Fried Taters
“What is wrong with this stove?!” I complained. “It was working fine a minute ago.”
My black iron frying pan was on the stove, full of cut up potatoes that I was frying.
Trying to fry.
I had loaded the firebox with kindling, and larger wood splits. I had stuffed it full and fired it off.
I was cooking! Those taters just sizzled!
Then it just stopped.
What was wrong?
Oh. You have to keep putting more wood in the firebox.
City girl alert. I grew up with a gas stove. Turn knob, adjust flame, cook food.
Country girl alert. Chop wood, start fire, feed fire, cook food, keep feeding fire, keep cooking food.
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My Otis
“There is something in here!?” I said and questioned simultaneously one night.
It was raining and the middle of the night. I had been waked up by a swooshing noise. At first it was once, then it began to happen at fairly regular intervals.
“What IS that?”
Mike got up and lit the lantern. We waited for the sound again. Nothing. Isn’t that always how it is?
Then we heard the sound again, and this time we saw the bat.
The cabin was 20 by 20 feet, and divided into two areas, with an open doorway between the kitchen and the living sleeping area. The bat was navigating quite handily between the two areas.
We tried everything. All the doors open, all the windows open, letting in the rain. Flapping of arms. Hauling in plywood to block off the kitchen room and limit the options. Brooms, gently guiding. Brooms swiping air, like John McEnroe overhand serve tennis rackets.
Cussing.
Bats have this thing called “broom-dar”. You couldn’t knock one out of the air if you wanted to.
Cussing also doesn’t work. Bats do not speak ‘cussing’. They do speak an other worldly sonic pitched click squeak.
They do eventually get tired of dodging flapping, cussing, broom wielding hippies. When they finally attach themselves to the wall, higher than you can reach without a ladder, and squeeze into the tiniest crack between the wall boards, they can be caught with the biggest, heaviest leather gloves imaginable.
That is when they start cussing in ‘bat’.
They don’t mind being looked at by their alien abductors, but they don’t prefer to spend a cold rainy evening outside, and will put up with hours of ‘fun’ to be inside a warm ‘cave’, even if the residents of the cave are not too accommodating.
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Shoveling Epiphany
“We’re stuck”.
That is quite a discouraging sentence to hear, particularly when you are sitting in the cab of a big ol’ honkin’ Dodge 4-wheel drive truck.
Our truck had a name. It’s name was French Fry. That name largely preceded the use of bio-fuel vegetable oil in vehicles of the future.
French Fry had come to be named that by the folks who sold it to us. The Dodge had been the transport vehicle for the bluegrass band, Ed Chicken and the French Fries. It was predominantly green, but had a red fender on one side, and a yellow fender on the other. It also sported a school bus yellow roof. And the short truck bed, perched over heavy duty shocks, was red. All of the colorful additions were the result of a brake failure suffered by French Fry’s former band member owners.
French Fry had a ‘cow catcher’ bumper on the front, with the spare tire there to cushion the cows when you ‘catched’ them.
This truck could go anywhere. Mike delighted in scaring the fertilizer out of our city friends that would come to visit ‘the land’. He would throw French Fry into the low gear, and crawl that baby straight up a hillside, emphasis on ’straight up’.
But our road, after it rained, was a mile and a half of deep ruts and small ponds and mud. It wasn’t greasy mud. It was suction mud. Tire smearin’, soft, deep, cloying suction mud. And it was more than French Fry could navigate.
We were in over our hubs. The more we attempted to go forward, the more we were pulled down, as if by sirens of the deep taking us to Davy Jones Locker.
Mike hiked out to the neighbors farm. I sat in the cab and waited.
About half hour later, I could hear a tractor coming up the road. The neighbor boy was driving the family plow tractor, cruising along, slowly and carefully, Mike standing bent kneed on the back.
This neighbor boy was still a boy, probably about twelve or thirteen, but he was not a boy. He was a farm hand. He had more real life ability in his little finger than most people even think of having in a lifetime. I was glad to see him.
He drove the tractor around ahead of the truck, and turned it off. He took a shovel off the floor runner of the tractor, and proceeded to the most deeply mired of French Fry’s wheels. He began to shovel away the mud.
Now, I’m telling all this fun stuff about French Fry because it was French Fry that was stuck. And French Fry was a colorful part of our lives. We had sold the camper and red truck, and bought the more sensible vehicle for our needs, French Fry.
But the real story I’m gettin’ to is about what the farm boy taught me that day about shovels.
City girl alert. When a city girl uses a shovel, she holds it like a big spoon, and stabs the ground with it, trying to get the point end of it into enough of the ground to make a shovelful, like spooning ice cream.
Not how to use a shovel. Especially one with a splintery handle.
A shovel is a lever.
I watched this ‘boy’ set the point of the shovel on the ground, put his foot on the top of the shovel head, on the part that is slightly wider to accommodate a boot, and apply his body weight to the top of the shovel. When the point sunk into the mud about half way up the shovel head, he took his foot off of the shovel head, and pushed down with one hand on the far end of the shovel handle, and presto! … a big shovel full of mud sucked up out of the rut. He tossed it to the side of the road.
I sat and watched as this ‘boy’ slowly, repeated the same motion, shovel point on ground, step on shovel, pull handle down, remove mud, toss to the side.
The city girl light bulb snuffed off, the country girl light bulb blazed on.
He finished his shovel miracle, hooked a chain to the bumper of French Fry, told Mike to ‘git in and steer’, started the tractor, and slowly unstuck us from the rut. When we were freed, he jumped down from the tractor, unhooked the chain, and stood at the side of the muddy road and waved a quiet little, shy, one handed wave.
I turned around to keep waving to him as we proceeded down the muddy track, but he had already turned the tractor around and was headed home. He sat solid down on the tractor seat, curved forward, one elbow sticking out because one hand rested on his leg in a man-on-a-tractor pose, steering with the other hand.
To this day, the shovel is my favorite tool. I kid you not. Given that my back can handle it, and the ibuprophen don’t run dry, I can, and will shovel all day. Need a pile of sand moved from here to there? I’m the shovel for the job.
Need stone gravel loaded into your wheel barrow? That flat nosed scoop shovel, pushed into the bottom of the pile has those stones just hopping onto the shovel face with joy! You can hear ‘em shouting in their little gravelly voices, “Yippie! We’re going for a ride!”
Need some fresh mortar up there on your mortar board on your scaffolding? If given a long handled shovel, I have one of the prettiest techniques for filling that shovel and turning it in mid air so that the tip lands on the board, and the mortar drops off.
I had witnessed The Miracle of The Shovel. A Mystery had been revealed.
Leslie
anecdotal evidence
