Mitchell Way
Inner tube rolling
The act of wedging oneself in the inside diameter of a tractor inner tube and vertically rolling.
Although I had proven the idea ineffective for long distance travel, I was curious if it could become a competitive competition.
“Dave! Did you hear that? Can you feel the earth shaking?”
“It sounds like a spooked, slobbering horse,” Dave remarked nervously as he looked around the edge of the building we were standing next to. “Cripes! It’s getting louder. It’s coming this way!”
You know, a lot of young newlywed guys come up to me and say, “Hey Mard, you’re incredibly old and wise. (They got it half right) Can you give us your observations on having babies?”
“Hey kid.”
“Me?”
“Yeah you. Come here!”
It was my first day as a Freshman at Bellingham High School. I was in much fear and dread of being in a new school and having no idea where I was, I stumbled into the Senior Hall. The guy who was calling out to me looked like a shady character, but I walked over to him anyway.
It was dark and I had just returned from a long soak in the campground hot tub. The park that weekend was packed with campers and our tent was one of many in the overflow field. Cheryl was sitting by the fire reading as I walked by and grabbed the lantern.
My schedule is always the same on a working morning: up at four and out the door at four thirty. Every morning as I step outside, the motion sensor light comes on shining directly into the bedroom window of Leo, the farmer who lives next door. Leo is the protector of the neighborhood and every morning when my light comes on, he gets out of bed to look out his window to see if someone is stealing my gas again.
“He was buck-rut loco; I tell you Don! Buck-rut loco! And he ruined everything too!”
I was speaking to one of my friends from the class of 73 who lived across the street. We were both 18 at the time. The conversation centered around his younger brother, Stanley.
Football is won based on perfectly timed, high-speed plays. If everyone does their job effectively and is in the correct spot or reaches for the ball at the exact planned second, the play will be made. Anything less than perfect results in failure or a play made on luck. The same holds true for all ball sports.
I could hear Cheryl in our bedroom closet. She was finding dress shirts for me.
“Ah nope, ah nope, ah nope, ah nope.”
“What is the problem?” I asked.
“You haven’t got one shirt that doesn’t have ball point pen ink stains on the pocket,” she answered.
I have a theory. The makers of dress shirts and the manufacturers of ball point pens are owned by the same corporation. The pens are designed to leak, leaving an ink stain on the shirt pocket thereby requiring me to go to JCPenney. Four new dress shirts had to be purchased. We were going on a cruise.
It has been quite a few years since I have been to the mall, and I believe that it’s safe to go back since the statute of limitations has run out. For a while there, my photo was on the wall as a wanted fugitive in the mall cop’s office. Well, the only photographic evidence is of a man looking like Daddy Warbucks running through the crowd.
Mr. Alan Watts was an English teacher at Bellingham High School during the 70s. He was a timid and fun-loving man who was not at all like the coach-teachers who would sharpen axes on their grinding wheels and thump their chests during class. The requirements for Mr. Watts’ Class included your pencil, a notebook, the English book, and a tetanus shot.
My mother told me that after I was born, they threw away the mold. I’m not accusing her of neglect, but why did she allow me to mold?
A short essay on the inadequacies of being a cow.
It all started one afternoon while I was preparing to mow the back field. I have a Craftsman Commercial riding mower which I use to keep the grass level of the half acre down to a two-inch height. The mowed area borders five acres of cow field which pastures six cows, six calves, and a bull named Melvin. It was a typical polygamous family relationship with Melvin; all the cows and calves vying for his attention while he hides in the back of the barn drinking fermented cider.
Ricky Dandelion stood in the fullness of his shop admiring his treasures. Hand tools were piled high on his work benches, and every square inch of wall space was covered by treasures hanging from nails. He walked sideways through the narrow passageways between old lawnmowers, car ramps, coffee cans full of nails, nuts and bolts, and everything else that couldn’t hang from the wall or lay on the workbench. You see, Ricky is a garage sale junkie — a purchaser of interesting tools, camping and fishing gear, and nick-nacks which he may need someday.
Every Saturday in the spring through summer, for the last 45 years, Ricky, with the classified newspaper in his hand and his lovely wife Venice by his side, gets up at the crack of dawn to jump into the old Subaru to be the first couple at a garage sale to find the best bargains. It is not uncommon for him to be told, “It says in the paper, no early birds!”
