Category: The Crazy-Ass Summer Of 99

You’re dad is cut and bleeding, son, what do you do?

Hop in the farm truck and throw it in Gear 2…

“Schlop! Schlop! Schlop!”

That was odd…last time I had heard that noise, it was the sound made by an over-zealous (and hotly contested) kiss shared by two star-crossed lovers. Yet there I was, in the middle of a Kansan field, working on an irrigation motor with my dad. And we sure the heck weren’t doin’ no kissin’…

“Uh, son, I think I might have cut myself.”

I turned around to see Dad, sitting flat on his ass on the ground next to the pipe running from the pump to the underground riser.

“Geez, Dad, how the hell did you end up on your butt?”

“I, uh, must have slipped in the mud, and tried to catch myself on that,” came his lightly dazed response.

My eyes followed to where he was pointing, a smaller pipe protruding from the larger one, the one which fed coolant back to the motor.

Then my eyes retraced their path, back to his pointing finger suspended in mid-air.

“Schlop! Schlop! Schlop!”

There was that sound again! But this time I could clearly see from whence it came: Dad’s right palm had a huge gash in it and it was pumping out blood like an Apocalyptic Old Faithful or something.

“Oh. ----- . You did cut yourself. I better get you to the Emergency Room ASAP!”

But first, my curiosity had to be sated. My eyes followed their original path once again, and landed on what must have inflected so much damage to his hand.

“Those rascally adjustable steel clamps–they’ll getchya every time…” I half-chuckled to myself.

But then, my attention abruptly jerked back to the copious amount of blood he was losing, and I realized he was barely clinging to consciousness. Not even thinking about it, I grabbed the nearest greasy rag I could find and, dodging the intermittent spurts, managed to get it wrapped around his hand and got the flow at least partially under control.

“Hold onto this for a sec–be right back!” I hollered over my shoulder as I scrambled to Big Red, our Ford F350 flatbed diesel work pickup, and rummaged through our unorganized pile of parts, tools, and supplies on the back.

“Hah! It’s a miracle! I found it!” I came trotting back to where he still sat on the ground, victoriously holding aloft the farmer’s fix-all: a fresh roll of Duck-Tape.

“It’s okay, I’m a future doctor…” Apparently, I thought it to be the perfect time to bust out my best Dana Sculley¹From the hit Fox television show, The X-Files. impression as I secured that greasy rag slightly tighter around his gaping flesh wound.

“Alright, now let’s get this blood-bath in Big Red and get you to the ER…”

“Stay with me! Dang it Dad, don’t make me smack you again!”

As it turned out that the Duck-Tape was only doing so much, and I was relying on Dad to stay conscious enough to keep pressure on his make-shift bandage.

“Can’t…you…go…any…fa–” as his words trailed off, I did the only things a son like me could do in a situation like this: smacked his jowly cheeks hard enough to help him keep his eyes open.

Now here’s the irony of all this: flashback to right about 10 years earlier in 1989, when I had broke my arm while staying on the ranch in New Mexico we had at the time. After he gave my arm the full Boy Scout treatment, he loaded me up and hauled tail to the nearest hospital in Raton. About half of that trip was on dirt roads, and when I say he hauled tail, he was hauling tail. I remember glancing at the speedometer from the back seat and seeing that we were pushing 80.

“Whoa, whoa! Geez, Dad, drive safe! My arm isn’t getting any more broken, and I really don’t want to get into accident on the way!”

Yes, I really said that. And yes, he was taking a very unnecessary risk going that fast on curvy dirt roads, even 8-year-old me could clearly see that.

“Dude, you listened to Alanis Morrisette way too much, didn’t you? You clearly don’t know what ‘ironic’ actually means…” you are indubitably uttering aloud right now.

Well, my friend, have you forgotten what year came 10 years after 1989? Yes, that’s right: 1999.

And in which season do you think all this was happening? If you said “summer,” you would be half right–the correct response would be “Crazy-Ass Summer.” (Hey, if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to the “The Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99”, then I suggest you go catch up here.)

One very important detail about that Summer that I’ve yet to share was that Big Red had, shall we say, a slight transmission problem. And it was perhaps this that really made that summer “interesting.”

Okay, so where we now? Oh yeah: Dad’s trying to slur the phrase “Can’t you go any faster?”, and I’m concordantly smacking the sh*t out of him.

I may claim that it was to keep him awake, but deep down, I know I was boxing his overgrown ears because he was harassing me about driving too slow to the hospital, as if it were my fault.

Did I want to be driving that speed? Heck, no! I honestly thought I was going to see my dad bleed out and die right there in the pickup with me.

