Martha Kills a Deer

4/10/15



Happy birthday, Kristian!

Determined to leave on time I told David to meet us at our house at 3:00. He was seven minutes late and it took us another thirty minutes to get on the road. We detoured to St Francis with a full truck but an empty trailer. Elizabeth had arranged for us to pick up some composted manure so that we could finally finish the grading we had prioritized as project number one almost a year ago (we still don't have a mailbox).

Of course we have 10 acres of dirt that we can do with as we please, but Troy in St Francis had a Bobcat. Unloading a thousand pounds of dirt by hand is a terrible pain in the ass, but digging that same dirt out from under tenacious weeds and loading it into a trailer is something only criminals should ever have to do.

We drove up to the farm and I was directed to drive into a giant mud puddle where I immediately became stuck. I rocked the truck out of the mud, turned around, and pulled up next to what can only be described by Jeff Goldblum's immortal words from Jurassic Park, "That is one big pile of shit."

A winter's worth of cow manure. (Or cattle manure actually. Turns out, cow means female.) So it was to be two days of slinging poop. The jokes began immediately. It was a bit of a shit show and at one point there was a small shit storm when the wind kicked up. Thankfully it didn't smell and Troy and his Bobcat had us loaded with 1000+ pounds of poop in five minutes. It was spectacular.

We drove a very cautious 60mph up to the schoolhouse. It took half a mile to slow down with a load that size. I barely made it up the driveway and when I went to reposition for unloading I had to back all the way down and out onto the highway before I regained traction.

Finished the night with the northern lights, a first for Elizabeth, Mike, and David. Not actually something spectacular to behold, but there is still something magical about a hazy cloud that you've heard about your whole life, but never seen. Knowing that the aurora borealis is made from sun particles entering our atmosphere at the North Pole made me feel as if we were standing on the edge of the world. It felt like maybe there was nothing further north of us but a few more pine trees and then sheet upon sheet of glacial ice, some harsh wasteland devoid of life except for the lost. It was a frightening feeling but a feeling with some romance as well. Of course I have been hundreds of miles further north of Willow River. I know there are large cities between us and the frozen desert. But maybe somehow the northern lights erases all of it or perhaps the shimmering sky opens a portal to the arctic. It made the world seem vast and empty.

We stood out there and stared quietly. The curtain of light waved in the solar breeze. A few of the brighter stars shown through it. We found the Big and Little Dippers. Mike identified Jupiter and Betelgeuse with an app and there were a couple of shooting stars. Everything you could want out of a night sky.




4/11/15



We started today with poop. Mountains of it. David, Mike, and I shoveled for about three hours to get the trailer emptied and the foundation of the schoolhouse finally properly graded. The schoolhouse now comes complete with a manure moat. So satisfying.

The flies are terrible this weekend. The worst we've seen. The fly paper filled up in twenty minutes. We've vacuumed clouds of them out of the windows. Nothing seems to help. The noise is annoying and they leave a mess on the floor when they die, but otherwise they pretty much stick to the windows.




4/12/15



Martha killed a deer.

The last thing I said to her and Maddy as they left at dusk last night was to watch out for deer. They were back in two minutes with tears in their eyes. She couldn't have even gotten the car up to the speed limit. You could see from the schoolhouse the spot where the collision had occurred.

Worst of all it wasn't a clean kill. There was a crack in Martha's grill. That's it. A little bit of fur was stuck under the hood. It was the barest brush of whitetail on Chevy, but it was enough to break a leg. The deer couldn't get up. It used its front legs to crawl to the tree line.

That's where we found it when we went back to check on it. I called our neighbors across the road for advice. Dwayne was on his four wheeler before I hung up the phone. I met him on the side of the road where the poor little Bambi was still struggling to get away from the road.

I explained to Dwayne how three deer had been on the pavement and scattered when Martha came along. She had nearly stopped to give the animals time to get out of the way. But as Martha sped up again one of the deer changed its mind and tried to join its other two compatriots on the other side of the highway. Bam.

I'm sure Dwayne was a little confused about why we had called him to deal with this strange occurrence that never happens to people like us (people who live in the city). "Does she want it?" he asked. I had a momentary image of hunters/Martha driving country roads at dusk looking for animals to kill with the plastic grills on the front of economy cars.

Mercifully Dwayne said that he'd take care of it. He'd call the DNR or the game warden or somebody. He didn't know. Clearly this deer was coyote food and only city folk go all weepy about the natural circle of life even if the circle did involve unnatural pieces of metal and rubber hurtling through the forest on black ribbons laid by other unnatural machines.

Martha and Maddy headed back to civilization where they couldn't hurt anybody else and Dwayne connected with the sheriff. About an hour later the uniformed officer knocked on the door and told me that he and Dwayne had been unable to find the deer and did Martha want to fill out an accident report. Even though I told him that the accident was minor, the damage was minimal, and the assailant was already gone, he asked me two more times if she was sure she didn't want to fill out a report. Either he was super bored or he just didn't understand why he had been called to the scene.

He sat in his car at the end of our driveway for a bit. I'm sure he was trying to write a report that went something like, "Just spent an hour driving to Willow River, traipsing through the woods, and interviewing locals who did not see an apparent vehicle/deer collision. Both deer and driver fled the scene. No evidence. No official reports to file. Remind me never to move to Minneapolis."

Poor Martha.




5/22/15



Spring is the best! Elizabeth and I got up together (for the first time in recent memory) this morning and went out to see what was new. The leaves on the trees aren't fully formed but the land is covered in grass and flowers and weeds.

No flies! Elizabeth's work last month seems to have paid off in a huge way. She sealed in a couple of attic spaces and now there are no flies inside. Zero. It's fantastic.

Neighbor Mike stopped by this morning. He was riding his bike home from the auto mechanic and he rolled right up the driveway. We gave him a tour and he was impressed. He said he'd been inside the schoolhouse about twenty five years ago. Back then it was abandoned and leaning. There was no loft and it didn't seem like it would be standing much longer. We owe a huge debt to whoever rescued this place. Seems a shame that they're not here enjoying the last marker of the town of Ellson.






NEXT POST: Ordinary Wednesday
Frozen fog. 12/12/14