Drive - A Memoir 69th Installment
fifty
head dairy and move his two sprinkler hand lines.”
“8:50
pm – Haul some of our hay until it’s too dark.”
“10:00
pm – Eat another meal (great, we eat four times a day) then
straight to bed.
Well, actually, the 10:00 pm time wasn’t on the
list, I ad–libbed it to make sure that nobody forgot we wanted to
eat!”
Russ
hadn’t worked at Don’s dairy barn, so I explained to him that
Don’s milking is fun because he has one of the latest in fancy new
milking barns. The cows line up and are guided to their stanchions by
pulling ropes and levers. The milker cups hang there already
connected to the system, you just stick them on the cow and go to the
next cow; when the cow’s milking is done the milker cups drop off.
We pull a lever or two and the next cow comes in. With the ten
stations we can finish all fifty cows in less than an hour. It’s a
grade ‘A’ milk system so the milk never touches the environment.
It goes from the cow to the bulk tank to the milk truck and to the
creamery all the way in stainless steel pipes, tanks, or trucks.
Chapter
17
“Should
we take our harpoon or our fishing poles this Sunday after we milk
Don’s cows?” I asked as we got ready to work.
“It
doesn’t matter. How about the harpoon; we can fish anytime. I heard
they might poison the sucker fish and chubs again like they did seven
years ago. Then our harpooning days will be over.”
“Yeah,
I remember when they poisoned the trash fish because the chubs were
so thick and the suckers were so big they were crowding out the trout
and perch,”
“Yep”,
Russ said remembering. “That fish rodeo was really fun.”
“And
nobody drowned, that was a miracle,” I added.
Russ
and I were seven or eight years old, and we had gone swimming at Mud
Lake. All over the lake were these huge fish, just floating lazily on
the surface of the water; they were the really big bottom feeders. I
mean most of them were as long as we were tall. We waded out to where
the water was about three feet deep and tried to figure out what the
deal was with these lazy bottom fish. I waded over to one and touched
it on the back, and it acted like it didn’t notice me. I closed my
fingers around its tail, and it flashed away jerking out of my grasp.
There was plenty of fight in these fish, but they weren’t
frightened, and they weren’t on the bottom like they should be. I
went to another fish and pushed it sideways, and only then did it
swim away. There were a few small fish hardly moving and a few of
them were belly up. Russ and I looked at each
500 more words tomorrow
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