I am bushed

I am bushed. Four hours of pounding and beating on a recalcitrant adobe road filled with rocks can be bushing. That’s after two previous days of the pounding and beating. Hilary had asked me to take the top off of a part of our driveway a mile and a half downstream that makes the horse trailer come awful close to hitting the back of the truck when she comes in with a load of equines. Here’s the scenario: As the truck descends, the angle between and it and the trailer (which is attached to the center of the bed of the truck, not the bumper) increases, making the possibility of the trailer smacking the tailgate and bed sides acute. Make sense? You have to be there, since I don’t have a picture.

Anyhow, I scarified the rock-laden near-dry red clay several times, bulldozed a bit of it down, graded the result, and finally reduced the danger of the trailer smacking into the bed of the truck. I hope it’s sufficient.

Then I ventured down to one of the impossibly rocky places on our road. A neighbor, who owns the area’s most gigantic bulldozer, said our road is impossible. “You will never be able to fix it with that little grader,” he told me. “I wouldn’t even try with my big dozer.” Well, thanks neighbor, but I will make it better with my “little grader.” All it takes is relentless attacks, an inch at a time, endless digging, scraping, moving dirt a shovel-full at a time up the slope. Fighting the nasty grass at the sides where I scrape up the pittance of dirt. Grass absolutely stops the natural action of a road grader’s mold board (the big blade). Normally, without grass, you scoop up some dirt with the blade at an angle. The dirt moves along laterally and drops away where you want it. When there’s tall, green, thick grass, it plugs up the action; the dirt simply piles up and doesn’t move laterally at all. Huge wads of tangled grass plop along the road, looking like someone was hauling an unwanted horsehair mattress to the dump, dragged behind their truck. The mattress never makes it to the dump.

If you’ve read my earlier posts about the road grader, you know it doesn’t offer a luxury ride. Today I made the mistake of sitting down on its meager seat while pounding along down to the work site. A couple of the bumps in the road pounded my spine to the point of pain. So I stood on my tiptoes with knees bent to absorb the shocks. That can be tiring. Being jerked to a complete stop by running into large rocks embedded in the road can be tiring. Being tired can be tiring.

I am bushed.