Being Careful What I Wish For

Last Monday, with first cut stretching ahead of us and lots of school activities that I'd be flying solo for, I found myself wishing for a few minutes that I had a pause button, or maybe a rainy day, so I could get a few things done before the proverbial hay wagon parked itself in the middle of our lives.

When I left to pick up the kids at school on Tuesday afternoon and take them to doctor's appointments, it was terribly sticky hot and Earl had half the fields down in hay and the 6200 was still not back from R.N. Johnson's. Travis was raking, Earl was baling, Erik was driving the big dump truck and there was lots of that loud and urgent talk that gets hay into the barn. There was a storm forecast for the afternoon and they were scrambling to get the hay up and wrapped before it got wet.

I'm not going to write about this next part very well, and debated writing about it at all, but if this blog thing is actually going to chronicle what happens here, it's too big a thing to leave out.

A few years ago, this other organic dairy farmer we know had a tractor accident. He was leaning over to the side in his seat, looking for the source of a rattling noise when his tractor hit a bump and he fell off and found himself underneath his baler. His hired man kept his farm going while he healed and he's back together now, but I saw him at a conference that winter, barely recognizing him for how much older he looked, and I could hardly sleep that night for fear that something like that could happen to Earl.

Winter before last, Earl borrowed a trailer from our friend, John, to take some pigs to market. It was spring and the trailer was down in the snow enough that the hitch needed to be picked up with a tractor to reach our truck's bumper. All the pieces were lined up and Earl was putting in the pin when he heard screaming and turned to see John face down on the ground under the rolling tractor's wheel, having caught his sleeve on the gear lever as he reached to turn the tractor off. Earl ran over, put the tractor in neutral and rolled the wheel off John by hand, too afraid to add his 250 lbs. to the weight on top of his friend. Earl thought John was dead, but then he jumped up and started swearing. The tread marks on his jacket stopped halfway up his back, but the only injury was some badly bruised ribs and John was back out skiing the next week. For a few days, Earl and John talked about it a lot and then, once the normal routines took over, they didn't want to talk about it any more, at all.

Sometimes when Earl is late coming back from the barn, I think maybe a cow tipped over on him or some other awful thing and I start to freak out and pack up the kids to go check on him. So far, he's always appeared before I get out of the yard and I joke about how my freaking out is how I get him to come home and help me get the kids fed. Really, though, there are things we do every day that could go horribly wrong. I suppose that's true for everyone, even people who telecommute from ranch houses in suburbs of small cities. Still, when you work with twelve-hundred-pound animals and heavy equipment, it ups the ante.

When I got home Tuesday afternoon, I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was weighing the cost of fixing the air conditioning in our dumpy nine-year-old Volkswagen against the cost of a psychiatrist or a defense attorney, either of which might become necessary if I had to travel with small children in sticky hot weather on any regular basis. When Earl came down the hill, I asked him how things were going. He said, "Well, it's okay now," and I thought he meant maybe that he couldn't find some wrench and then he found it (this happens a lot) or that he ran out of twine and the twine they had was the wrong twine but then they found the right stuff where it shouldn't have been. Something like that. When he told me he rolled the tractor it didn't even hit me at first that this is a Very Bad Thing to Do. He was saying it so nonchalantly that he could have been telling me that he broke the glass in the tractor door (another frequent occurrence and only a few hundred dollars to repair), or that the tractor was stuck in the mud or something. I was still puzzled, thinking, "Rolled. Rolled the odometer?" when he showed me the pictures. The tractor was on its side and the round baler was completely upside down. It was ninety-five degrees out and I felt cold. I kept looking at the pictures and then looking at Earl, trying to understand how both things--tipped over tractor in the field and normal-looking, normal-acting husband standing next to me--could be true. He had been baling on the counterslope, he told me, and took a corner just a little too fast and tight. The ground was soft and the round baler started to tip and when it rolled, it took the tractor with it. Rolling a tractor is the sort of accident that can have a horrible ending, but Earl was in the cab tractor, protected on all sides and his only bodily complaint was a sore toe that he apparently stubbed on the steering column as he was climbing out.

The aftermath was the good part. Of all the fields we hay, the one in front of the heavy equipment operator's house was the best one to roll a tractor in. The tractor was leaking diesel so Richard came over with his skidder and set it right. If that hadn't worked, he had an excavator or a bulldozer, all of which he operates with the skill and sensitivity of a surgeon.

The insurance agent came out the next day and said it was all covered, even the rental of the tractor Trottiers agreed to loan us, even though they don't usually rent things out. Greenwoods came to pick up the probably-totalled round baler (which we'd paid off not ten days ago) and brought a brand-new baler that we'll buy with the money from the claim.

The storm Earl was scrambling to get ahead of came through that night with high winds forecast as the primary concern. The power around here goes out whenever two people sneeze at once and we were worried. It was still over seventy degrees at nine o'clock and we have a freezer full of ice cream and all the milking equipment dependent on a back-up generator that can only be run off the rolled tractor's 1,000 rpm PTO. We heard the thunder and felt the winds, and checked the radar on the computer. I generally reserve my spiritual pleading for air travel and childbirth, but ten thousand pints of ice cream and the future of our business made me utter a few pleadings to the Ultimate Authority. Our lights flickered for the better part of an hour, but they stayed on.

And so here we are, a week later, pressing on, making our way through the t-ball and b-ball barbecues, milking cows, making hay. There's not really much different, except that I'm being extra good, trying to parent and manage and be a friend with my best, most honorable self, quicker to give, slower to take. If I need to be calling for help from the higher powers any time soon, I'd like to feel in a position to ask.