But what could I do? Had he got the Big Red’s transmission fixed, then maybe–just maybe–we would’ve been able to drive faster than 28 mph, if ever the urgent crisis did arise.

But nooooooo, we were stuck with driving all over Morton County in 2nd gear that entire summer, and now it was all culminating with this, an actual life-or-death situation,

I tell you what, even though it was only 19.8 miles to the hospital (which Dad could have covered in a mere 15 minutes going 80, no doubt), that was the longest 42 minutes of my life.

Good news, I was able to get him there before he bled out, and, after 23 stitches and shot of antibiotic, he was back in the field by then end of the day.

Of course, with him unable to really use his right hand, that meant I was back in the field by the end of the day, doing all the work for both of us…

Now, for entertainment’s sake, I truly believe it’s worth noting here the other headaches and amusements that Big Red’s busted tranny provided for us that summer.

First, there’s the obvious problem of only being able to get into 2nd gear and therefore having to tut from field to field at around 30 mph. The fields that Dad, The Bard,²the friend and classmate who helped us our regularly that summer and I had to service back then were spread all over MoCo³I’m trying to make Morton County sound “hip”. so this really was a drag, man.

If we were ending our day on the other side of the county, near the Colorado state line, then just getting back home would take at least an hour. And driving that slow can mentally wear you out–I don’t recall a single time that the Bard and I went somewhere together where the non-driver wasn’t passed the ----- out by the time we reached our destination.

Verily, one time we were so intent on both of us staying awake, that we decided to take advantage of the fact that our route included a stretch of highway that was under construction, and therefore had plenty of those bright orange and white safety barrels off to one side of the road. But what made this trip so special was that we “just happened” to have some long heavy pipe that was “accidentally” sticking out about 5-6 feet from the edge of Big Red’s flatbed.

So it was a real shame then that I “just happened” to knock over 12 of the 14 barrels I passed with that pipe.

What was even more of a shame was that the Bard nailed all 14 of the ones we passed after we switched players–er, I mean “drivers” halfway through…

Wait. Let me just back up a moment. I forgot to tell you the best part: we couldn’t back up.

You read that right: a farm truck. With no reverse.

Whenever we went to town for parts or lunch, we always had to be very mindful not to pull into a traditional parking spot like a normal human being. Nope, we always had to find some spot off to the side where we could parallel park.

There were a few times that the driver forgot, so you can bet that it was the Bard and I out front comically pushing the truck backwards with Dad steering in those situations.

Even worse than the occasional city-folk parking problem was just day-to-day farming. For example, have you ever tried to hitch up a trailer to your truck without backing up? Didn’t think so. Yet, we had to figure out a way, and yes, it usually involved an unnecessary amount of manual labor on the part of the Bard and me.

And of course, there was the mud issue: it’s not uncommon throughout the regular course of farmin’ that one gets their vehicle stuck in a patch of wet dirt (aka “mud”). Now, ordinarily you would get out of that pickle by alternating between Drive and Reverse, and eventually you will rock yourself onto a spot where you can gain some traction. But did we have that luxury? Noooo. It was only “Forward, Ho!” for us.

Ahh…good times, good times…

Well, y’all, the point of the story really comes down to this: just get your sh*t fixed when it breaks, will you? Sure, relying on a half-assed transmission will provide your son with some interesting dysfunctional farm storied with which he can regale his city-slicker friends 20 years down the road. That’s all fine and dandy.

But then again, instead of bequeathing him with fun and cheeky tales, you just might very well easily burden him with the lifelong trauma of seeing his parent bleed to death while he hauls your tail to the ER at 28 mph.

“Dang it Dad, don’t make me smack you again…”

Content created on: 18/19 February (Fri/Sat)

“We need your tractor. NOW, MOTHER ----- !”

I got to admit, this was not how I imagined my first tractor-jacking would go. I’ll tell you what though: don’t believe Hollywood’s lies. It’s not nearly as romantic as they make it look in the movies…

Of course. Of course.

Of course the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99 would have to include forcefully commandeering another man’s farming implement. Exciting as that was, though, that only accounted for ~20% of the sh*t that went down that particular day…

But before we go any further, you really should get caught up on last week’s post if you haven’t already.

Yes, that’s right…click riiiiiiight HERE.

It’s okay. I’ll wait.

…

…

..

