Sometimes events come together in remarkable coincidences. Good friends had a horse, Wylbur, who has been frequently sick. The five children and some of their friends were quite attached to him. He had colic, his intestines all tangled, and died this week. Everyone was worried how the children would take it, especially Willow, the 7th-grade daughter. They decided to have a funeral for Wylbur, and a few people from outside the family attended. Getting a hole big enough for a horse is a project, but the Dad shares a backhoe and a hole was dug.
We hadn't heard anything, and worried what was up. One of our sons saw the children at youth group on Wednesday and asked how they were doing. They didn't get what he meant until he asked about the funeral, whereupon they started laughing about it telling him. Shortly before the scheduled funeral, they realised that no one had figured out how to get Wylbur INTO the hole. Where he was lying wasn't that close. So the Dad looked it up online and found that someone had successfully lifted a horse with ratchet straps.
So he ratchet strapped the horse to his tractor. Then he drove for the hole.
"The parts of the horse that were ratchet strapped came with it, but the rest of the horse just dragged behind." The children started screaming because it looked like Wylbur was going to lose his head, but Dad kept going and managed to get all the horse into the hole. The children decided afterwards that this was all really quite funny and have enjoyed telling the story. It's probably a bonding moment they will share on holidays when they are old.
Today at the library program one of the last NH commercial fishermen gave a talk about his new book of reminiscences. One of the best ones was bringing a net with whale goo all over it to the dump, which tried to refuse it. I thought immediately of the Dave Barry story about the exploding whale and associated it with dragging Wylbur across the landscape. As I was wondering what I was going to do about all of this, Earl Wajenberg sent a bunch of new links from his site which included...Dave Barry's story about the exploding whale. I am not linking to it here, but you will be seeing it presently. If you have any other funny stories about dismembered animals, now's the time.
I am including the film of the exploding whale here, because putting it in Earl's list from Wind Off The Hilltop would distract your attention from everything he put there, including some serious writing.
5 comments:
Farm life is helpfully educational in many respects. No farm-raised child is unfamiliar with death and its humiliations of the once-proud; nor needs much explanation of where babies come from.
True story: a friend of mine had two sisters, both divorced, who lived together in a house in Texas. They thought it would be a nice idea to get a Vietnamese potbellied pig, as a pet. It was supposed to stay small, but grew to be 300 pounds. However, they had gotten very attached to it, and gave it the run of their house and yard.
One day, some dogs got after it, and chased it around the yard, until it had a heart attack and dropped dead in the middle of the yard. Now the sisters were faced with a problem: what do you do with a dead 300 pound pig? The obvious answer seemed to be to bury it. However, they had no garden implements. But, Texas soil is very sandy, so they went out with two metal pie plates, and started scraping a hole in the ground next to the pig. They managed to get a hole about half the size needed to hold the pig, but it was exhausting work, and they had to stop. So, they managed to roll the pig into the hole, and covered it with the soil they had scooped out.
Now, they had a large, pig-shaped mound in the middle of an otherwise perfectly flat yard. What do you do with that? They decided to plant geraniums on it.
My friend told me this story, and I never thought I would see it, but by an odd set of circumstances, I happened to be visiting Texas at the same time my friend was visiting her sisters. They invited me over for a family crawfish boil. While I was there, I got my friend aside, and whispered, "I wanna see the pig mound!" She took me out to the back yard, and, sure enough, there was a large mound in the middle of the yard, covered with flowers.
My grandfather was an egg farmer and didn't have this problem. He probably had to bury a few medium-sized dogs over the years.
Back when I rode the bus to work, one of the other riders worked for radiation safety at the university. One of her stories involved a hog that had been given radioactive tracers for some testing, and eventually killed. Because of the tracers you couldn't hand it off for butchering, or land-fill it right away, and the large room was not refrigerated. She had to oversee its dismantling and storage until the radiation levels surveyed low enough to chuck it. The floor had a drain, but they weren't allowed to use it under the circumstances, which made cleanup interesting.
That's an above-average story about animal disposal, James.
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