So it was stowed
under a tree row, wait, make that a row of Chinese elms, where it was out of
the way of the mower and couldn’t raise up like a cobra out of the veldt to
bite and kill if not the tractor certainly the mower (several such cobras now
exist in the farmyard with the Ford tractor still in the shop, parts for the
steering much harder to come by than were the hydraulic parts and the June
grass rankly bursting forth and hiding antique treasures which become hazards
lying unseen waiting to puncture a tire or wreak havoc with the sidelined
mower).
Faulknerian
sentences aside, the “cactus dragger” lay in wait underneath the elms for
thirty years. Last week’s attempt to
grade the road left huge clods anchored by grass roots. It was rough, worse to drive on than
before. My second attempt to smooth
things over involved the chisel and the spike-tooth harrows.
I had used the
chisel and harrow to both check the wetness of the soil to see if I could
finish disking the summer fallow and to destroy the tracks left by the
seismographers. It worked pretty
well. The chisel loosened up the compacted soil and the harrows did a good job of
breaking up the clods.
As I returned
from that task, it occurred to me that maybe it would break up the clods on the
road. So I let the chisel points down so
as to just scratch the surface of the road and up the road I went and back down
I came. The chunks were somewhat
diminished, but not gone, not forgotten.
Something lurked
in my mind like the old log with the chains lag-screwed to it beneath the dying
elms. The cactus-dragger! Why not?
The nice thing
about the mind is that it can do 70,000 jobs which the aging body can’t
do. So, a day later, after the ebbed
energy from the chisel-harrow episode was flowing in a new day, I grabbed a
chain and backed the 4X4 up to the elm row and hitched the cactus dragger to
the 4X4.
Our entourage
actually went a few yards before one of the lag screws fastening chain to log
pulled out of the old wood. The ultimate
answer was #9 wire double wrapped around the log, but on that first attempt, I
needed to get a couple of letters to the mailbox, so I didn’t have time to do
things right. We would go a few yards
and I would have to stop and replace a lag screw. It took a while, but
eventually the round trip was completed.
The wire fix was
performed at my leisure. Now, every trip
to get the mail is also a road-smoothing operation. The 4X4 and the cactus-dragger have become a
pair.
In other news,
the summer fallow operation begun on April 30 and interrupted by the monsoon on
May 4, finally was completed on Thursday, June 4. I tried to disk the edges with the little
tandem disk, but it was still too wet for that.
The wet dirt would jam between the smaller disks and plug up.
With the Ford tractor still laid up, I broke out the swather and went to work on the farmyard grass. That went pretty well once the rust was worked out of the sickle. That came to end when the reel-drive chain broke.
It is a light (as
in not heavy) chain and I have nothing like it.
It was Saturday afternoon. I had
trucks out of the shed to get the swather out.
I had clean white clothes dry on the line. I had drained the oil out of the swather
engine. Tools here and there, and you
will never guess what. It threatened to
rain.
Trucks started and
back in the shed, golf cart to garage, clean clothes quickly fetched off the
line, tools hurriedly grabbed and stowed, and then it rained. Too late to get to town to get chain repairs.
So once again, the farmyard grass gets a rain
check. Oh well, it’s Saturday afternoon,
the sun is back out, the Rockies are winning, sit in the sun and watch the
rainbow. Perfect, well it would be
without quite so many mosquitoes.
Much better than dust
blowing. Count your blessings.
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