Back when the earth was still drying up from the great flood – well, my grandkids think this is a normal preamble to a good story – I was working for a dairy farmer while still in high school.
He was doing his best to balance milking cows at 4:30 a.m. and p.m., dealing with irrigation water, a young family and baling alfalfa hay with adequate dew so the leaves were not all left in the field. Those close to him knew that his mood would depend on whether or not he had managed to get four or five hours of sleep for two nights in a row.
As we went about setting up the barn for milking one morning, he seemed rattled. I knew he’d been trying to catch the dew for baling at night. He said he had nodded off for just a bit baling. He was driving an Allis Chalmers WD-45 tractor, with no cab, baling with a two-tie PTO-powered baler, a New Holland if my memory is correct.
He said he woke up because instead of the smooth hayfield, the tractor was driving over rough terrain. As his eyes popped open, he stopped the tractor to figure out what had happened.
Yessir, he was in the neighbor’s sugarbeet field. Shaking his head to get his mind around where he was, and how he and his machinery got there, yes, he was indeed several yards into the neighbor’s beet field. But – to get there from his alfalfa field, he had to drive through his own grain field.
He said he just shut down the baler and maneuvered out of the beets, doing as little damage as possible. He deemed himself unsafe to try to continue baling and went home. Said he thought he would be able to sleep for a couple of hours before milking time. Wrong. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling wide awake until his alarm went off.
Yeah, that was a massive adrenaline burst!
Decades later, I was behind the wheel of my yellow hay truck, on my way home. Our backhaul was a load of lumber from southwest Oregon. I was approaching Vale, Oregon, and within a couple of hours from home. I was fending off the sleepies with Pepsi, Mountain Dew, taco chips, black licorice and singing along with Johnny Cash.
Guessing I was running about 60 miles per hour, an owl had the audacity to fly in front of my truck and hit the passenger side of my split windshield. It hit just to the right of the center bar, rupturing that half of the windshield enough that I now had a new 6-inch-by-12-inch vent. I instantly smelled the nauseating smell of hot bird feathers and bird. Making sure I was still on the road with the truck, I turned around, expecting to find an owl inside the cab of the truck with me – I was alone.
I made it home without another incident. Wide awake all the way. I tiptoed into my house, showered and crawled into bed at around 4 o’clock in the morning. Yeah, even then I had to win a battle to get my eyes to stay shut. Another massive adrenaline burst.
The jingling of neck chains outside the bedroom window is another thing that will bring a dairyman out of a deep sleep to a fully alert state instantly. Changing road conditions while driving is another example. Like the car half a mile in front of you lighting up its brake lights at night in deer crossing country. Or the road surface changing from matte black to glossy black. Yeah, black ice.
While unexpected happenings will snap most of us out of La-La land, there are times when we need to be able to judge our own state of alertness, and “manually” adjust it. If not able to adjust our level of alertness, then we need to at least be able to temper our driving speed to match the “situation on the ground.”
For example, a curvy stretch of road. Dry weather, clear traffic and daylight, and there are some among us who have never outgrown that urge as a 12-year-old boy to be a race car driver. We realize that a curve posted with the yellow warning signs for 35 miles per hour are probably there so loaded hay trucks don’t make a mess negotiating the curves. However, a stiffly suspended pickup or even Grandpa’s Lincoln Town Car is safe faster. If – the pavement is dry, the other traffic is clear, and the “nut behind the steering wheel” is on full alert mode.
I’ll admit to being known to release frustrations toward a tail-gating car behind me at a local set of curves – by blasting through at half-again the posted suggestion for speed, leaving the tailgater halfway down the hill when I’m long gone down the straightaway.
But – there are also times that I prudently coast down the hill, braking to near the posted warning speed – because I know that I’m not at full alert mode mentally.
Prudence is often the better part of valor. Or safety.