Okay, all caught up to speed now? But just in case you have the memory of the goldfish, let’s review:

The Bard–my partner in grime during the Summer of ’99–and I were helping my dad harvest the wheat from the two adjacent fields shown in Figure 1 below:

One important thing not shown on this map is that the Cimarron National Grasslands was kitty-corner adjacent to the southeast of Field 2. Not that anything with words National and Grass in its name would be important to this story or anything…

Anyway, in our attempt to burn the stubble in Field 1, The Bard & I nearly set Field 2 on fire. Despite our most valiant exhibition of “The Pimp Technique”, we were ultimately unsuccessful in putting out the unwanted inferno and had to be rescued by Dad, who successfully implemented the “Harvesting The Fire” method and saved Field 2 from premature destruction.

Or so we thought…

Where we last left off, we were all packed into the combine and halfway through taking care of Field 2, when, through my smoke-filled contact lenses, I spotted what looked like Haley’s Comet shoot out of the back of our mighty harvesting equipment.

And now, with Field 2 indubitably about to be ablaze, Dad gave us the very vague instructions to “get help” while he tried to speed-race through the field in an attempt to get as much grain–and therefore moneyz–into the bin before it all burned to the ground…

What do you when you’re in the middle of nowhere, before the age of cell phones, and your dad pleads with you to get help for the raging wildfire that is on the verge of devouring Morton County Kansas off the map?

Heck, I wouldn’t know!

So then it was a dang good thang The Bard had a good head on his shoulders, right? Upon receiving our marching orders from El Jefe, he drug my dazed and confused ass into our not-so-trusty work pickup¹Oh yeah, I should get around to explaining that whole situation some time. and started hauling tail due north on the Dusty-Ass Dirt Road.

About 3 or 4 miles up the road–which translates to ~15 tractor/combine miles, mind you–we were fortunate enough to spot a random farmer out a-plowing his field. The Bard took a hard right and straight-up tore tracks across this strangers freshly worked plot o’land to where he was just tuttin’ along, minding his own biz. We bailed out of the truck, barely waiting for him to stop the tractor before climbing halfway up to the cab.

As you can imagine, we were met by one very confused country folk-man, and I was actually a bit surprised that he didn’t hesitate to open the door for us.

“What you boys need? Is something wrong?”

Now, honestly, I can’t remember what The Bard said at this point, but I do confidently recall two things: 1) it sadly did not involve the dropping of the F-bomb, and 2) whatever he said was clearly and convincingly communicated, and before we knew it we were all kicking up dust in a ske-daddle rush back to the source of all that smoke brewing off yonder…

We rolled up to our Field 2 rendezvous point right about the same time as Dad, who, while in mid-air leaping off the combine, yelled to The Bard, “get in there and keep cutting, dammit!!!”²Dear The Bard, I actually don’t know if this is accurate, and maybe you can confirm or deny it. Though, I’m pretty certain I was on the fire-fighting tractor, and I can’t imagine Dad would have let the combine sit idle in the meantime.

To the other farmer, he simply said, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here,” as they swapped out, and once I was mostly inside the tractor cab, he threw it in gear and got down to business.

At this point, we were mostly cutting our losses on the wheat crop, and were just trying to minimize the collateral damage to things like, oh, I don’t know, ALL THE CONTINUOUS DRY GRASS IN SW KANSAS, SE COLORADO, AND THE OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE.³…and NE New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, too!

Don’t believe me? Just take a gander at this map I stole from an alternate timeline, outlining the hypothetical extent of our series of unfortunate events:⁴Source: https://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/colorado/comanche-national-grassland.php

Now, most plows aren’t meant to be dragged through the ground at speeds more than 3-5 mph,⁵Reference: https://www.quora.com/How-fast-mph-or-kph-does-a-farm-tractor-travel-when-plowing-planting-a-field-and-how-many-acres-can-this-be-done-in-one-1-hour but it turns out that you can get up to about 12 mph if you really need to. At least that’s what Dad taught me that not-so-fine day, as he made two laps around the perimeter of the field, saving the rest of the Continental United States that wasn’t a body of water from going up in smoke.

On the other hand, our “shallowly-buried irrigation pipe” that ran to the center of Field 2 in Figure 1? Well, we tried to save it, at least. I vividly remember wistfully looking out the tractor window as we vainly attempted to plow out a buffer along either side of it, only to see grotesquely twisted strips of melted plastic intermittently protruding from the ground, much like a broken bone sticking out of an arm or a leg…

Gratuitous and completely unnecessary analogy aside, that was actually a small price, given the potential consequences our escapades could have had, like, oh, say, MELTING ALL OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA OFF THE MAP.

“But how did you fare personally?” you kindly ask?

