I was mowing Saturday and was close to being finished when the mower screeched and stopped like I’d hit a wall.
A quick inspection showed that I had sucked up a piece of electric fence wire. About 20 feet of it was wrapped as tightly as a garrote around both blades
I thought: You know, I’ve been meaning to change the blades and belt anyway, so I’ll just pull the mower deck off, replace those parts and it’ll be like mowing with a brand new machine.
That was a pretty good plan, except I decided to do it Sunday afternoon, which was way too hot of a day for an old guy like me to work that hard in the sun. By the time I got the deck off, I could wring two gallons of sweat out of my shirt.
Later, standing under the ceiling fan and gulping a cold drink, I thought back to when I was a teenager working in the hayfields on summer days very much like that.
There were three of us on the crew: me, my best friend Nelson, and Kerb Felkins, who owned the grocery store in Fitzhugh.
Nelson ran the mower, I raked and Kerb ran the baler.
We made quite the crew. Nelson and I were 16 or 17 and Kerb was about the age I am now.
Kerb would flag me down a few times a day to load a new box wire into the baler or to get a pecan limb out of the baler or whatever.
Now that I have reached his age, I readily agree with his position that some tasks are better suited for teenaged lower back muscles.
We baled a lot of bottomland that had pecan trees, so there were a lot of limbs around.
I tried to keep an eye out for them while I was running the rake because it was a lot easier to hop off the tractor and pitch one aside than it was to dig out a jam in the baler.
One day we were baling near Lawrence, where there were lots of rattlesnakes. We often baled snakes that had been napping in a wind row at the wrong time, so the three of us stayed alert.
I was a couple hundred yards away when I saw Kerb disengage the power take-off on his tractor and stiffly climb off.
He looked in my direction, as if thinking about flagging me down, but he didn’t. Instead, he crawled into the baler, as if reaching for a limb.
Suddenly, he jumped out of the baler and back several steps, holding the top of his head.
My first thought: Snake bite?
So I drove to his tractor and found Kerb with a lump on his head, but not really wanting to discuss what had happened.
He realized finally that I wasn’t going to get on my tractor and leave until I heard the story, so he finally coughed it up.
A pecan limb had gotten caught in the baler and sheared a pin. He saw I would be coming around in a few minutes, so he thought he’d pull the limb out and let me replace the pin when I came around.
But: as he reached into the baler, a breeze blew just strong enough to rustle a thistle by his ear.
It sounded very much like a rattlesnake, he said. In fact, it sounded exactly like a rattlesnake.
He jumped hard enough to put a lump on his head and perhaps a dent in the baler, he said, and allowed that he was glad I had seen it because it was the last time anyone would ever see him try to get a pecan limb out of the baler.
I should be watching for his wave because I was now the officially designated balercrawler.
And he kept to his word, flagging me down many times to dig out limbs.
So, as I cooled off under the fan, I thought: I might be hot and sweaty, but at least there weren’t any thistle snakes around.