It
isn’t every day that your family invents a new sport. In my family it was only
once: on a fateful Mother’s day in the 90’s.
I
remember it well. We were waiting to go to my grandma’s house. Mom was pissed
that dad had taken the four wheeler to go bring down a few bull calves that had
broken out and into general pop. I was overly eager. Grandma Dot’s place was my
FAVORITE place in the whole wide world, and for some reason my seven or eight
year old mind had decided that not only were we going to grandma’s house, since
we had time to kill we were gonna go in style.
Screw
the fact that I didn’t know how to ride yet. I worked for over an hour lugging
a saddle out of the barn only to lose interest in cleaning and oiling it after,
oh, about ten seconds. I remember leaving it hanging haphazardly across an old
feeder and trotting up to my dad when I saw him slowly walking back to the
house. I should have realized something was wrong at that point, but no. I had
a one track mind. Grandma’s? Can we go now? How about now? Why aren’t you
running to the car? We need to leave, NOW! I left the saddle. It got rained on.
Mom was, uhm, displeased.
Dad
meanwhile had stumbled up to the porch and kicked the kitchen door until mom
came to let him in the house.
I
remember coming in a while later and seeing him with bright silver duct tape
wrapped around his shirt in a makeshift splint. He couldn’t talk, but mom
thought he’d broke a few ribs. To hear her tell the tale of finding the
fourwheeler is a thing of beauty.
She
wandered high and low around the pastures. With dad’s injuries she searched
gullies, and ditches; assuming like most would have that he had flipped the ATV
in a ditch rather than by inventing the most extreme animal sport in the good
ole U.S. of A.. Much to her surprise she found the four wheeler sitting on all
four wheels on a gently sloping curve of a hill. The only oddity was the occasional
tuft of black angus hair sticking to grass and wafting on the breeze.
It
took two days for my dad to regain the ability to speak. When he did, a legend
was born. Dad had been riding after the calf, chasing him high and low. The young
bull had zigged and zagged, bolted through brush and ditch without a care; and
still my dad and the four wheeler had been on him like a cocklebur. But there
on that gentle swell of a hill, when my father was in high gear because there
were no ditches in sight, the calf turned the tables. Well, not so much the
tables as he turned himself and lowered his head. Dad couldn’t brake or
downshift fast enough. The four wheeler flew right up that cow’s neck and dad
flew right off of it. He tried to kick away from the four wheeler, but did not
succeed. When he came to he was alone, in pain, and only vaguely aware of the
four wheeler idling quietly in the distance. He stood up, hurt enough to sit
back down, and decided then and there that sitting back down was a bad idea. I’m
pretty sure he crawled most of the way back to the house.
Mom
discovered later that he had a perfect 2”x2” square on his side. When he kicked
off the four wheeler he went the wrong direction. The four wheeler had a square
steel tube for a seeder bolted to the back and the full force of the flying
machine centered on that tube as it landed upside down on his ribs and bounced
off just as pretty as you do please.
Clearly he should have got 10 points from the Russian
judge for the excellent dismount.
Fun
fact: three weeks later he reached for a towel and discovered that his shoulder
had been dislocated the entire time. Do NOT try this one at home kiddies. Not only was dad beat up, that poor bull calf went crazy every time he heard an engine. Sheesh. Talk about PTSD.
