Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Stuck Truck

First, I would like you to take note that the title rhymes. :)
Now if you also look at that title you can probably guess what this story is about. Tonight I did evening chores at the farm. At one point we had about 20 guests at the farm, so it was not a quiet night. The farm closes at 6, and I was just wrapping up with bottles at 7. I was surprised we had people come to the farm because it was raining pretty much all night. Not just a nice drizzle but a hardcore thunder and lightning storm.
Turns out, that rain did a little damage. As the farm is set up, all the rain ran to the left corner in the back. That is where our hoop barn is, where our steers live. Wally (who is Mary, the director of the farm's, husband) came in saying that the cows were swimming in water. The water was building up back there, and well it was not a pretty sight.
Another problem is that we had about 25 bails of hay stacked in that barn, that were now getting wet on the bottom. For $7 a bail, Mary was not happy. We could save the bails if we got them out, and fed them in the next couple of days before they got moldy.
This meant someone had to go out and move them to a different barn in the pouring rain. Mary called up Greg and Nate (the two boys of the barn) to see if they could come on over. Only Greg could make it so he came over, and since he needed some help and I was there; the two of us went out in the pouring rain. We got one load out and into the next barn. This involved backing up Mary's truck into the hoop barn and filling it as full as we could with hay. We got about half of it out, so we went back for the second load. Keep in mind we had to keep the hay dry as we moved it too, so we had lots of tarps.
The problem came when we went back for the second load. At the entrance to the hoops barn, there is a bunch of small pebbles to help with drainage. With all the rain, they became a sort of sing whole and I think you can guess what happened. The back two wheels of the truck sank into the mud and it was stuck, very stuck. Almost the entire back wheel was buried.
No matter how much we pushed or reved the engine, the thing would not budge. This meant we had to get out the tractor to pull it out. Someone had to drive the truck (me), someone had to push (Greg) and we needed someone to drive the tractor. At this point Greg called up Nate and told him he had to come over. By the time Nate got there and got the tractor all hooked up, Wally had come out as well to help. After a bit of struggle the guys got the truck out though. (At this point, I was not doing very much.)
We still had to get that hay out of there though, but we could not back the truck back into the hoop barn. So this meant carrying it to the truck, putting it under the tarp, while stacking it and getting in as much as possible. Before that started, Greg told me to go home. I had not been home all night, and well I have homework and such. I took him up on the offer and left, since the guy's had it handled and I was not doing much anyways. Hopefully they got it all out!
So that was my night... Lets just hope the cows don't mind a little water since it is STILL raining.

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