Surprisingly, by some miracle, we actually ended up losing very little of our precious wheat crop. And by “miracle” I mean the “level-headedness of The Bard, the executive action and thinking-on-his-feet of Dad, and the selfless-sacrifice-of-his-precious-agriculture-implement-without-a-second-thought of That Farmer Who I Had Never Met Before That Day.”

And while we’re here, you might as well give this crew a hearty thanks for, oh, I don’t know, SAVING THE ENTIRE ----- WORLD FROM BECOMING ONE GIANT FIREBALL.

Well, folks, my MasterClass in illustrating the rhetorical device of “hyperbole”⁶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole aside, the real point of the story is: avoid growing up on the farm at all costs if you can.

And if you can’t avoid that fate, for the love of the harvest gods, at least don’t drag your semi-city-slicker⁷Yes, Dear The Bard, back in those days, you very much qualified as a city slicker in my book. Oh how the tables have turned now. friends into your literal dumpster fires UNIVERSE-CONSUMING BLAZES.

As much as I would love to say at this point, “Whew, what a crazy day on the farm! I’m glad that’s over!”

Instead what I heard was: “Welp, now that we’re finished up here, time to head the next field of wheat and start cuttin’!” Dad proclaimed like any true-working-hard-af-farmer would.

Wait, what? This ----- day is “to be continued”?!?

Content created on 6/12/13 August 2021 (Fri/Thurs/Fri)

The field, the field, the field is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the mother ----- burn.

Burn mother ----- , burn…

“Smokey The Bear would be rolling in his grave if he could see us now.”

“First, now is not the time for your witty remarks, and two, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FOCUS ON YOUR PIMP TECHNIQUE!”

You wanna take a wild guess as to where this already-convoluted conversation took place?

That’s right: in the middle of Kansan wheat field…

Oh, the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, that rascal. The idea of me going off to college later that Fall was starting to look like a foregone conclusion: if I wanted a shot at a higher education, first I was going to have to survive all the shots The Farm took at me.

Now you may be under the impression from the Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Never Gets Tired and its sibling stories that these tribulations were by my hand, and my hand alone. Or perhaps you are perishing the thought that no one else out there has the honor and privilege of regaling their city-slicker friends with such anecdotes.

But take heart, my friend! Just like the catchy af slogan for the hip dating site onlyfarmers.com encouragingly informs us: “You don’t have to be lonely!”

And guess what?!? As you probably inferred from the ursine-of-PSA-fame-referencing, misogynistic-slang-dropping, semi-historically accurate conversation above, I wasn’t always alone/lonely in my existential struggle with our family agricultural enterprise. Sometimes there were witnesses. Or accomplices, depending on how you look at it.

Either way, my main partner in grime was The Bard,¹Not his real name, and frankly, an uncreative alias. But I felt if I took this line of nicknaming one step further and called you–yes, I know you are reading this–Billy S.S., that it would be a bit too much to ask people to figure out that it was a derived reference to William ShakeSpeare–another name for The Bard (of Avon), of course. So…that explains all that. a fiend since our days in Kindergarten, fellow fresh graduate of Rolla High School, and, if things went well, future brother-in-law.

In addition to us dating a pair of Amazonian sisters that were both taller than either of us, The Bard would occasionally help me and my dad out on the farm that summer. And since this tale finds us in the thick of wheat harvest, he was naturally part of our 3-man harvest crew.

We were literally in the middle of harvesting two of our adjacent fields when things got, er…”interesting”. For context, I’ve drawn a little map of these fields, because these details will matter later on:

We had just finished up harvesting Field 1, and The Bard and I, the peons that we were, were tasked with performing a controlled burn of the wheat stubble, while Dad took the combine over to start cutting Field 2. Simple enough right? Since the stubble was surrounded on all side by either a road or dirt (see Figure 1), all we had to was just light a match and watch the whole thing burn to the ground.

Oh, that critical part about “surrounded by roads and dirt”? I need to make one tiny correction. Of all that’s going on in Figure 1, I would like to draw your attention to that Wee bit of overlap. Here, much like a Venn Diagram, Field 1 and Field 2 shared not an infinitesimally short border of a single point as they should have in a geometrically perfect world, but instead had about 50 ft. of common border.

But really, how much trouble could 50 ft. give us anyways?

Uh…turns out a lot. Let’s just say our attempt at “controlled burn” spun out of control pretty quickly:

“Oh man, the fire is moving quicker towards Field 2 than I expected,” one of us noted with a bit of concern.

“Yeah…no, we’re about to be in over our heads if we don’t slow it down,” the other responded.