Methodically, he looks over each item for sale, picks up what looks interesting, and ignoring the price sticker, goes to the owner and asks if he or she will take less for it. Venice shakes her head and mouths the word, “Sorry” to the homeowner. Then it is quickly off to the next garage sale in the classifies.
The problem with Ricky’s treasures being all second hand, is that most of them don’t work or must be fixed to work properly. This is how he occupies his time during the mid-week: repairing a switch on one tool, sharpening the blade on another, fixing the short in a cut-up extension cord.
“There’s nothing the matter with this that I can’t fix,” he says to Venice as she tries desperately to pull a plated brass chandelier from his hands to give back to the seller. His shop of burgeoning junk and his insatiable addiction to garage sale bargains has created more than one heated argument between the two.
“If you die before me, do you know how much it is going to cost me to pack all this junk to the dump?” she asked.
“Now, now, Venice. I find your tone a little bit offensive,” he answered. “Let me just remind you that it was at a garage sale that I was able to find the 12-foot fiberglass open-top lake boat, trailer, and outboard trolling motor.
“Which you can’t fit into the shop and has to sit out under the fruit trees in the cow field,” she bellowed.
“And I will be pulling it out of the field because Vern called me just yesterday with the news that he has reserved a week at the lake for this year’s fishing trip, so you need to start stocking the RV while I prepare the boat and trailer.”
“You didn’t ask me if I wanted to go again this year. You are assuming a lot, Ricky.”
She stormed off into the living room and sat in her recliner. Pulling her Walkman earphones onto her head, she listened to her CD of the melodious songs of Marvelous Hollis Quince and the Yodel Aires, while reading the romance novel entitled, He Wore A Yellow Rose On His Polka Vest.
It was an annual event for Ricky, Venice, and several other friends to travel the day-long journey in their RVs up the Canadian Highways and unmaintained gravel roads to the lake and the private ranch which allowed them to group park in the field by the water. This fishing trip was always a delight to Ricky and was tolerated by Venice only because having Ricky out on the lake all day allowed her to take long undisturbed soaks in the wood heated, cow trough hot tub.
Ricky looked through the kitchen window at his boat and trailer out under the fruit trees in the cow field.
I’d better go get it cleaned up and ready to go, he thought. I’m sure that the tires need air, and the motor hasn’t run for eleven months.
One side of the fiberglass bow had the oxidation buffed from it by the cows who were rubbing the flies off their backsides all summer. The rest of the boat body was heavily oxidized and some of the canvas was fading badly. The trailer, which Ricky had planned to repaint, was rusting in spots and there was an inch of rainwater which needed to be bailed from under the floorboards. He went back to the shop to find a rag and the can of oxidation remover he had negotiated for at a garage sale a few weeks back. He would work on the boat in the field since there was no great hurry to pull it out right away.
As luck would have it, the national weather service forecasted strong wind warnings for that night through the next day. Lying in bed that night, Ricky listened to the wind whistle through his unsealed bedroom window, which always sounded different than the air which whistled through Venice’s nostrils. He could also hear the metal on the shop roof lifting and slapping back down which caused him to worry.
The next morning, wearing his barn boots and wool coat, he walked the perimeter of the property to assess the wind damage. The house and the shop appeared to be fine, but looking out at the boat he was shocked to see that in the night a large limb had broken from the apple tree and was now lying on top of his boat.
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” he muttered. Walking out to the boat to survey the damage, he was relieved to see that the limb had not damaged the fiberglass, but it was too heavy to lift off and would have to be cut into pieces.
This was indeed a boil on his bottom of happiness, but he had the necessary equipment in his shop to do the job.
During one of his garage sale expeditions, Ricky found an electric chain saw which he purchased so he would never have to mix gasoline for a gas chainsaw again. He had plenty of long lengths of repaired extension cords which he could plug in, end to end to reach almost anywhere on the property and this was exactly the tool he needed to remove the limb.
Going to the shop, Ricky located the chain saw under a pile of shop rags. He also removed three extension cords from nails hanging on the shop walls. He then began laying the cord from the shop, out to the boat in the field. The wind was still blowing quite strongly as Ricky climbed into the boat with the chainsaw in hand. Taking and plugging the extension cord into the saw, he pulled on the trigger. Nothing happened.
