The thought of living in the woods with few neighbors can be a little intimating to some folks. Self-reliance is a necessary trait for a homesteader, but it can lead to some challenging situations. Recently we had one of those challenging situations at our homestead. As has been widely reported, much of Texas has received a little bit of rain lately. In fact, some areas have had way too much rain. While we did not suffer the terrible flooding that some places got, we did get a real frog strangler, 8 inches in three days on already saturated ground was bad news for the road up to our house. In fact the canyon created by the raging runoff rivaled Palo Duro.
Feeling obligated to make some quick repairs ahead of some additional predicted rain, I got my trusty MF out and started rearranging some of the misplaced dirt. This basically consisted of moving dirt from our gate back to the top of the hill so that it could start it’s migration back down the hill. Things were progressing well, the berm I wanted to create was done, the worst of the canyons had been refilled when disaster struck. Wanting to get one more load of dirt to put some finishing touches on one of the canyons I took my MF back down to the gate. Spying an area of unmolested soil that need rearranging I got in position and the MF sunk; and by sunk I mean axle deep in liquefied dirt. At first this was kinda funny, a stuck MF. I strolled to the house, loaded the chains in my 1 ton 4×4 GMC and headed back with my son in tow to rescue the MF. The MF and the treacherous dirt had other ideas, nothing we tried would unlodge the MF. In defense of the truck, it never quit trying; it just couldn’t get any traction.
Beginning to get a little desperate, a friend appeared, returning home from an evening out on the town. A friend with a big green tractor, a big green tractor that barely managed to get my MF outta the tight spot it was parked in. So, the moral of this story is to keep on good terms with your neighbors, you never know when you’ll need them and keep your MF tractor on solid ground.
I think I’m gonna give my friend a nickname, State Farm, because like a good neighbor, he was there ….