The Little Ford That Pulled the Excavator Out

At ten after three, Cole came running up from the bus with his backpack banging on his back, and right behind him I heard a sound I’ve only heard a few times in my life.

It was a long, low grinding, like the earth clearing its throat.

By the time I got to the crossing the excavator had slid sideways off the east bank and down into the creek.

It was nose down and tilted, with the left track buried to the top in mud and brown water running around the cab.

Shane was all right. He’d climbed out the upper door and was standing on the track, white in the face, holding on to the handrail.

Brent was already down at the edge of the water in his good company jacket, yelling at him to get clear.

Shane got clear. Then he got back in, because that is what operators do, and he tried to walk it out.

He planted the bucket up on the bank and curled the arm to drag the machine toward it while the tracks turned. It moved maybe two feet.

Then the bank under the bucket sheared off in a big wet slab, and the whole machine slid back three feet toward the deep hole where the old pipe had been.

Brent waved him off. Shane shut it down. Nobody said a word for a while. You could hear the creek running and the rain ticking on the tin of the culvert.

Thirty some tons of yellow iron was sitting in my creek, and the creek was still coming up.

Brent made phone calls in his pickup until dark. I went up to the house and made coffee, because I didn’t know what else to do, and I brought a thermos down to the crossing, and he took it without looking at me.

Friday morning the big wrecker came out from Sioux Falls. Brent’s other excavator was on a highway job ninety miles west and couldn’t be moved without a lowboy, and the lowboy couldn’t be had until Monday.

The wrecker driver drove as far as my field gate. He got out, walked about a hundred yards down toward the bottom in his boots, and came back with mud to the ankles and his mind made up.

“I take that rig down there, you’ll have two machines stuck instead of one,” he said. “My truck weighs more than your culvert. Call me when it dries out.”

He was right. Anybody who’s farmed bottom ground knows that a heavy machine on wet clay doesn’t drive, it sinks.

Brent got his insurance man on the phone and put him on speaker on the hood of the pickup.

The man was polite and sorry and somewhere warm. He said a recovery company could get there Monday, maybe Tuesday, depending on the ground.

“Monday,” Brent said, after he hung up. He said it like a man reading his own sentence.

That was the problem with Monday. The weather service had two more inches coming Sunday night.