The Rock Wall

Tough times bring out the best in people. We’ve been beat down way too much with the “bad news” about the virus. I don’t even want to watch the TV news. I prefer to watch one of the shows we have recorded. Oh, I know I have to keep up for you, but I’m trying to find things you’d rather read about like kids’ turkey season or mushroom hunting.

I’m impressed with what the El Dorado Springs Food Services crew, the administrators, teachers, and other volunteers are doing to make sure that kids don’t go hungry. Now that’s something worth reading about.

I still have a sense of humor.

Derrill Price sent me a photo of the 6 ft. distancing device for Carona Virus he just picked up. It’s a hot shot like for loading cattle. Of course, just like using it on cattle or hogs, you run some risk of backlash if you use it on one that is too big and too surly.

I kinda did that once. For part of my FFA project I had hogs. I had purchased a Duroc gilt out of the Marion Strother herd north of Nevada. One of her little piglets had grown into about a 500 lb. boar that had two inch tusks. He developed a knack for forcibly opening the corn crib door and letting himself in.

One day I went in the west side of the barn where the corncrib was located at the north end. The only light in there came from the south door. I went in quietly all the way to the corncrib door which was safely latched. As I was leaving, I awakened the boar which I had walked by as he was sleeping against the west wall of that part of the barn and he did not appreciate my intrusion.  There weren’t really any handholds or places to step on the east wall of that part of the barn, but I found some while kicking at the boar’s head and open mouth to keep him from eating my legs and feet as I climbed into the barn loft. I was wearing heavy leather work shoes and wound up with a hole in the right one from one of his tucks.

About a half hour later I had a baling wire around his upper jaw and had him tethered to the wall he had just put me up. I used some bolt cutters to trim his tusks and kept the tusks in a small medicine jar for several years. We had a better working relationship after that.

Dad, who would have turned 97 on Monday, March 16, never used a hot shot. He kept his one-ton Limousine bull in line with a five tang pitch fork. The bull would go through any gate he opened and said, “Come on, Pop.”  The bull lost respect for fences if there was a girl friend on the other side. Since his neck was too big for the cattle chute head gate, Dad had the vet come out and put about a three-foot chain on a ring in his nose It was about 200 yards from the house to the corral and I could see daylight under the vet’s mobile chute as he was putting the ring in Pop’s nose.

Dad thought maybe Pop would be wild after that. But as soon as the vet turned Pop loose, Dad opened a gate to the corral and said, “Come on, Pop,” and he went right in.

Wonder if Dad’s five tang pitch fork would work on some of those politicians or Derrill Price’s social distancing stick? KL