Back me up :)

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Several of my stories will probably start this way, but here’s one I have to tell. Mostly because my daughter Tara was with me at the time.

  It was hot that summer and the chickens were big. The tractor was broken down, so that meant no front end loader to throw the 100 plus 6 pound dead chickens into, making one trip per house to the composter and dumping the freshly dead onto the disgusting, gooey, vulture and raccoon and possum chewed up dead. Tis a miserable, disgusting job to climb up onto the back of the one ton flatbed and grasp each chicken AGAIN by the leg and toss them one or two at a time into the composter. Miserable, hot, disgusting and stinky. The composter is just large, open bins to pile dead birds in and let them “compost” which is a nice way to say “let them rot and get all boiling with maggots and flies and draw every raccoon, coyote and possum and stray cat and hawk for miles”.

  Trevor was in college at the time and Tara was about 16, helping me walk chickens when they were big and hard to do. I saved her for days when it was bad and left her alone when it wasn’t that hard.

  We got the bright idea (actually…she says I thought it up by myself and she’s probably right) to load all the birds as far back as we could and I would put the one ton in reverse and just FLOOR it and fly backward, slamming on my brakes and THROWING the chickens into the composter at one time, saving the tedium and work in the heat.  

   So, Tara and I put all the birds on the very end of the flatbed and I got in the truck and put it into position. Clint had put a big, heavy, red tool box on the truck which blocked my view from the back window. The tool box was filled with heavy metal tools and equipment from the chicken houses. It weighed probably around 300 pounds.

  I FLOORED it and watched the composter looming up quickly in my side mirror. I SLAMMED on the brakes in what I felt was an appropriate length away from the composter. Tara and I skidded backward HARD and….

                        (I feel I must interject here. If I had known the 300 pound tool box was attached to the truck with a couple of bungee cords, I probably would not have done this. Carry on)

   the chickens didn’t move, not ONE of them flew off the end. What DID try to fly backward was the 300 pound tool box, stretching  the bungee cords to their LIMIT. Tara and I watched in horror as the tool box came back at us and hit the back of the window with a BOOM.

  We sat in silence for a second.

    “Bad idea, mom.” said Tara.

“not one of my better ones, Tara.” said I.

We inspected everything and found no damage to the truck or toolbox. Then, we climbed up onto the back of the flatbed and in silence, spend the next 20 minutes grabbing dead  chickens by the feet and throwing them as hard as we could into the maggoty pile of goo.

   “you gonna tell dad?” asked Tara. “yup” I said.

And I did.

When he quit being mad, he laughed at me and fixed the tractor and then, for my birthday…bought me my very own Kubota, with a dump bed. So there is no need to try to be creative and make work easier, as I tool around in my Kubota, using the dump bed to dump all those freshly dead on top of the deadly dead. But sometimes, because my Kubota is small, I have to back WAY up on TOP of the deadly dead to dump the freshly dead, hearing the bones crunch and hear the soggy bog of death push away underneath me.  Then I have to get out and wade thru….I’m not even gonna SAY what I wade thru…to unlatch the part to dump the bed of dead.  What if….I piled all the birds WAY on the back…put it in reverse….and backed up REALLY fast…hmmmm. Seems like it could work…..