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Rural Life
We were paged out yesterday evening for a huge live oak tree limb that had fallen into the road. It was only a little way from our home so I got the chain saw out while a couple of other firefighters went to the station to get more equipment. I was at it for maybe fifteen minutes when a guy stopped and said his excavator was being hauled to his nearby home/business and asked if we wanted some help. The excavator cleaned up the debris in about 20 minutes versus the couple of hours it would have taken us. We have our big annual fundraiser tonight so I’m inviting this guy and his crew to come and eat on our dime. During the work a half dozen people passing by offered help, and this is a fairly quiet country road. You can see another large limb that has been worrisome for a long time – our road and bridge crews are coming out soon to take these big limbs down as they give almost no warning before they come down. The base of that limb was so heavy it lifted one track off the ground a few times while he was pushing it.
Published in General
About a year after I moved to Palestine, TX (pop 20K), I blew a cooling system hose in Montalba (pop ~3000). Biggest problem I had was fending off unnecessary offers of help, because I got plenty in the next 15 minutes. One person stopped with duct tape, and showed me how to patch up the hose with it. Two others got water to refill the radiator. A fourth and fifth escorted me back to Palestine (about a 15 minute drive) with one ahead of me and one following (in case I broke down). The sixth, seventh, and eighth that stopped seemed disappointed they could not help. None of these people knew me. They just wanted to help.
I love rural Texas.
The guy said thank you for letting him help. At big brush fires we can usually scare up a couple of tractors until we can get the big dozers on scene.
But, but, but…. You act as if the race didn’t matter!
We live on a country road and get the same problem where trees from across the road will fall across the road. Pretty soon, a pickup truck will stop, two guys will get out and manhandle it across the road. If the branch is too big, the chain saw comes out.
I’ve learned that “Good ole boy” is a compliment, not an epithet.
Tonight we had our annual dance but before we renamed the fire complex for one of our founding members. Picture is one of his sons speaking to the crowd.
Great story.
Danger trees are no joke. They’re the first to come down in a storm. This may not exactly apply, but utilities spend time and money on pruning back or taking down trees that threaten power lines. It’s never a favorite expense from a regulatory point of view because there’s no asset there that gets installed and benefits a customer, which is how a straight (ish) line can be drawn from their perspective.
The result is the pruning is always underfunded, and we all pay for it later during the inevitable storm that knocks a tree down, and takes the power offline for X number of hours or days.
I have a tractor with a grapple. It would make short work of that little bush you are calling a tree. It’s funny how I can’t legally drive my unregistered tractor on the road but when a storm hits those rules simply go away for a while.
I had a similar situation a couple years ago before I had my tractor. I was cutting firewood and we got a call where my neighbor was on an old excavator and thought he would knock a large branch off an oak tree. He got it down all right. It came crashing down on top of him somehow. Dispatch said some of you go to the scene with your chainsaw. I was standing there with my saw in my hand. Since I already had more than one beer in me I decided better than to go screaming down the road in my F250 in that condition. Okay, don’t say it, I didn’t have a lot. Other than his femur poking out and a few months in the hospital he is now fine.
In the early 2000s Joe Hurley, a newspaper guy in CT, got laid off and had an idea; he would walk all across the US on Route 6. It starts on Cape Cod, and ends in southern CA. He submitted weekly columns, and then wrote a book about the walk: Ten Million Steps on Route 6 (now out of print).
So he started the walk from MA to RI to CT to NYS and then crossed the Delaware River into PA. He wrote that he had little to no interaction with people in New England and NYS, but as soon as he got started into rural PA drivers kept stopping to offer him assistance or a ride. He said that continued for much of the rest of the trip.
US 6 – The Grand Army of the Republic Highway. He would have crossed US 30 (the Lincoln Highway) and the former US 66, where Bobby Troup advised us to get our kicks, less than two miles from here.
The Crossroads of Mid-America.