Have you ever been startled awake in the middle of the night, slamming your eyes open to be confronted by a huge ugly monster?
When I was a boy, one of my great pleasures was to spend a day fishing with my father. Usually, this meant leaving the house early in the morning to walk down to the creek that wrapped most of the way around our thousand acre farm. We’d walk the half mile or so, checking out how the ditches had washed out, how the fields had grown over or where the buzzards were circling overhead.
We’d start at one side of the property and take all day to walk along the banks, wade through the shallows and crawl over the numerous large rocks that blocked our way. And all along, we’d be casting bait and lures into every likely spot, tempting the bass and perch to take the hook.
We heard a story, sort of a country version of an urban legend. Just down the road a few miles,
The BIG road grader gave a loud roar as its huge diesel engine shot tremendous power to the six-foot tall tires and pulled taut the chains that connected it to the truck.
Now, bear in mind, this BIG road grader was sent out to do the job after the “big” road grader couldn’t do it. And what it couldn’t do is what my story is all about.
In 1975-1977 I worked as a surveyor on the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline. I had started as an Instrument Man, the one who was always peering through the tube to make sure the lines were all straight, the angles were correct and the distance was measured. After some time I worked my way up to Party Chief, responsible for an entire survey project and the crew that was to complete it.
Those of you who are familiar with surveying will know that, after the instruments themselves, the survey truck is a very important part of the crew. In this case the truck was a 1974 Chevy Suburban with three rows of seats and stretched a little longer than the typical Suburban. This was a good thing, because
Growing up on a farm in Alabama, I learned some important lessons from shocking encounters with electric fences.
Short cuts are only short if you can take them.
For a couple of years, when I was young and not yet in school, we lived on a hillside just outside of a small town. Our place was rented and fairly small. It would have been a sharecropper’s cabin in years gone by. There was room for the necessities and not much more.
There wasn’t a lot of agriculture going on around there, but some of the neighbors did a little gardening and some even had a few head of cows. Every once in a while I would visit one of those neighbors with cows. Visits usually included cookies or some other treat with a few stories and a visit to the pasture to see the cows up close.
On one of those visits I realized that I had stayed away from home too long and decided to take a short cut across the pasture and through a small stand of trees. I raced across the open pasture and came to the barbed wire fence on the other side. I reached to pull the strands apart so I could squeeze between.
Now, I had heard about electric fences and I knew they were strung in places across the hillside, but I had not really realized what that meant. As I touched those wires