“Oh. Sh*t. Too late!”

“Uhhh…grab whatever you can from the pickup–we need something to beat it out with!”

“I think you meant to say ‘with which to beat it out’.”

“NOT NOW, DUDE! You pedantic ----- sucker…”

Moments later, the both of us found ourselves with faces of full of smoke, furiously trying to smack out the flames with burlap work coats we had found behind the seat. Yup, you heard me right: we were using the lesser-known yet surprisingly effective “Pimp Technique” to fight our fiery foe: beating it like it owed us money.

Not that I would recommend it to anyone though: given that the fire was less than arm-lengths away, we also had the delightful privilege of enduring moderate-to-severe smoke inhalation, and what felt like 3rd-degree sunburns. Yet we persisted.

It’s not like we had a ----- choice in the matter, now did we?

“We’re losing the battle! Go get Dad while I stay here and keep beating it!” I hollered over to The Bard.

The Bard scampered back to the pickup, but didn’t get the respite from the smoke he was indubitably hoping for. Nay–and lucky for us–Nostru-Dad-us had actually already foreseen the potential shenanigans in our future and had been keeping a side-eye on us. Sensing that a hub-bub was most likely afoot, Dad was halfway across the field, hauling ballz in the combine in our general direction.

When he got there, Dad–being the problem-solver he was–lowered the combine all the way down til it was scraping dirt, and started cutting as much of the blazing stubble as close to the ground as he could. Fortunately, after a few passes in the Overlap Zone he had it all under control. My Dude had literally saved our bacon.

I was so happy that I found myself crying tears of joy.

No, wait. Those weren’t joyful tears. My eyes were watering like one of Kansas City’s many beautiful ----- fountains, all thanks to the copious amount of smoke that had gotten all up in my contact lenses business while I had been busy Big-Pimpin’…

“Great balls of fire! Uhh…guys, I think we might have a problem…”

My smoky eyes might have rendered me largely sightless and useless, but I was pretty sure about what I had just seen.

With our fire-fighting duties fulfilled, The Bard and I had nothing to do, so there we were, the two of us crammed in the cab of the combine with Dad. How did we perform such a Tetris-Level-20-like feat, you may ask. Well, The Bard got to enjoy the privileges of the extra mini-seat found therein, while I, on the other hand, contorted myself into the only space left: the floor of the cab with my back against the front window.

And thanks to my rear-facing position, I was able to spot what sure the hell looked a lot like a meteor go whizzing out of the back of the combine.

Upon hearing my cry of consternation, Dad whipped our trusty implement around, and sure enough, there was a tiny, tiny patch of fresh stubble burning mere meters behind us. Apparently, some of the burning stubble that Dad had “harvested” early had just been smoldering somewhere deep inside the combine for the previous two hours, and finally decided to make a dramatic exit out the rear, a la a fire-breathing dragon.

Okay, so, maybe not a fire-breathing dragon. More like a fire-farting dragon.

“Oh. Oh sh*t.”

You know it’s never a good sign when you hear your dad’s voice tinged with panic. In this case, Dad was probably panicking because now he had a fire in the middle of Field 2, which was only half okay.

Sure, the 50% of Field 2 that was now stubble needed to burn sooner or later.

But the other 50%? It was still Amber Waves of Grain. By my calculations, that was about $9136.80 about to go up in smoke.²On July 12, 1999, wheat was selling for about $2.43/bushel. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-chart-data. The average per-acre yield for Kansas in 1999, was around 47 bushels. Source: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/k3569432s/ft848s81t/37720f99x/CropProdSu-01-12-2000.pdf And for you yungen’s out there, that’s approximately $14,900.55 worth of today’s coin.³Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1999?amount=9136.80

That was no bueno. No bueno AT ALL.

We all paused for a moment in a state of shock as we watched that tiny, tiny patch quickly grew into a monstrous beast. Then Dad snapped out of it.

“Okay, I’m going to try to speed-cut as much of the remaining wheat as I can before it burns to the ground. I need you two to…well, fuck, I don’t know what exactly I need you to do–just go get help!”

To be continued…(yes, there is more to this particular god-forsaken day).

Content created on: 6/7 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Attention, all you agriculturally ignorant city-slickers out there!

This one’s for you…

“Oh sh*t. Dad’s not going to be too happy about this…”

I sat there on the side of a dirt road, trying to take a nap in the cab of our neighbor’s tractor, waiting for my dad to show up. In addition to the mid-morning July sun, my ability to snooze was severely handicapped by the persistent thought that, indeed, the patriarchal figure in my life would indubitably be disappointed in the predicament in which I had found myself.

