- I was asked to accompany Carl Barr this afternoon to
take a look at his spread. "She's four hundred acres," says the
Bedford patriarch with pride. "Bought er in 47 with the help of the
DVA. Course I didn't get er closed till 49 but that's another story."
His boarder-collie, Ring, pants with a rhythm matching the drips of saliva
that find their way to my left knee. "See that field over there?"
I acknowledge his pointing finger with a nod of my head. "That's 7/8ths
of a mile round. Another man and me, used to take two teams of horses
and a single-frog-plow and plow er. We would do twelve rounds in the morning
and twelve in the noon. That's twenty-four miles a day." At eighty,
Carl's recollection is remarkable.
-
- "Oh, and see this here?" The truck lunges to
a halt; I brace myself from being impacted on the windshield. Ring, licks
his nose, looking at me with a stare that suggests: "He does this
sometimes, you'd better be careful." Oblivious to what has just happened
Ring changing the radio channel from the impact of his muzzle the patriarch
points to a gravel pit. "Best pea-gravel in the township."
-
- On the move again the old truck quickly tops a hill
I lose sight of the road in front of us. We nose down like a Mustang P-51
in a power dive. Ring pants wildly placing a shaky paw on the dash. The
work boot finds the brake. "See this?" I remove my gaping eyes
from the road. Looking to my left I see a majestic stand of Pine. "I
planted those, oh, must be twenty years ago now." The size of the
trees suggests their age to be forty years. Time compression perhaps?
-
- We start to roll again, the road bending to the right
and downward. Driving through a clearing. Carl sees a man climb over a
gate towards the bay of a crystal blue lake. Carl stares, the stranger
waves; Carl gropes for the horn as the truck blazes a trail to our left
in the direction of the unwitting stranger. Ring, caulks his head in my
direction with a look declaring, "You now have a front row seat to
an accident . . ." The five-foot pine tree didn't have a chance. Oh,
the humanity!
-
- "I was going to cut that one day. Guess I don't
have to now." "Nope," I say, "looks pretty flat to
me."
-
- Ring lays down on the seat, his muzzle nudging my left
arm with urgency. His look begs: "Will you be my seatbelt?" In
a moment of compassion I grab the K-9 and hold him firm, his legs sprawl
across my lap. With this new seating arrangement Ring has now found a drier
place to salivate further up my leg.
-
- Carl backs the truck away from the point of impact, commenting:
"I know him. He's my cousin . . . must be going down to put the boat
in."
-
- How I wished to be in that boat.
-
- We leave the scene and move on, the road travels along
the side of a meadow. I scan the area for any landmark that could precipitate
a four-tire-flattening stop. I see nothing and settle back in my seat.
-
- My mistake!
-
- "Hey! Ever see a stump puller?" The nose of
the truck dives. I'm sure the bumper makes contact with the ground as Ring
slides under the dash from my lap. "Heck no." I say in a perky
voice trying to disguise the fact that Ring has possibly removed my ability
to ever father kids again.
-
- There, hiding next to a tree, is a weathered wooden-tripod
with a threaded pole hanging from its apex. "You put a chain around
the bottom of that threaded rod, and tie the pole at the top to a horse.
The horse walks around the tripod and the stump gets pulled from the ground.
You can do the same to rocks too but that type of tripod has to have two
wheels on it so you can wheel the rocks to the side of the field. It was
a lot of work." "For the horse?" I ask. "Nope, for
me. If the dang horse didn't want to move, we had to walk in front of it
holding oats. I don't know who was smarter, the horse or me."
-
- "Interesting," I say, as Ring returns to the
seat trying to assume his original position. I stop Ring. "Not a chance,"
I think to myself. Ring looks at me with eyes that are now pleading for
a helmet. "I should take a picture of that," I say. "Sure,
go ahead. I will wait."
-
- I set my camera and snap a shot of the stump puller.
Then I decide to take a quick shot of Carl and his fear-stricken copilot.
I hear a slight rumbling. No, it's not the muffler on the old truck although
it should well have been it was, his free range cattle. They were closing
in fast thinking we had stopped to feed them.
-
- I shriek -- in what can best be described as a girlish
scream, "STAMPEDE!"
-
- I scramble back into the safety of the truck. "Aw,
they won't hurt you. They just want to see who it is." Perhaps he
was right. They pressed their collective noses against the windows as I
whispered, "Shew cow!"
-
- The truck leaps into motion when his unlaced, size-13
work boot, gropes for then finds the gas-peddle. I glance at Ring who seems
to grimace with the troat-tightening acceleration. Ring and I now share
something in common -- to survive this lazy-afternoon country drive.
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