Pop goes the weasel, I mean snake.

…in addition to working at the Forest Service during the summer months I also continued to work on a small ranch a few miles out Caves Highway from where my mom still lives. I learned at a young age that “any job worth doing was worth doing with a piece of equipment”. I learned this lesson while I was cleaning one of the many flood irrigation ditches running through the hay fields on the ranch using a shovel and brush hook to hack through the blackberry bushes that grow rampant along these waterways. One time off in the distance I hear the roar of a tractor coming towards me. It was the neighbor farmer cleaning his own irrigation ditches, as he steadily gained and passed me by while he set comfortably on the seat of his tractor while pulling a ditch cleaner behind him. Sweating my butt off while cleaning my ditch I made a note to self. I need to get one of those. Right after I got out of high school I bought my first tractor. It was an old 8N Ford tractor, but it had been well kept by its previous owner.

I used this same theory, “a job worth doing, was worth doing with a piece of equipment”, when going rattlesnake hunting too. Using my tractor to pull the hay wagon was much easier then using horses to pull a trailer. You don’t have to feed a tractor, clean up after it or brush it either. Most of the time when you find a rattlesnake laying out prone on the warm pavement they are stretched across the country road. This particular time the rattlesnake was pointing right at me as my front tire rolled over his head and I continued driving down the length of his body. Imagine our surprise when we heard a very loud POP when I rolled over that snakes tail. It must have gasped with fright just before I hit it and was full of air.