pendulum

Monday, and our final day in Iowa. It’s another rainy one, so we’ll have time to gather our belongings, wash the gravel-road dust off the car and pack for our trip back to Bend. We’re leaving tomorrow morning for our 850 miles to Boulder. We’ll stay in Boulder Wednesday (hanging out with our friends Bill Locke, and Will & Beth Laughlin – we hope, this time J), then off to Bend, via Salt Lake City overnight, arriving in Bend Friday night.

We’ve had a wonderful stay here in Iowa, and it will be hard to leave, especially for Matt, whose favorite place, and the place he wants to stay forever, is wherever we currently are.

For those of you who have been privy to the annual Drape Family Christmas letter, you know that I like to take seemingly non-eventful events, and expand on them a bit. I haven’t really taken the chance to do that yet on our trip, so now seems like a good time. We’ll call this story “Pendulum.”

You probably know that farming is dangerous work. There are many (often comically graphicked) warnings signs on the heavy equipment, reminding us when to jump off, and when not to jump off the overturning tractor. Last Thursday I tried (unsuccessfully, thankfully) to become a statistic.

Two lessons. Don’t park a loaded grain wagon on soft ground, and don’t wear a ring (even your wedding ring) while working at such pursuits.

We were harvesting corn down the highway from the farm, and had finished the field we were in. Uncle Dave and my dad had already set off for the next field, so Bill (Figenbaum, owner of the trucking/grain storage company that hauls for the Drapes) and I were loading out the last of the corn. The first wagons were dumping away into the semi, so I ran off to move the next wagon up in the queue. The fields are still soft from recent rain, and a 35,000-pound load of corn has a tendency to sink – sometimes right up to the axel. This wagon was not up to the axel yet, but it did happen to be the wagon pulled by the tractor least equipped to pull something out when stuck. Bill and I rocked and cajoled to see if we could get it unstuck, but to no great avail. Bill was in the stuck tractor when I noticed we were getting close to moving time with the semi (the auger dumps in, and you pull the semi forward gradually, so as to fill evenly). I dashed off to move the semi forward (yes, Bill allowed me to drive his semi, but it was in 4-foot increments, so reasonably safe, at least “safe” in the relative sense of working with equipment that can squash you like a grape), so we didn’t have corn spilling all over the road. My Grandma Edna is fond of reminding us that she never spilled any corn in her 75+ years of harvesting – a goal we all aspire to, but cannot attain.

So I ran to the semi trailer, and climbed up to see how close we were to time to pull ahead. We were very close, so I jumped off the trailer and ran around the front of the truck to jump in the cab. In order to propel myself more efficiently around the front of the truck, I grabbed the side mirror to pivot and swing myself along. Before I knew what was happening I found myself slamming my head against Bill’s truck. It seems that my wedding ring had caught on a screw on the side mirror, and thus turned my arm into a pendulum, and my head into the nice weight at the end of the pendulum – and WHAM! Head meets truck. I will let you know that the truck is harder than my head (thankfully no dents in Bill’s truck) and a gold ring bends under such pressure, though one’s finger does not. This little mishap, while leaving my finger rather mangled, and head throbbing, did not deter me from my task of moving the truck ahead (remember, our highest priority, short of glorifying God and enjoying him forever, is not spilling corn). After I successfully bounced the truck ahead the requisite four feet, I examined my wounds. My ring was no longer round, rather more of a teardrop shape. It’s difficult to remove such a shape from a round (and swelling) finger, so I grabbed the vice-grips from the tractor tool-box, returned the ring to a semi-circular shape and pulled it off. My head seemed fine for the moment… and the other tractor was still stuck.

So, Bill and I quickly switched tractors, and got the honkin’ big tractor (a technical term) to pull the wagon free, and got on with the loading of corn.

At lunch at Grandma Edna’s that day, I was proud to tell my story of solving our stuck wagon problem while beating a semi with my head AND not spilling any corn in the process.

I am healing up fine, and Grandma let me eat an extra piece of chocolate cake. Chrissie is now in possession of my ring, at least until we are in less dangerous territory, and we have promised Priya we will not post any pictures of the actual incident, or finger – so all seems well. I am thinking of turning the incident into a Drape Academy math/physics lesson, making the boys figure out the impact of a longer or shorter arm on the velocity (and force of impact) of my head.
So, there you go. honkin' big tractor
not-so-honkin' big tractor

Three editorial notes… two amusing, and one serious.
I did not let Chrissie edit this (because she wanted to remove all my parenthetical thoughts), so she takes no responsibility for the content or style.
When I told my dear wife I was going to write this story for the blog, since I hadn’t rambled on about nothing in particular in any focused way on the blog, she replied that “rambling on about nothing in particular” describes most of my blog entries.
The serious note: Since we know many of you readers are praying folk, please be lifting up Grandma Weidler (the twin who just turned 97). She is hospitalized with some internal bleeding that doctors are trying to figure out. We’ll keep you posted.