Now, pissing Dad off to no end with my agriculture-related shenanigans and general farming ----- -ups was nothing new. However, I had just taken it to a whole ‘nother level with this here Pirate-Tractor. And I can’t say I was very hopeful that he would give me points for creativity.

Hmmm…I suppose I should back this tractor tale on up and tell you how I got here in the first place, though…

‘Twas back in the middle of the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, and I was working full-time on our family farm with my dad before heading off to start college in the fall. We had been having problems with the two tractors we owned breaking down on us, so we had to resort to borrowing a spare one from a fellow farmer for a few weeks.

We’re not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when the left rear tire–one of the big ones, mind you–began gradually working its way off the rear axle, did we complain and ask for a refund? No! Why? Because we had no choice!

Instead, we learned to co-exist with this modest inconvenience by regularly jacking up that side of the tractor off the ground, laboriously moving the tire back in towards the cab, and then tightening all the bolts down with the heaviest-duty ratchet you’ve ever seen.

Well I had finally had enough of that horse baloney after having to do it 4-5 times, so I decided to that I was going to tighten them bolts down so friggin’ tight that they would never come loose again. Fortunately, we had brought the tractor home for the holidays¹Before we took a day and half “vacation” for the 4th of July. so I was able to scrounge up an array of steel pipes and bars from around ye olde homestead, and MacGuyvered myself a cheater bar²A cheater bar is any bar or pipe that is used to effectively lengthen a ratchet handle, enabling one to apply extra torque when tightening/loosening a particularly stubborn bolt or nut. See Figure 1. about 6 feet long.

Yes, you read that right: 6 feet. Picture a ratchet. Just a regular ratchet, not the one in the figure above–I need to make this as dramatic as possible. Now picture that ratchet, but ~10x bigger. On the wheel of a tractor. With my lightweight ass hanging off the end of it like a hyperactive sloth, with both my feet and hands wrapped around it, bouncing up and down like a regularly-active monkey.

I rinsed and repeated this thorough procedure for all 8 or so of the lugnuts, and upon completion, proudly proclaimed to Dad, “This ----- ain’t going nowhere!”

A few days later, it was time to get the tractor back into action, so early that morning Dad told me to “road”³I.e. Drive the tractor down the highway. it to one of our fields about 20 miles away while he ran errands in town, and then wait there until he got back.

Relatively speaking, it seemed that I had a relaxing morning ahead of me, so you didn’t have to ask me twice to hop up in that thing and haul tail down KS Highway 51. Granted, “haul tail” in a tractor means maxing out around 22 mph, so all in all, I had almost an hour commute ahead of me.

Fast-forward to about an hour later, with a little under a mile to my final destination, I started to feel a slight shaking. I thought it was a bit odd, so I started looking around to see what might be causing the ruckus. Just as I turned to my left, I saw the strangest ----- thing my life: a giant tire speed past me.

What. The. ----- .

You know how in old Wile E. Coyote cartoons where he runs off the cliff, but there’s a split second when he’s suspended in mid-air before he realizes he’s about to fall, and somehow gravity doesn’t kick in until he acknowledges it?

It was exactly like that.

It’s hard to describe the cognitive dissonance I experienced in that moment–how the hell could anything be passing me?!? This stretch of highway was closed for repaving, so I was literally the only traffic for a good 5-10 miles in each direction.

“So where the heck did that tire come fro–“

Oh.

Sh*t.

That’s…that’s my tire.

“But, wait! How, then, am I still rolling down the road uprigh–“

*creaaaaaaak*

“Oh, hello, Gravity,” I thought aloud as the laws of physics reasserted themselves and the entire tire-less quadrant of the tractor plummeted 4 feet straight down.

*THUNK!* went the left side of the axle as it landed hard in the freshly-paved road, making a rather noticeable divot.

I sat there tilted sharply to my left at a 45-degree angle, stunned and desperately trying to comprehend that that just happened, watching my tire roll on down the road without me.

After about a quarter of a mile, it veered to the left off the highway, down the ditch…and out into the smack-dab middle of the field where I was supposed to ultimately end up at. Oh, the irony.

On the bright side, thanks to the highway being closed, there was no oncoming traffic, because if there had been any, I’m pretty certain a rather gruesome and fatal car accident would have ensued. I mean, that’s some Final Destination-level sh*t right there.

On the other hand, the road closure meant the only thing I could do was just sit there and hope the KDOT⁴Kansas Department of Transportation crew would show up and decide against strangling me for completely undoing all there hard work with the nasty divot I had made.

