Last Days Before School . . .

Jeez-ola Peaches . . .

Four hours on a Saturday in a new building, copying syllabi (two preps) intro worksheets . . . in the immortal words of Captain Jack Aubrey, looking at a hull model of a French frigate, "What a fascinating modern age we live in . . ." The copy machine is a Ricoh monster-truck. The lights are off, the copy room is still, only Hardage is moving, tentatively pushing random buttons to see if the machine will talk to me . . . aha! Click! and with a series of solenoids slamming shut and vacuum pumps generating absence, honest-to-God eight feet of machine fires up like an F-15 on the catapult of the Enterprise. You have to turn your head to see the source of the noise. The beastie is huge! And it all comes to life with flashing green and red lights atop the control console - at eye level . . . I'm expecting to hear, "Danger, Will Robinson!"

I got my copying done. Well most of it, anyway. I ran out of paper. Other people had been there ahead of me . . . maybe tomorrow.

I came home to veg-out and watched Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. ROFLMAO. That is really a delightful piece of work. What a terrific line of . . ."Professor! What does an intellectual genius like you want with a simple young nurse like me?" to the accompaniment of ripping fabric. Really; go rustle up a copy from Amazon.com or eBay and watch it with someone you enjoy talking to and thinking with. So much laughter that the back of your head hurts where your jaw muscles attach.

Mental Health Break!

Last year I took off a week to ride around our forty-five acres with George and his D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer (tracked front-end loader). Oh, Lord, have mercy; what a rush. I'm starting to get an idea how George Patton felt driving through Germany!

So, here we are at the top of the hill clearing out a circle in the trees for a council-fire ring, and we stop to . . . ah . . . water a tree . . . and I smell wood smoke. What a happy smell. Uh, the smoke is coming from the pile of tree/brush we just trod over! Damn! NO water left - this is the top of the hill. I'm sprinting across the clearing grabbing up a stick to beat out the fire with. It's in a punky, rotten log, so I start digging out the coals that are glowing in the daylight! The more I dig out, the more I find. Fifteen, twenty minutes - I get them dug out. OK. But there's more smoke back across the clearing where I just ran from. OGodOGodOGod! More running, more digging, more scooping rocky dirt to smother embers - no open blaze. Thank you, Father.

Another trip back to the first pile and the fire's out, but George and I hear the crackle of flame and smell - OSHIT! THE ENGINE'S ON FIRE! Bail off the Cat!

The little yellow-painted thumbturn screws that hold the engine compartment closed won't open. Did you know that it is humanly possible to bend heavy-gauge metal when one is excited enough? George and I stepped into the Twilight Zone and bent metal to get the engine compartment open. The only water we have is our water bottles. That doesn't impress the gods of fire. The oil and fluids that drip out of the engine and puddle on the bottom of the engine compartment . . . that's what's aflame. So I'm ripping up handfuls of hardscrabble dirt and rock and tossing it into the sump.

Then George starts sounding his Death Rattle . . . he's 68, lean as a snake, weathered as an old Paiute moccasin in the Mojave desert . . . the man has stress-induced asthma, his inhaler's in his truck down on the flat, and he's leaning against the 'dozer trying to get enough air not to die. Finally the fire in the engine sump goes out.

But smoke has started again across the clearing. This is not a fun afternoon so far. Exciting for sure, but not much fun. Scared witless. All I need now is to burn down the woods. The cellphone doesn't work down in here, so we can't call the VFD, and the neighbors are about a mile away through the trees. That's the same way the crow flies, by the way. So I'm back being a forest ranger/smoke jumper when George yells, "The fire's back up in the engine!" and guns the dozer down the roadway we've just bulled out like a Russian in a T-38 on his way to Berlin. I get the hilltop fire out again. I hope. And I hear the dozer engine revving and the treads shredding vegetation --- then the scream of limestone as the beastie slides (Thank God it didn't roll) off the top of the hill and down to the creek. I later learn that we now have two paths up/down the hill.

Then all the noise just stops.

And there's not a sound in the woods. Even the birds are still.

I start reenacting the Battle of New Orleans . . ."I ran through the briars, and I ran through the brambles; I ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go." Greenbriar is a real bitch. I am being polite, Mom. I get off the hill and pelt down the road (it's gravel). There stands the 'dozer, engine off, smoking gently. No George. No sound. OGod! He's dead somewhere on the road!

Nah. Here he comes, sauntering back up the road with an empty milk jug, sucking his inhaler like a kid with a Dr. Pepper, cutting the top off to make a bailing bucket. Now I'm standing in the creek - in my boots, yet - bailing creek water into the engine compartment, and now the damn fire is out.

Uh, it's not really wise to run heavy equipment with an engine compartment full of rocky mud and sh....tuff. So we unbolt this 100-pound skid plate to get access the the beast's steel gut, and the young guy (that's me) gets into a semi-erotic configuration with this caterpillar and starts pulling out all the mud and the blood and the beer I have been shoving in there in the first place. The smile is because there's no smoke on top of the hill, either. You can laugh or cry. It's easier to just laugh.

Then we bolt the skid plate back on, and just let the machine sit in the road. That's enough for that day.

When I got back to town and back to school, I learned that that same day -- at that same time -- the fire sprinkler in the hall outside my classroom blew and put, I'm told, a couple of inches of water on the carpet and partway up the walls. The Principals shut down my classroom and herded my kids into Kay's class and Dawn's class. Actually, they herded them into Kay's room, but she was so tough on 'em some of them just sort of migrated over to Dawn's.

A little psychokinetics goes a long way . . .

I love being in my classroom; but I flat smooth would not take for that day.

The 'dozer worked fine the next day. And that evening's bath in Buffalo Creek was uniquely refreshing.

This is the road we pushed up the hill when we were calm. I didn't have the strength to take a shot of the one George cut coming off the hill. It looks a lot like this one, except theres some bare-naked limestone up just below the crest where the treads slipped.