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Vilisar Translation

Expert German-English translation available; business and finance our specialty.

Sachverständige Deutsch-Englische Übersetzung; Geschäft und Finanz unser Spezialgebiet.



Friday, October 14, 2005

GENTLEMEN NEVER FALL FROM HORSES; THEY ARE THROWN!
Friday, 14 October 2005

Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime. But after many times of riding different horses on some of the roughest that the ranch has to offer, today I lost an argument with Snip about what direction we were going to be riding.

Tanner, 10, has a black pony or mini-horse called Ginger; if you have ever read Black Beauty you will know where the name comes from. Now that Ginger works so well towing the sulky, T. is also training Ginger to the saddle. Next week she will be showing Ginger and her skills at an agricultural fair in Chihuahua. She asks me if I want to ride out with her into the large open meadow behind the corral. Approaching the final days of our stay at Rancho el Nogal, I am looking for opportunity to ride and agree readily.

Snip, a black stallion, has the reputation, I later hear, of being rather stubborn. Dutch rode him early on during his stay at the ranch and wound up walking back to the corral. I rode Snip out to the dozer site earlier this week but had no trouble.

Snip stands saddled and tied near the corral and I reckon on no problems. But, he is difficult about going through the gate and even tries to buck a few times. Why didn’t I get off then? At nearly every turn he tries to head back to the corral. He clearly thinks he is on a union contract! Only constant kicking and whacks with the end of the lasso keep him moving.

The major psychological problem here is that the corral is clearly visible from anywhere in the meadow. If the horse thinks it can head for the barn, it is going to try it whenever it can. Snip is a tough horse and fights me at every step.

Eli, 6, has decided to follow his sister out and around the meadow. He is walking barefoot without complaint, as he usually does. But at some point I ask him if he wants to ride behind me on Snip. He thinks this is a good idea; I help him up and point Snip away from the corral.

Snip has decided he has had plenty of this and is going home no matter what. We struggle. Snip begins to buck. After three or four good bucks I fly over his right shoulder, landing hard on my right shoulder. The wind is knocked out of me and I feel nothing. Nor can I seem to get any breath. I roll onto my back and see Snip, still bucking, moving away from me with Eli still hanging on to the saddle for dear life. I close my eyes involuntarily and feel the pain ooze into my shoulder and ribs.

When I open my eyes, I look up to the blue sky and see two small children and a black pony looking down at me.
“Are you all right?” T. asks.
“Not really,” I reply. “I hurt.”
After a minute or two I suggest she go and fetch Snip who is now eating grass about 100 yards off. T. returns leading Snip.
“Maybe you should walk her home,” she says.
“There’s no way I am walking back unless I kill that damned beast first!” I say.
T. giggles. I struggle to get up and feel less woozy on my feet. Nothing seems to be broken but my shoulder aches. When T. brings Snip back I can see that the horse is ready for more fighting; she has her ears back and her forefeet planted wide apart. I ask T. to hold his bridle while I climb aboard. Pulling myself up with my right arm hurts like the very devil. I am clearly going to be in pain for a few days.

We walk slowly back to the corral. The pain is there in my shoulder and upper chest. But Snip’s gait is relatively smooth and I am doing all right. I stop once to let T., Ginger and Eli catch up; Snip is still in a feisty mood, still determined to get back to the corral as quickly as possible. He does not like stopping here and paws at the ground with his right forefoot.

Eventually we pull into the corral area. Climbing down is fraught with pain. I notice that the Tanner and Eli have headed out to find Kathleen who is reading while sitting on a log overlooking the river valley at some distance from the ranchhouse complex. I open the corral gate. Agh! Mensch! Scheisse! I tie up Snip and loosen the saddle girth – darn, that hurts! - before walking over to the nearby guesthouse where we sleep to swallow four aspirin and get a head start on the stiffness.

Bob and Cindy come along and the kids are all too eager to tell the whole gruesome, not to mention embarrassing story.
“Snip is a tough horse to fall off of,” Bob says, trying to be consoling.
“Oh, I don’t know. I found it pretty easy,” I say.
What he means is that Snip is tall and you fall a long way. Apparently he has fallen - correction: “been thrown” - several times from Snip. The last time he broke his arm.

Trying not to show my distress, I head into the ranchhouse to doctor the abrasions on my arm.


THE FINALE OF THE BULLDOZER SAGA
Thursday, 13 October 2005


It is evening, nearly dark. I sit in the guest house typing. I am tired. I have been awake since well before dawn, constantly checking if it is yet 0630 so I can get up to put the water on for breakfast coffee. I was in bed shortly after dark last evening and it looks like it might be early again tonight.

