Things Going Down

     Lots of things went down down on the farm this week.   The MET tower, for instance.

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

      No, I did not knock it down with tractor or implement striking a guy wire, though I feared doing that a few times.

      Instead, a crew of two pulled in.  When they called to tell me the tower had been “decommissioned”, I suggested October would be nice.  The millet would be out of the way by then.

     No, they had in mind much sooner.  Like when?  Like tomorrow.  They would be very careful and not damage much of the crop at all.  They offered to pay damages, if necessary.  They had just finished a similar job in Nebraska and would be going to Peetz, CO when they finished here.

      We arranged to meet at the site at 4 p.m.  They were two reformed farm boys from Indiana with a tandem trailer pulled by a heavy-duty pickup.  They had tire trouble and were finishing up putting on a spare when I arrived to join them in the shadow of wind tower 119.

I weighed the damage they might inflict with the advantage of being rid of those guy wires.  I gave them the go-ahead.  It was Friday afternoon.  They would start work immediately, planned on finishing the job on Saturday with cleanup on Sunday.

     They were off by a week, finishing on the next Friday.  When they didn’t show up at all on Saturday, I called and asked if they had decided to take off Labor Day weekend.  No, they had to go to Denver to find a Discount Tire place.  They also searched out a salvage yard that would pay them something for the tower parts.  It was near Aurora.

       I went up Wednesday to see what was left for me to do to clean things up.  I was surprised to see them still there.  The tower was down and loaded on the trailer (each section weighing over 200 lbs.) and they were rolling up guy wire cables.

     They had a few problems. They thought the tower was made of tubes.  Instead, it was solid shafts, heavy and harder to cut.   

      They had more tire trouble.  They found Discount Tire had sold them underrated tires and inflated them to tire pressure (80 lbs.) for the correct tires for their vehicle.  After two more flats, they got all new tires (at Discount Tire’s expense, I hope).  They would finish rolling up and loading cable and head to Aurora with the recycle metal on Thursday.

     On Friday, they picked up the solar panels and the 6-volt batteries, all 16 of them.  There were three electrical boxes and some other junk.

       They took out the anchors holding the guy wires, down to two feet below the surface, they said.  I haven’t checked that yet.

    Unfortunately, they didn’t take the concrete pad on which the tower perched.  I will have to see what the company has to say about that.  It looks like a patch of weeds that needs a good plowing.  Woe unto the plowboy who tries that.  So I put a “fence” to avoid that fate.

      

     The tower made a path in the millet when it came down, here seen between the fence posts that mark the concrete pad.

     The other thing that went down on Friday was the millet crop.  A 36’ swather made fairly short work of the field.

    On Saturday, Cousin Janice’s cremains went down—in an urn into a vault in Pershing Memorial Cemetery.  Eleven of us attended the inurnment.  Not a bad turnout considering she died in 2011.  But that is another story.

  

    Finally, a little wheat went down Saturday evening following the funeral.  Wheat to plant, millet to pick up, it will have to wait.  This week is full of social activities, like singing and trip planning, and an actual trip.

 Seed cleaning.