And eventually they did–and no doubt that was a WTF moment for them when the rolled up to the scene with me just sitting there in the tractor sideways. Lucky for me, they found it more humorous than anything else, and graciously took pity on me. They ended up wrapping a chain around the now-naked axle and then around the teeth of one of their front-loaders and helped my peg-legged little Pirate-Tractor hobble off onto the dirt road right there off the highway. They propped me up by putting a couple blocks underneath the axle, then were like “OK, see you!” They were happy to get me out of their way, but weren’t going to help me out beyond that…so, thanks?

…and that is where you found me at the beginning of the story, anxiously awaiting the wrath of Bob J. upon his return.

Of course, “running errands in town” took him 4x longer than promised, so I had to sit there in that stupid ----- Pirate-Tractor from 10 am until around 2 or 3 pm–almost 5 hours–before he finally showed up.

In the meantime I thought I might have been able to prop up the Prodigal Tire and roll it back to the tractor, and maybe even put it back on before he returned. But one very important life lesson I learned out in the middle of that dusty-ass field was holy crap, tractor tires are heavy! Yeah, I couldn’t lift that a centimeter off the ground, though it’s probably for the better, as I indubitably would have run the risk of getting crushed by the 500-800 lb thing at some point during the hypothetical wheel-wrangling.

No, if you came here for an actual near-death event in this story–my death anways–then that would have been when Dad and I nearly got into a fist-fight over which one of was responsible for it coming off.

You may be surprised to hear that I actually had a pretty strong case against him. As it turned out, back when I was tightening all the lugnuts–remember that?–there was the usual 8 in a circular pattern, and then one oddly off to the side. I had asked him whether or not I should tighten that one, and he told me no, so I didn’t touch it.

Well, as it turns out, that was the one that actually kept the tire on the axle. Go figure.

But honestly, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago–about 20 years after the fact, and long after Dad had passed away–that I finally admitted that, yeah, he was right: I should have been paying attention to that rascally tire. You know, instead of be-bopping down the road like a cool cat without a care and all that.

Anyways, that is the point of the story: pay attention, Dumbass.

Otherwise you might end up being the guy or gal who finally does it–who finally manages, as they say, to put the “laughter” in “vehicular manslaughter”.

Editor’s note: This was one component of the Near-Tragedy Trifecta of the Summer of ’99. You can read about the other two [less exciting] close encounters with grave bodily harm here.

Content created on: 8/9 July 2021 (Thurs/Fri)

What could possibly be more interesting than life on the farm?

Death on the farm. Definitely “death on the farm”…

“He gave his life in service of his country.”

Usually when you hear that phrase you’re bound to assume that a “fallen soldier” is the topic of the solemn and hushed conversation you’ve just awkwardly intruded upon. But what if I told you that’s not always the case? Truly, there are other unsung heroes across the Fruited Plain of this great nation that have laid down their life–or at least came darn tootin’ close–for the betterment of their fellow citizens. Case in point: the Semi-Involuntary Farm Boy.

And I’m here to tell you first hand: the danger is very real and very present…

Let me be real with you: I hated growing up on the farm. Me and agriculture? We simply didn’t get along. But on the bright side, it sure is nice having a tidy collection of Crazy Farming Stories in my back pocket, ever-ready for whenever I need to impress my city-slicker friends.

Amongst my favorite of these are what I call the Near-Tragedy Trifecta: the 3 consecutive¹Okay, so technically I think these unfolded over the span of about a week. days in July 1999 where my life played out eerily similar to what I imagine a farm-themed installment of the infamous Final Destination movie franchise would indubitably have looked like–with the exception that I managed to walk away relatively unscathed.

For context, the Summer of ’99 was the summer between high school and college for me, and I spent it toiling away with my dad on our family farm so I could buy a car of my own. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve talked about that summer in these parts, because, whew-wee, boy! That was one crazy-ass summer!

In Exhibit A, I present to you here, in non-chronological order, 3 of the several times I probably should have died over the course of those 3 months…

Sunday, July 4, 1999: Around the Fourth of July that year, my dad and stepmom decided to celebrate the birth of this fine nation…at the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation, in the finest casino their reservation had to offer, that is! Since said nation/reservation/casino was on the other side of the state, they kindly left me in charge of the basic day-to-day operations of our farm in their absence.