I have been riding each late afternoon out to the ravine where the dozer has been hanging on the side of the steep slope waiting for the time when the trees between it and the streambed have been cut and a pathway made for the wheeled dozer to race its final journey down. Bill, his son Joe, along with occasional other helpers like Dutch and Alex, have been working every day to build rock berms, chainsaw the moderately sized but very hard oak trees. Bill says himself that he is no spring chicken any more. The physically demanding work is exhausting. He looks gaunt, his eyes sunk into his skull. There is a lot on the line for Bill; he was driving the bulldozer when it slid sideways off the road. Since it was nearly the first thing he did after arriving with his family on the ranch, his shares are not going at an all-time high. The dozer is urgently needed to grade the whole ranch road so that two-wheel vehicles can get in and cattle carriers can get out. The ranch lives from cattle and from educational tourism, i.e. climbers, hikers, university courses in ecological subjects, etc. The heavy rains of last winter and the recent rainy season have played havoc with the ranch road, which of course is why the 60,000-pound, four-wheeled bull-dozer went off the road at a spot which cuts diagonally along the sides of a ravine. The soil there is very soft.

As part of the rescue attempt, last week the dozer was allowed to slide downwards into the sixty-foot ravine in two stages, each time at considerable risk of rolling the dozer. The betting odds amongst the gang were definitely indicating that they thought the dozer could roll at any time even after it came to a rest against an oak tree. It certainly looked precarious.

Every step of the rescue attempt had been plagued. The ranch ran out of gasoline for the chain saws, for example. This was after many hours were put in by Bill and his son Joe in cleaning them and getting the two machines operational. Then it was discovered that the spark plugs were actually broken. When high water caused the starter motor on the little pickup that the work team (usually just Joe and his father) to fail to start and then to run out of gas after several days, the men were obliged to ford the river on foot and walk the better part of an hour out to the site. Finally, the rains came back and made the ground under the dozer so soft that it was treacherous to even be near it.

But today it was going to be dropped into the stream bed so that it could be driven downstream to where the stream crossed and then back onto the road. There were some problems with this too since the stream bed, though more open and level than the ravine sides, was still littered with large boulders and oak trees growing out of the middle. It was hoped that the dozer could barge its way through.

Dutch rides out there in the afternoon to help and I go along to take photographs for the blog. We tie the horses in a shady spot in the woods and walk the last one hundred yards. Arriving, Bill tells us that since the vehicle has been at such an angle for so long, the engine will not start. The rains have also loosened the soil so much that the upright oak tree that the dozer was hung up on is now parallel to the ground. But the vehicle has settled somewhat and at a more propitious angle.

Without the dozer’s own engine power available to him, Bill has decided to pull the vehicle off its berm using a come-along. (A come-along is a chain rig that increases the leverage of a pull.) If everything works as planned – which nothing has up until now -, the dozer should roll backwards down the steep embankment and come to rest right-side up in the stream bed.

It takes some time to rig the heavy come-along. One-inch chain weighs over two pounds per foot of length and the blocks and hooks are heavy as well. The first attempt to use another oak tree as an anchor for the come-along fails because the tree-root systems are so shallow in these soils. As the chain comes under tension, instead of moving the behemoth vehicle, it pulls the tree out by the roots.

Bill, Joe and Dutch sweat to move the whole set up to a freshly-cut tree stump directly behind the dozer. The work on the dozer is complicated by the soft footing. The come-along is rigged at last and Dutch and Bill pump the handle to exert pull on the dozer. Once the chain is off the ground, Bill climbs onto the dozer to release the brakes and put the transmission in neutral. The dozer remains somnolent though it seems to quiver as Bill leaps down.

To work the come-along, Dutch and Bill now have to stand directly between the tree stump and the dozer with their backs to the dozer. Dutch turns to Joe who is up the hill a bit and says, “You are my eyes now. If it starts to roll warn me in time!” Then he starts pumping.

As the chain hooked to the dozer’s trailer-hitch comes under increasing stress, we hear the dozer creaking and vibrating. Occasionally, from under the left rear tire, stones pop out of the built-up berm and roll bouncing down to the bottom of the arroyo. At some point everyone begins to shout that the dozer is starting to move under the pull of gravity. Dutch and Bill take off at a run in the loose gravel along pre-agreed pathways. The giant machine rolls up over the berm, the rear end tilts even further down, and the whole thirty-ton monster crashes backwards down the steep slope into the streambed in a cloud of dust. The whole downhill dash takes about five seconds. Followed by silence. Then a cheer goes up from all present. The dozer is still upright and has landed exactly where Bill had said it would. And nobody is hurt.

Scrabbling down the hill, Bill climbs up on the dozer to set the brakes. He tries to start it but the battery does not have enough juice. Bill thinks that, lying for so long at an angle, the battery has lost fluid and probably exposed the plates to air and reduced their efficacy. With the dozer how nearly perfectly level, all the fluids in the machine – oil, hydraulic, battery - should settle back after an overnight stand. Bill plans to start it up the next morning and start to work his way, bulldozing, down the arroyo streambed. We return to the ranchhouse feeling very satisfied.

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