Some days you just know you should never have gotten out of bed.
We’ve had excavators working at the farm to repair the carriage trails washed out by the flood three weeks ago for the last two weeks. They were working by our pond, putting the road back together where the pond had breached its banks and overflowed and digging a new trench to install a second culvert pipe to handle future floods. They needed to work with their excavator on both sides of the pasture fence and that meant taking their equipment around to the gate to get in.
“I can drive it around John, but that will take over an hour of moving it back and forth. What I’d really like is to just go right through the fence here and save all that time,” the operator said.
Time for an executive decision. I know a little bit about how these things typically work – the amount of hours the excavator is operating times some flat rate and there’s your bill. I didn’t want the farm to pay him to drive the equipment back and forth.
“We’ll cut the fence, Jerry, but we’ll have to put it back together before the day’s over because we have to turn the horses out tonight and I’m pretty sure they’d walk through any gaping holes we’d leave,” I said.
It was the answer he wanted, so Justin and I got out the cutters and he had is entrance to the area he needed to work.
By noon he was finished and we began the process of putting it back together. Things like this never go smoothly and so when the auger on the back of the tractor (a big corkscrew that bores holes for a fence post) broke, we knew we’d be digging by hand. That’s not really a big deal if you’re digging in dirt, but we weren’t digging in dirt.
“This shit is like granite,” I said as I pounded the posthole digger into more rock. We grabbed the spud bar and tried to break it up, but finally reached a point where dynamite would be more appropriate.
“This is as deep as it’ll go,” I said.
“:But the fence post will stick up a foot higher than the ones around it and everyone will know that we didn’t put it in deep enough,” Justin said.
“That’s why God made chainsaws, Justin. We lop off the top, dump a bag of cement in the hole and strap off the fence to the posts down farther,” I replied.
He agreed that it would work that way and really, what other choice did we have? We needed the chainsaw, so jumped in the gator to pick it up and to check on the hay delivery scheduled for one. We were hoping to be done before it arrived and would have if we hadn’t found the rock shelf from hell,
Back at the shop, I went to check on the hay. It was right on time. “Why don’t you ask them if they can put it up themselves because we HAVE to get that fence done,” I suggested.
He returned and said, “they need our help. Only brought two guys.”
So we went to the loft to take delivery on 180 bales, which should take about 40 minutes because of the distance we needed to move each bale in the loft. I looked down at the trailer, noted the size and height of the bales and called down to Eli, the guy delivering.
“That looks like a hell of a lot more than 180 bales,” I said.
“That’s because it’s 270,” he replied. Justin and I looked at each other and the space we had to put it and shrugged. “Guess we’ll be stacking a little higher,” he said.
An hour later we were back in the pasture, sweaty and tired. The fence took another two hours and we were close to done when we realized we had to talk to the excavator on a road issue. Driving towards his new location and looking down the service road in front of us, I noticed something out of place.
“I’m pretty sure that tree wasn’t laying across the road on and our pasture fence when we drove in this morning,” I said.
Justin looked…his mouth hanging open. “That’s a problem,” he said.
He knew I had a doctor’s appointment for my heel and a date after that and that I was trying to get out a little early. A little early had passed an hour ago and now we had tree surgery to perform. “You go. I can handle this,” he said.
“I appreciate that, buddy, but I’m not leaving until that tree is off the fence and out of the road,” I replied. We grabbed the chainsaw.
An hour later, I was as dirty and sweaty as I could be. I’d moved over 10,000 pounds of hay, pounded rock with a spud bar, lifted tree limbs and dumped them in the woods and done other miscellaneous physical tasks. I evaluated the work day and knowing that I didn’t have time to work out, decided I’d done enough not to feel guilty about it.
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