The Dust Settles

Things have slowed down a little since the heavy hitters have moved on.  One more trip through the CRP grass and the summer fallow as the crane migrates to the north and east.

 

    As it passed by the old Number 3 (the old John Deere combine), I couldn’t help but remember how that old combine was the highest thing on the farm.  We used to climb to the top of the grain bin to drop our homemade bandana parachutes.

      In High Wide and Lonesome, Hal Borland tells how as a young boy on a prairie farm near Gary, Colorado, south of Brush, the flatness of the prairie affected his perspective.  When he went to town, a two storey house overwhelmed him with its impressive rise into the sky.     

      I’m not exactly a kid, but the thrust of crane and wind generator tower into the sky has me a bit overwhelmed.  Every morning is sort of a surprise with the dawn revealing the towers popping up all around.

 

      Well, back to the flat and mundane.  Well not exactly.  I finished the summer fallow on Monday and Tuesday entertained by tower-raisings in the neighbor’s field, dodging towers and roads in my own field.  

 

 

 

A few red roots that escaped the last operation thrived and enjoyed a reprieve while I waited in vain for a rain.

 

      And now that the big heavies won’t be lumbering across our fields anymore, I can finish fencing the east quarter and get some cattle in there.

     My bridge-piling corner post lasted little more than a year.

 

     The top part was easily removed.  The bottom two and a half feet were another story.  I’m thinking of wisdom tooth removal, piece by painful piece.

  

    An old cedar post will have to do for now.  What did the advertisement say?  The post that outlasts the hole?

     Removing the old corner and replacing it took quite awhile.   Wednesday and  Thursday found me finishing the north side and starting the east line.  I had the wire laid out and planned on having cattle in there all summer, but then came the wind towers.  The workers cut the wire on the east and west to make a path to bury cable and run cranes and a thousand other pieces of equipment.  So I made gates across the path, this one for the east line.

 

                                And it did rain a little, .25 of an inch, Wednesday afternoon.

 

    The fence project got juggled with another just-as-important activity—getting seed wheat and preparing to plant.

 

     After five or six hours of fencing, I would retire to less strenuous tasks such as getting the old GMC truck (familiarly known as “The Chuckle Truck) out of the shed and preparing it for the arduous journey it must make.  I had the bed covered with corrugated tin to protect the wood floor from barb wire, dead shingles, steel posts, and other such stuff as it has hauled these past few years.  Remove the tin and give the bed a good sweeping, install the tailgate, air up the tires, and oh yes, install a new battery, to the tune of $124.

      Friday morning I set off for a sixty mile roundtrip towards Matheson to get seed wheat.  Finding the road less traveled was difficult.  I met ten trucks hauling rock used by the wind company to top off the access roads to each tower.  Before I could get off the county road and onto the pavement, two of the empty rock-haulers were on my tail.  Once on the pavement, I had room to let them pass me, and so I did.

 

     The rest of the journey was uneventful.  I arrived at Kochis Farms, took on 120 bushels of wheat, wrote a check for $1400+ (the price of wheat has gone up in 20 years!), made a stop at the hardware store in Limon for fencing materials, and arrived home a little more than three hours after I left.

     Back to the fence.  I finished Saturday afternoon in the heat, after about freezing to death while working on it that morning.

 

    A cold wind blew out of the north with occasional spits of rain when I was too far from the pickup to take cover.  Not enough moisture to do any good, only to dampen me enough to make the cold wind that much more miserable.

 

      A road grader appeared.  He smoothed out some of the tracks the crane left as well as the ridges and ruts from the original path-making and the myriad other footprints left by other equipment.

    The operator and I passed the time of day for awhile.  When he left a few hours later, things were a little closer to back-to-normal.  And, the gates were closed!

     Off to Adams County for some music this weekend.