your time and rest when you need it. Dig a little, rest a little. Try not to ingest tons of cold arctic air into your lungs. Cover your mouth and nose, even with the palms of your hands. On cold days, I wear a full length baclava-type facemask and breathe through that as much as I can.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, of digging, although I wasn’t gasping for breath, I took a shot of my Albuterol inhaler that I use for my asthma and felt great for the rest of the night; it really improved things. I don’t over use it.
I called Joe to help me, who doesn’t live too far from where I live. He was home, so I asked him to drive to my house and get my pickup for me, which in this case, was not enough to pull it out. Due to prior family commitments he had made, I had him drive me back to my house so he could go home and I could return with more tools.
Before I went back to the tractor, I took a few potassium tablets, drank a good sixteen ounces of water to refill my electrolytes I had sweated out shoveling, and ate a plate of food my wife had cooked for me. I had the presence of mind to grab two headlamps
I had bought in Florida last year with Jerry, when we went to Harbor Freight. He had told me they only cost three dollars each -- and they work most of the time, so I grabbed two.
It was a nice night. The temperature was about 10 above and there was no real wind. A yard light by the shop shone, fifty or so yards away, so things weren’t in complete darkness.
I was wearing a black Guinness stocking cap Jerry had given me that he said he had bought in Dublin when he and Marion were there while on a sailing trip one of those years. He said he had thought of me when he purchased it; wearing it frequently as the years came on. He gave the cap to me after a welding job we had completed last spring, adding, “You might want to wash it first.”
Well, I did that of course, as it had seen the bottom side of a quite a few field cultivators, and harrows as it braved welding sparks from under the protection of his welding helmet. It cleaned up pretty good considering its history, but I think there’s something residual of Jerry woven through it as I get some pretty good 'Jerry-rig' ideas when I wear it, as happened while studying my stuck tractor dilemma located almost out the door of his welding shop.
“Wrap the chain around the wheel that spins, eh,” I could practically hear him say. “It’ll give it better grip.”
“Hmmm,” I thought. “That could work...”
I had a thirty-foot high tensile strength chain, that cousin Gene had given me years ago, that is light and handy in most circumstances, so I wrapped it around the tire and rim to start, tied a knot into it, then began pushing it through slots between the hub and the wheel, serpentine-like, until I had gone all the way around.
Looking at my work again, I dug the snow away to the gravel of the road on both sides of that wheel, then spent another ten minutes or so shoveling snow away from the front wheels and underneath the tractor even more, trying to eliminate as much resistance to forward and backward motion as I could; the tractor, all the while, idling happily along.
I was glad I had put fifteen more gallons of fuel in it before I left home. This tractor is so fuel efficient with its little Perkins 4-cylinder diesel engine, it could idle all night long if need be and still have plenty of fuel to get me back home in the morning.
I stuck the shovel in a nearby snowpile, then climbed up onto the seat. Making sure the snowblower was up out of the way, I put the tractor into high-side first gear and slowly gave it a try--and it did move ahead a little. Then I put it into reverse, and moved a foot or two that direction.
Having a two-wheel drive tractor versus a four-wheel drive tractor is a big disadvantage, as per this example. Not that a person can’t get a four wheel drive tractor stuck too; but having two relatively useless front wheels to push or pull against like I was having to do, doesn’t make the job any easier.
So after that, I got hopeful. I had the tractor lurching at least, when the hook end of the knotted part of the chain came loose from along the tire and began striking the fender now and again.
Not wanting to break momentum after all the work I had done, I just let it happen, “THWUMP” . . . “THWUMP,” I hear it hit the fender somewhere. I glanced at the fender, but it didn’t look bad for wear and tear considering it was being loudly bludgeoned with chain.
When back and forth momentum was at its greatest, and it was very apparent I wasn’t going to be going backwards, I just drove forwards through the drift ahead of me into uncharted territory and kept it moving, the right rear wheel driving too at times, then the left again, virtually swimming it out and back onto the road by the shop.
“I’M OUT!!” I shouted to no one there; save Jerry maybe, standing invisibly by the door of his long-shuttered shop. I called my wife right away because I know she worries about me when I'm working alone somewhere, and called the nearby neighbor, still in Roseau, who had expressed with some sincerity he was sad he wasn’t available to help me. It was then that I saw that my success had come at the expense of a LED headlight and an amber marker light. Maybe I had been lucky not to have been hit by the chain myself.
But there was still the matter of the chain around the wheel, so now high and dry below the shop light there, I pulled off my gloves and started disconnecting the part of the chain that had remained tight, pulling its length from around the tire and rim, its whole width, until I got to the knotted end and began working at the tight little knot, still using my cold bare fingers on such a relatively mild night in February.
Looking at my hands at work, I thought about people working alone with chains and equipment, outdoors in the dead of winter, with very little light to help them see, except perhaps a kerosene lantern, a Coleman gas lantern, headlights of a vehicle, or the radiance of the moon and its glow against the snow. I thought of specific people too, many whom have walked-on from around our area of Wannaska and elsewhere, even if I didn’t know them personally.
I could imagine men’s hard-looking whiskered faces, or those with beards, under felt caps with earflaps, or hand-knitted woolen tuques; people whose sun-darkened necks were covered by the collars of heavy sweaters, enwrapped by scarves, or just by thin, well-worn, sweatshirts under dirty denim coveralls, canvas chore jackets; wool makinaws and bibs, the people standing or crouching as silhouettes, their feet in felt shoes and galoshes, knee-high insulated boots, Sorels, uninsulated leather workboots, cowboy boots, even tennis shoes; men and woman alike, hitching trace chains to wagons, securing loads to bobsleds, draping tire chains over tractor tires, securing corral gates; doing anything the situation demanded for what needed to be done right then.
I wrapped the chain around the front grill guard on the little tractor, looping it a few times, round and round, until I was confident it would stay there. I zipped up my vest collar, pulled my Guinness cap down over my ears, snuggled the baclava hood over that, its facemask over my mouth and nose; and, loosing the inside earflaps of my red & black plaid insulated cap, pulled that down over it all, then over that, my outside tie- down earflaps so I had but a slit to see through.
Saving the best til last, I got my headlamp working after a few tries, and secured it tight to the top of my cap. Zipping up my jacket to my chin, slipping on both my gloves, I put the tractor into road gear and headed home, two miles by road away, my only light a headlamp.
Fabulously, sedulously, irrevocably, unquestionably, imperatively, indefinitely, inexorably, perilously, irreparably, indissolubly, felicitously, narratively, unequivocally - himself utterly - our WannaskaWriter.
ReplyDeleteYou do me a great honor, sir. Thank you for your comment.
DeleteLike Wednesday's Child says. I agree.
ReplyDeleteBut it was not a "mild" night at all.
It was a freeze-the-balls-off-a-brass-monkey Northwest Minnesota night.
I know, I was there, but had to run home for family matters.
How convenient.