The wind quickly carried the words coming from his mouth in a direction away from the house which saved him from Venice hearing, but at the same time, may have caused the chickens to quit laying.
Now the question was, “Does this chain saw not work, or does one of my repaired extension cords still have a short?”
Muttering to himself, he carried the chainsaw back to the shop. Unplugging the long extension cord from the outlet, he took a shorter cord, plugged it in to the outlet and into the saw. Pulling the trigger, nothing happened. The trigger switch on his bargain garage sale chain saw was broken.
But this is where Ricky really shined. He would just replace the switch and although he did not have a trigger switch made for the saw, he did have some toggle switches which came off the instrument panel of a junk yard Cessna airplane. A switch is a switch, he thought.
Only a mere half hour had passed before Ricky had jury-rigged a toggle switch onto his electric chain saw. He had a smile as he admired his workmanship.
“Try to get the best of Ricky Dandelion,” he muttered, and he carried the saw out through the field to the boat again. After again climbing inside, he plugged the extension cord into the plug on the chain saw and holding the blade of the saw into the air, he flipped the toggle power switch.
Nothing happened.
“What the heck?” he yelled, and he flipped the switch back and forth. “It’s got to be one of these extension cords.”
He tried once again to lift the limb off the boat but the length and weight of it made it too heavy for a man of 82 to move. He laid the saw down with the chain bar resting on the floor of the boat.
“Dag nabbit. Stupid chainsaw!” he yelled with such volume that Venice heard it through the Walkman headphones. She looked out the kitchen window just in time to see Ricky climbing out of the boat. He had one boot on the ground and one boot hanging from the gunwale. His pants had dropped far below his hips, and he appeared to be mooning the neighborhood. Cussing up a storm, he followed the extension cord back across the field to the shop and upon entering, he realized that after he had used the shorter extension cord to test the toggle power switch on the chain saw, he had forgotten to reattach the cords going out to the boat.
“Well dog-gonnit, Dandelion! Use your brain,” he grumbled as he plugged the cord into the outlet again.
Heading back out of the shop, Venice opened the back door of the house and yelled, “Lunch is ready, Ricky. Come and eat while it’s warm.”
She stood in her cotton farm dress with knit green socks, wearing yellow Crocs. The bonnet on her head added to her outfit giving her the look of an Amish housewife. Still grumbling and hot under the collar, Ricky entered the back door and sat down for lunch at the breakfast table.
Somewhere in the neighborhood, the hum of a motor could be heard.
“Sounds like one of the neighbors is using a weed eater today,” she commented.
“A weed eater, or maybe a chain saw,” he mumbled. And then with his fork halfway to his mouth, he stopped eating and jumped up from the table. Running to the kitchen window, he looked out at his boat. The bar of his chain saw was hanging straight down from the bottom of the boat and was shaking back and forth sending fiberglass dust into the air.
“My boat!” he yelled, and he ran out the back door to unplug the extension cord.
To summarize the damage: In the process of flipping the toggle switch on the chain saw back and forth, he left it in the “On” position. Upon plugging the extension cord in at the shop, the motor started the cutting chain and because the chain bar was resting on the floorboards of the boat, the saw cut through the floor and the hull, leaving an eight-inch gash next to the keel.
“Gol-darnit, Venice,” he moaned.
Venice couldn’t help but giggle.
In the days following, Ricky was able to find some fiberglass patching material in his shop which he had purchased from a garage sale and lying under the boat, he covered over the eight-inch slash making it almost invisible and almost a waterproof seal.
Ricky and Venice were able to pull the boat up to the lake in Canada for a week of fishing with Vern and the other friends. Venice spent her mid-day hours lying in the wood heated, cow trough hot tub listening to her Howard Quince CDs through her Walkman headphones while Ricky sat in his boat out on the lake bailing water from the bilge while he watched his bobber float on the surface.
“Gol-darnit, Venice,” he yelled from the lake.
Venice couldn’t help but giggle.
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
“Three weeks left in August. Then I go to my college, and you go to yours. Where did the summer go?” I griped.
My best friend, Chuck, and I were lying on the carpet of the TV room waiting for my mom to make us some sandwiches.