May 13, 2021 Mother's Day Mud Hole

Mother's Day Mud Hole

It’s been a dry spring here in Wannaska. Farm work is all but done given the ideal working conditions. We currently lack moisture, but in this country we know to specify the amount of rain we need when we wish and pray for rain, adding at the end, ”... if it knows when to stop.”

The wife watched a tornado of top soil whip cross a neighbor’s field and through the imprint of what used to be a small woods. The Redwing blackbirds act desperate for cattail fronds to build their nests among. Although our yard is the single green oasis in six hundred and forty acres of woods and fields surrounding it, it will be a few weeks before I have to mow it. The Wannaska Forestry sign warns of VERY HIGH fire danger in big black letters against a florescent orange background.

Still, I managed to find that one wet spot in all this with my two-wheel drive Massey-Ferguson tractor with an old Bush Hog mower on behind, and of course got stuck, as per tradition every spring.

I am something close to my 70th birthday, it being one of those milestone birthdays on which I may take a solo trip ‘somewhere’ behind the wheel of my Subaru Legacy Outback for a few days, but, in the meantime, I must contemplate a reliable error in judgement behind the wheel of my tractor that I certainly can’t afford to have driving my car; I can’t blame it on age either for I’ve been doing it for years. Whereas I may have had a few traffic accidents in my life, my vehicular adventures on the farm have exceeded them in scope and frequency and sadly aging has nothing to do with it.

In this case, I had mulched a small field near my deer stand and had happily completed the task with the idea of moving onto the next when I went down a narrow trail leading off of it toward a oxbow off Mikinaak Creek. Signs of water at a low crossing were obvious; I knew not to attempt to go through there, (That’d be foolish) so I turned onto an adjoining trail above the spot by sixty-some yards, where the trail entered a drier area of the oxbow, ‘thinking’ that instead of turning around and going back the way I came, I could just edge around it, but . . .

It’s always those very short distances that tempt me enough to ignore the past and obliterate the memory of these experiences in which the follow-thru of this action doesn’t end pleasantly. It’s exactly why any notion of being a bank-robber, or soldier, wouldn’t have been the best career decision for me to have made, given such a penchant for making repetitive errors. Fortunately, I could see the graffiti on the wall concerning the previous two, but getting the tractor stuck every year, almost, is still a blind spot on my part.
 

I tried to pull the tractor out using the pick up, to no avail.

 I’ve  always wished I had a big winch on the front of my tractor, after the fact, this time being no exception. When I bought my first four-wheel drive vehicle in 1972, a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40, my dad counseled me not to spend the extra money on a winch. He said that it would only encourage me to go places I shouldn’t go anyway. I always remembered his advice -- and since, regretted listening to him because I got stuck with the Toyota so many times afterward, when I could’ve used it. Having a winch would've prevented hours of back-breaking labor and the loss of often a great deal of time. ARGH. The thing is, I haven't bought one yet.

I had to try everything I could to get out of my dilemma by myself before I called a neighbor to help me. I unhooked from the Bush Hog mower and used my 4x4 pickup, with a 40-foot tow strap and a length of chain to pull the unit backwards and out of the way. I used my chainsaw to widen a track through the small woodlot the Massey was close to, cutting down dead trees, and logs buried under the grass and stacking them aside in case I would have to get a bigger tractor in that way. I went around to the front of the tractor since the front wheels were on firmer ground. With Chairman Joe’s help, I tried to pull the tractor out using the pick up, to no avail.

I stuck cobs of wood in the deep ruts ahead and behind the rear wheels to maybe climb up on, but even so the deep-cleated mud-filled tractor tires just spun against them. Chairman Joe pointed out to me that the tractor tires and the cobs were both round, so the tires had no grip. Never recognized that! Sure made me regret I hadn't cut the wood cobs square. This time-costly mistake proving that once again, "Two heads are better than one." (A woman would've seen that long before too, I'll bet. I'm so dense sometimes . . .)

I even tried chaining cross logs to the wheels ahead of the fenders, so they would bring the rear tires up out of the muck, but the front wheels of the tractor came off the ground too much for my liking and I quit before things got dangerous. In an attempt to limit its ascent, I tried chaining the front end to a tree about fifteen feet away, but I couldn’t get low enough on the trunk to make it effective enough.

It had worked before, several years ago. I had chained logs on the wheels like that on a wet field and got out on my own, but until I tried it recently, I forgotten that I had chained the front end to the rear of my Toyota pickup, and starting the truck, put the truck in first gear, in super low, at idle; so when the front end lifted it was limited by the short chain on the truck, and both the truck and the tractor moving incrementally forward at the same time; I had to jump off the tractor at the right moment and kill the engine on the truck before the logs started up toward the back of the fenders and demolished them. That time, everything worked out great -- this time, not so good.

I had to call the neighbor finally, apologizing for bothering him during spring planting to help me out of the mud, but he assured me he could get me out should his Case tractor with front-wheel assist be sufficient to do the job. He has two much bigger tractors, but both were likely busy on fields someplace. I had completely forgotten about Sunday being Mother’s Day, but the neighbor seemed genuinely glad to help me despite “ ... the house being full of grand kids.”

The neighbor assured me he could get me out should his Case tractor with front-wheel assist be sufficient to do the job."

It took him longer to back the Case in through the trees close to where the old sun-bleached Massey sat in muck up to its differential, than it did for him to pull it and its fifty-feet of chain, up and out. I wished I had filmed it.

Afterward, him declining any notion of payment for his services, I invited him to sit his own differential down at a picnic table near the house, so we could visit a bit over a refreshment. 

I’ve truly enjoyed becoming reacquainted with this gentleman and his family over the past couple years. With my retirement from the toy factory almost four years ago now, and his retirement from the seven-day-a-week slog of dairy farming we’ve found the time to get to know one another, and I think, discover quite a number of common interests we never knew existed. I’ve often written about the rather unique situation our two families share in Palmville, being neighbors and friends, however distant through the generations, since 1897. Interesting stuff.

When I told him about chaining logs to the rear wheels, he said, “Dad said that Earnest Ingebrigtson tried that one time and stood his tractor straight up in the air until he got the clutch pushed in and got it back down. It could’ve tipped back over on him.”

Earnest should’ve had a winch ....