Now, when the farm is in “just keep shit running before you run off to hang out with you honey” mode, one of the primary tasks is to make sure that the crops are being watered, and this usually means making the rounds to check whether all the farm’s irrigation motors and sprinklers are running. On the morning of the Fourth, my grandma and I were hauling tail around Morton County doing just that, me with high hopes of knocking my duties out early and being able to take off to Beaver (Oklahoma) to celebrate the day away with my Amazonian girlfriend, Teri.

Well, the Law of Averages will tell you that if you have 7 irrigation motors, then at least 1 of them is not going to be running when you go to check on it, and sure enough a motor on one of our pumps was in need of being brought back to life.

After some basic maintenance, I went to crank that bad boy back up, and tentatively pressed the ignition button, praying to hear that sweet sweet hum of staying on schedule to see my lady friend.

Engine: “Vroom! Huff-chuff-huff-chuff!”

Me: “Oh, ----- yeah. Ain’t nothing gonna keep me away from Beaver tonight!”

Engine: “VROOOOOOOOOOM!”

Me: “The ----- you say, Mr. Engine?!?”

Driveshaft *Wildly flapping around at a few thousand RPMs*: “Wheeee! Look at me, I’m a helicopter!

Stunned, I sat there staring in awe as it spun out for about 30 more seconds before losing its momentum and coming to a stop…though it took my racing heart another 30 minutes to return to normal afterwards.

After a quick investigation, it was discovered that the bolts fastening the motor to the driveshaft had just straight-up snapped off–ergo the 3000 RPM, 40-pound chopper wannabe that had just been spinning way to close to my cranium.

Fortunately, though, the mechanical failure had been on the motor end of the shaft, otherwise had it came loose from the pump side, the motor would have kept spinning it faster and faster. And, based on where I had been standing, there’s no doubt in my mind that my final, violent moments would have horrifically included getting my skull bashed in and a couple of my precious limbs grotesquely maimed.

The good news is that I ended up making it to my Beaver-based booty call later that day.²PG-rated, that is. Given that I was thiiiiis close to being on the wrong side of a closed-casket funeral, I would definitely call that a win…

Thursday, July 1, 1999 (est.): Irrigation engines must have really had it out for me that week. Mere days previous to the Drive-shaft/Helicopter Brain-Basher incident, Dad had sent me a few miles from we were working to check up on a different pump engine in a nearby field.

Now, on the Farm of Bob J., there were many idiosyncrasies, and this particular engine fell squarely in that category. As I recall, it had a bad battery on it, and so you could only use it to start the engine–but if you left it connected after that it would short-circuit and explode. Fun times, indeed, right?

Also, this engine ran on natural gas, but for some reason we didn’t have a proper valve on the gas line. Now for those not in the know, I guess you have to turn the gas supply down pretty low when you start these types of engines (or something like that). In our case though, we had no flow control and were forced to completely remove the fuel hose and then quickly reattach it once the engine got to spinning.

Anyways, this engine had died, and so again, after some basic maintenance and trouble-shooting, I was ready to see if it would fire back up. But instead of turning a key or pushing an ignition button, I had to bend down to where the battery was inexplicably residing on the ground, and re-connect the battery cable.

This was very confusing to me, though. No, not this oblique and convoluted version of “Gentlemen, start your engines!” It was the fire that was so confusing.

HOLY SH*T, WHY WAS THERE ONLY FLAMES WHERE MY ARM SHOULD BE!?

While my brain was processing the philosophical question of whether or not spontaneous human combustion was for realz, my body was busy getting my perhaps-phantom limb the ----- away from that fire lickity-split! Lucky for my dumb ass, my central nervous system had acted quickly enough in yanking my hand out of el fuego that the only damage done was that all the hairs on my arm had been singed off. Once, I got over the shock, I quickly realized what happened and rushed to shut off the emergency valve to the gas.

You see, when I had disconnected the gas line, I hadn’t realized that it was aiming straight down at the battery. And since it was still blasting that beautiful natural gas, it just needed a single tiny spark courtesy of a freshly hooked-up battery cable to turn that ----- into a full-blown flame-thrower!

I guess it just wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without some fireworks, right? I just wish the Universe would quit taking sh*t so literally though…

Well, Dear Reader, originally I had planned on sharing all 3 stories with you in one sitting, but alas, we are out of time for today. But that’s okay! Near-Tragedy Trifecta Tale #3 truly deserves a post dedicated to it alone.

So I guess the point of the story is you have a full week now to build up yourself some anticipation for…”The Tractor Tire Story”–trump-bump-a-dum!

Oh, and for realz, don’t forget to thank a farmer for sacrificing life and limb to keep your face fed. Perhaps you even know one personally…

Content created on: 2 & 4 July 2021 (Fri/Sun)