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"Remember Bub, you only have one set of arms and legs" - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/10/2011 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
Fate I suppose, does not always mean moments of epiphany or a near miss. It can be a culmination of luck after a period of time. My experience working on the farm from 12 to 18 years old was significant not for near misses with fate. But rather, that time was significant for being devoid of physical trauma. Marshfield Hospital and Clinic up in the middle of our still very rural state, to this day devotes resources to agricultural trauma - its study, training, and medical care. This now, in a time where the technology and culture of safety has greatly improved since I was a kid. While my neighbors and classmates were losing fingers, toes, limbs, and even lives, my farm experience was uneventful. This stretch of safety I attribute to one man and one man only - my father. He constantly hounded both me and my uncle on the culture of farm safety.
Dad called me "Bub." "Bub, don't touch that." "Bub, look the hell out." "Bub, don't let me catch you removing that safety shield from the power-take-off." "Remember Bub, you only have one set of arms and legs."
In those days, we did not have the potential to have body parts sown back on like today's workers might if lucky. So safety had a finality about it. My Dad understood finality as he had been in Africa during World War II. A mistake there, so far from the "news headline" war, most likely resulted in death or even worse.
Equipment did indeed come with shields, safety guards, and safety devices in the 1950s and '60s, but they often were removed because they were quite frankly, often in the way. You would need to have been there I suppose. But, multiple equipment from different companies and eras was often needed to be attached to each other to accomplish a task - filling silo, bailing hay, harvesting grains, et cetera. The various safety devices often collided, rattled, or made the work go harder. Dad was not one to remove a piece of safety equipment, but sometimes it would disappear. Dad would then harp ad nauseam about being careful around that compromised machinery.
We have just up the road to the north from Janesville, Wisconsin, an annual event called, The Rock River Thresheree. The four day or so event takes place on a several hundred acre plot out in rural Rock County over the Labor Day Weekend. The theme - old farm machines and their use. Of course there is old tractors, steam engines, and harvesting equipment. Hence, the name Thresheree. Threshing machines separated grain from the plant stem. They were the precursor to our modern combines.
Back when I was a kid, all the threshing machines were in farmers' sheds collecting cobwebs, in junk yards rusting, or in pieces being used for parts. The term "thresheree" was an event of sorts back in the day when neighboring farmers gathered at each others' fields to share the labor intensive tasks of harvesting the crops.
I always smile when I go to the Rock River Thresheree event. There is enough dangerous equipment their to remove dozens of digits. The people demonstrating the equipment take it in stride. It is what it was back in my grandfather's time - dangerous.
There were not too many old farmers around the neighborhood of my farm that were not missing a finger or two, or worse. I later worked on the ambulance in central Green County with a retired farmer who drove for us. Between both his hands, he was missing at least four and a half digits total. Now there is poetry, an ambulance driver whose fingers had been lopped off in various farm accidents. All he said to me one day was, "Damn corn picker jumped out and grabbed my fingers; I put my fingers where they shouldn't have been..."
I have all my fingers and toes as did my Dad. His warnings served me well in my combat trained unit in the Army; also during my landscape maintenance days (enough junky equipment to de-finger a battalion of men); and, more recently in Turkey, Laos, and Vietnam doing research, and then in Iraq as a journalist.
In Iraq, there was errant electrical wires hanging in the streets. Manhole covers were missing - no doubt stolen for scrap - exposing inattentive pedestrians to the peril of falling into third world sewers. Those that had cars drove them in lawless abandon. And of course it was a war zone, many times over. Accompanying me always, Dad's voice was constantly hounding my every move, especially over there in Iraq...,
"Jesus Bub, watch the hell what you are doing."
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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