Every piece of shit tells a story

I'm not talking about that foil-clad envelope in an envelope I just sent off to LifeLabs to verify that I don't have any of 23 varieties of ass cancer. And by the way, is that a gross undertaking or what? Seriously, I have yet to figure out a way to stifle my gag reflex while I'm scooping samples with those miniature popsicle sticks that come with the kit, no matter what I've tried.

No, I'm talking about something else entirely. With apologies to Adam Sandler, I'm talking about the fleet of piece-of-shit vehicles that festoon the property. It was a very lovely spring-like afternoon here at Falling Downs, and I wasted it splendidly sitting on the stoop surveying my empire, and I have to admit, every piece of shit tells a story.

Take the old Allis Chalmers back-hoe, for example. That was fully functional when my dear father dropped it off here five or six years ago. Dad was a real estate guy, but he had a hobby that let him out of the office. He'd spend his free time building various roads to nowhere throughout the acreages that he owned.

To that end he had a dozer and a dump truck and the old Allis. When he got a newer backhoe old Allis showed up here at Falling Downs on a float. I dug a few random test holes, smoothed out the roadway into the Bass Lake marsh across the road, and used it to clear snow once or twice.

Then I parked it, and it's been parked ever since.

Just like the Ford Escape has been parked for a year. This is an older Escape, when they still looked like SUVs, unlike the new ones. Originally bought it for the tires. It was wearing a decent set of off-roaders that I thought I could use on the F-150. Got the whole vehicle for less than a new set of tires. Used it to collect firewood around the woodlot for a couple of years, but it turned out those tires weren't rated for the larger F-150.

Then there's the Mustang Fifty. It's been in the fleet for seven or eight years, and I don't believe we've put five thousand miles on it. Once in awhile I like to go for a spin in a car that pushes you into your seat when you stand on the gas, and the Mustang does that in spades. The longest trip it's ever been on was from here to Bayfield.

My favourite piece of shit is the 2005 Subaru that's become the daily driver. It's old and ornery, much like me, but I've come to love it.

It's authentic. You know you're driving a real car. No back-up cams or blind-spot alerts with this puppy, and the manual transmission means you actually have to know how to drive. She's my fourth Subaru. Two of the other three got well past 400 thousand kilometres.

This one will eclipse them all.

Anyway, you can only drive one car at a time. I'm getting older (and you are too) and I think I'm going to start paring down the fleet this year. I haven't even mentioned the 500 Ninja or the Ford 4000 tractor or the GM SUV...

After all, I can still tell their stories when they're long gone.


I'm thinking of trading the entire fleet for a new F-150.

Winter at Falling Downs

I have to say I don't count myself among the global warming deniers.

In fact, I'm a firm believer. I'm such a firm believer that I didn't bother hooking the snow-blower to the tractor. Nor did I bother getting the walk-behind snow-blower ready to go.

Everything was looking good till about a week before Christmas.

Then it snowed.

Snowed good.

Snowed some more.

My default snow-removal technology is the old Allis-Chalmers backhoe. In a pinch I can take a run down the drive with the bucket down and snow-be-gone in no time at all.

Unfortunately, she's a diesel, and she needs to be plugged in if you're going to start her up when the temperature drops below 40 degrees.

Which it obviously did if there is snow.

Which brings me to the conundrum. I had a 100 foot extension cord, but I left it in the back room over the summer. aka the woodshed. aka the dog shed.

Lucy likes to chew extension cords. So instead of a 100 foot extension cord, I now have multiple cords of random length, none of which will reach out to where the Allis was parked back when we still had global warming and thought winter would never come.

So between two tractors and a snow-blower I am left to clear the snow with...

A snow shovel.

Now I'm at the age where guys drop dead all the time just from looking at a snow shovel. This does not bode well. Hell, I'm having chest pains just thinking about it!

So we remain storm-stayed at Falling Downs. Luckily all my hard work with the Stihl is paying off. Cats are luxuriating on the heat vents. Boomer is curled up in the nook beside the piano. I'm not seeing Lucy, which probably means she's made herself at home in the spare bedroom.

It's all good for now. But I'm thinking in a couple days I'm going to have to make a run to the liquor store.

Better get shoveling...

Decorating with boulders

I've been working hard at sprucing up the place.

It's got a lot to do with that 1980 Allis Chalmers back-hoe, the acquisition of which I've been trying to justify ever since it arrived here.

My first back-hoe project was digging a series of practice holes alongside the creek. I mean, you get a back-hoe, obviously you need a little practice.

I have to admit that original practice project had an ulterior motive. If I did enough "practice holes" alongside the creek, eventually I could just scoop out the berm between the practice holes and the creek and I'd have a pond!

Even a small lake maybe!

Alas, as I've been jacking up the rent I charge my tenant farmer every year, he keeps jacking up the amount of acreage he wants for his cows. This resulted in me having to fill in all those practice holes.

Which was good practice. Besides, we wouldn't want cattle drowning in those practice holes...

But the long and the short of it is I don't have a whole lot of useful things to do with Allis anymore.

Which brings me to landscaping. Back in the spring I took out a huge ugly shrub right by the front porch.

Replaced it with a half-ton boulder out of the back 40.

Lately I've been clearing the logging trails in the marsh across the way. This is a dicey operation, because that side of the road is covered not only by the Niagara Escarpment Commission, but it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well.

Well fuck me.

I'm gonna apply to the United Nations before I can take my Allis across the street?

Obviously not. So I've been over there, rooting around, making one of these "logging roads" into something that ends in the middle of the marsh and has a dock, from which I can access Bass Lake!

Bass Lake is a very pretty vacation-land tourist destination. It's home to a trailer park and a few dozen cottages that when they change hands tend to go for three hundred and up.

