BACKHOE FOR BARTER

5/13/98
The backhoe operator arrived before my barn chores were done.
I told him the neighbor's gravel hadn't been dumped off yet, there
was nothing he could do until we were sure the gravel would be
brought today. There is no way I'm going to haul twenty yards of
stone across a hundred yards of muddy lawn to a drainage ditch
in a wheelbarrow. Maybe Ricci couldn't find a load on such
short notice, he had arrainged for the backhoe two days ago, but
thought he would be finished with a job by then and could do it
himself. He had called in a favor just last night, asking me to put
off an Aunt's plumbing job  in order to do this one .
Aunt Hazel didn't mind, she'd already told me not to hurry
fixing her shower faucet because there were two bath rooms in
the house. At least this one is outside work on a sunny day.
Usually, my schedule makes me do interior work on such a day,
and labor outside in the rain or snow.


I sent John up to the house for coffee while I finished
chores. An unexpected twist to the story of my log cabin plans
came when I had strained the morning's milk and washed out the
equiptment. John had planned on digging a ditch today and he wanted
to dig a ditch! He asked if I needed any back-hoe work. Do I?!
I gave him a rundown on all the reasons I would like to hire a
back-hoe and front end loader if I could afford to. "We'll
work something out for a barter deal," John told me.


We took our coffees out to the hole-in-ground that is going
to soon be a log cabin. One look and John knew what to do. There
was a foot-deep puddle at one end, the trench I'd dug years ago
had gradually filled in with leaves and dirt, daming the flow. He
said the overgrowth should be cut first. Several ironwood trees
were now twenty feet tall; prickly locust and berry briars also
lined the ditch on both sides. I set down my cup and went for the
chainsaw. In five minutes we had a clear view of the trench and
John walked down to get the back-hoe.


Another hour went by, in which I hauled off the brush and
stood guard for roots and rocks banging into the conduit to the
cabin for the temporary electric service (temporary, twenty
years ago), the water broke through the last foot of mud and
roared down the cleared waterway to the other hole-in-the-ground
that is either going to house a rootcellar or the septic tank.
This smaller hole is twenty-five feet long and about ten-foot wide,
with a depth of seven foot. A different back-hoe dug this
for Uncle Louie, before I aquired our two acres, as part of a
failed attempt to set a trailor here.


John declined lunch and asked if there was anything else he
could do with the old Ford tractor. I said he could scrape the
inside edges of the banks of the foundation for me if he wanted.
I needed to start setting forms for the pillars soon. He is still
out there as I write this, the boy don't quit!
 

The back-hoe is Bob's, the senior member of the OFCC, he had
bought the machine at an auction last summer. John had helped
to repair the broken steel pin that the hoe pivots on and replace
the worn out belts and hoses, and being unemployed at the time,
they had struck a deal. John would drive it around to the
local folks on our mountain and make it earn it's keep.


Ooops, I spoke too soon, the tractor has stopped. A control
rod broke. John is taking it up to the farm to re-weld it. Old
tractors do have their drawbacks.


John wasn't gone an hour when I heard the tractor start. He
said he didn't know if it would last four hours or four days,
but he'd fixed it. We looked at the lever system that controls
the hoe attachment, a series of eight-inch rods, a loop on one
end that joins the pistons at the hydrolic pump. The opposite
end is threaded into the handles themselves. The rig had been used
in a stone quarry business in it's past life. All the other
rods were in the same, rusty shape as the one that broke. John
told me that he'd asked a freind to bend some straight rod to
replace them. He hoped these would last long enough to finish my
neighbor's job tomorrow.


He scraped off the entire 24'x36' skull of the future
foundation of our cabin, with extra room for the footers.
There wasn't much dirt there but once he'd finished, I once again
saw the lay of the shale ledge our two acres sits on. Only about
two feet lower than the lawn, it appears deeper because of the
surrounding mounds of dirt. The ledge slopes slightly away from
the pitch of the hilltop with a step near the center of a foot
or so, the reason we had a pond at what should have been the
higher end. It's somehow comforting to know this huge chunk of
rock is over three hundred feet thick.


By this time, I was ready to call it a day, but not John. He
just asked for a glass of water and said "What's next?" I led him
to the compost piles. He moved ten ton of the twenty-some
that filled the space between the barn and the coop. I directed
him first to the edge of the garden for five scoops of the finest.
I'll use that for top-dressing the beds once everything is planted.
Then he hauled the entire second bin to a spot closer to the top
gate of the pasture, very efficiently turning the pile for me.
I'll take it from there to the terraces with Alice, the garden
tractor. Then he loaded his truck with two scoops of grade-A for
his garden. He said a mutual friend might be by for a load and we
moved some of the first bin (the freshest) to the empty one beside
it. He parked the tractor and was just about to shut it off when
Russel showed up. Back down to the piles we went. This time I
gathered worms for the worm-box betweeen John's scoops. I must
have picked five or six thousand redworms and earthworms. John said
he'd never seen so many worms in one place. He said he'd bring a
container tomorrow and left when Russel did, just in time for
evening chores.