So while I'm leveling out the logging roads I keep unearthing giant boulders that were left here by the thaw of the last ice age. The global warming of its time.

Haven't heard that it was "man-made" global warming, but it could have been.

Maybe Iglpoop, the Neanderthal who was an extra in the Quest for fire movie, got careless with the fire...

I know from personal experience how quickly a little controlled grass fire can become something else... so it's utterly possible that Iglpoop set the entire continent on fire.

And then the glaciers melted and ten thousand years later I'm stuck with these random boulders all over my property.

Anyway, I've been doing the best I can with the hand nature dealt me, and today I placed a really nice one ton boulder right in front of the house.

Sure hope the farm manager likes it.

Adventures with Stihl & Allis

Had a big old dead elm on the fence line way at the back, just at the edge of the marsh. Been dead for years; bone-dry, all the bark long gone; two months of winter fire-wood just standing there.

What held me back for years was the question of which way she was going to fall. Must have walked all round that tree a hundred times doing the mental math. About twenty feet from the ground she branched out into five seperate trunks. Had two big trunks heading off to the west, away from the marsh. There were three trunks that were closer to neutral or eastward.

Which trunks were heavier depended a lot on your perspective. When I stood on the marsh side, it always looked like she'd fall that way. Looking up from the other side, you'd swear she was going west. Directly under the tree, it was a toss-up, but I was thinking the two big limbs heading west would outweigh the three going east. Time to fire up Mr. Stihl.

The diameter of the tree was about a foot more than the reach of the 18" bar on the saw, so just making the "v" cut on the west side took four cuts instead of two. Same with the back cut. I was making the second of the back cuts. Gradually the kerf starting to open up a bit. Yes! Two years of head-scratching was paying off! She was going to go west!

I'm practically through, and there's a gust of wind, and all of a sudden the kerf closes up. Shit! Couldn't get the saw out in time. There I am with a tree that's been practically cut through, saw caught in the trunk, and a thirty foot tow strap to pull 'er back the right way.

It's about a 75 foot tree. I've been there before. Ain't going there again. Figured next time I'm in town I'll pick up an 80 foot rope and away we'll go.

Then I got to thinking. I've got a back-hoe; maybe I could use the boom to nudge the old elm in the right direction!

Had to wait a few days because as you know the think tank here at Falling Downs has been pretty busy following world events. Like, holy cow, what up with the Santorum show last night? Haven't even got around to blogging about that aberation.

But I finally got around to it. Had to plug the old Allis-Chalmers in because that diesel just doesn't want to start in the cold weather. She hasn't run for a few weeks, so I also had to hook it up to a battery booster. Finally got the old girl fired up, and I was on my way.

Theres about three fields to traverse before I get to the mighty elm, and the last one has a couple of low spots where I normally cross the fence line. I was worried about getting stuck in the low spots. You'd think an eight ton piece of machinery wouldn't get stuck in anything, but you'd be wrong. I decided to build a new path through the stone fence that demarcates the last field.

Those stone fences! What a testament to the work ethic of our pioneer forebearers. Stone fences made out of the rocks and boulders they picked out of the fields by hand the first 75 years that the European settlers colonized the land in these parts. Such a thing is inconceivable today.

I've had about two hours of practice time on the back-hoe, so carving a new gateway through the stone fence takes a little longer than I expected. The Allis will actually throw five hundred pound boulders. Trouble is, I'm not trying to throw them. When I figure I have a pathway cleared, I steer through into the next field and get hung up on some of the boulders I didn't throw.

Well, here's the beauty of a back-hoe! You can actually get hung up on rocks and use the various hydraulics to get un-hung! Trouble is, my learning curve is pretty much a straight horizontal line so far and this is taking way longer than I expect.

Finally make it through, and I arrive at the elm. Only it's no longer there. It's gone over.

Into the swamp.

Shit!

I should have known. We've had some strong winds these last few nights. After pondering the situation I finally decided that I'd try to use the hoe to pull the tree out of the swamp and back to where I could cut her up.

Long story short, I managed to do that, and the mighty Stihl was none the worse for wear after being lodged in the trunk for a few days and then lying there in the snow for a few more.

Unfortunately, by then it was pitch dark. I still wanted to bring Allis back home with me, and I had to move a few more boulders to get across that fence line without getting hung up again. That was quite a deal. I understand now why excavation work is generally done in the daylight hours.

I've beeen bullshitting the farm manager about getting the oil tank filled. Haven't actually followed through. With the big old elm now on terra firma, I figure we've got wood heat clear into June.

By then we won't need it.

Digging in at Falling Downs

Last year I was such an exceptionally good boy that Santa found room in his sack for a backhoe.

Not one of these new-fangled air-conditioned sissy machines with the girlie toggle controls.

Nosirree Bob, we're talking eight tons of manly Allis-Chalmers excavator here!

And let me tell you, this thing is more fun than I could have possibly imagined. The busybodies at the Township office want all sorts of permits and environmental impact studies before you dig a pond, so I'm not.

I'm digging holes all over the place though. Practice holes. Starting to get the hang of it, I must say, even though the farm manager seems to have a better aptitude for it. She was simultaneously swinging the boom and dumping the bucket the first time she took the controls.

So I need lots of practice, but practice is fun with this puppy. There's nothing like the satisfaction of pulling a brim-full bucket out of the unpond and dropping it twenty feet away without spilling so much as a grain of sand along the way.

I've got some major plans for the marsh across the way. With a little bit of creative rearranging of the eco-system I should be able to have boat access to the Indian River right from my property!

Unfortunately the marsh has some sort of an environmental sensitivity designation, so that's going to have to wait a couple of months till the spring foliage provides a bit of a screen.

Anyway, times a wastin'. Gonna fire up Big Yeller and dig me another practice hole!