Shit Happens

I was going to spray the vineyard with fungicide.  I got on the lawn mower to drive it to the sprayer in the shed.  It went ten feet and quit.  I checked the gas tank.  It had over a half-tank of fuel sloshing around.  I started it again and went two feet. It started and died without moving.  Crap.  I went into the house to report to Mom that the spraying wouldn't happen today, either.

"This has been a frustrating couple of days mechanically," I told Mom.

"Well, let's face it," she said, "it has been a frustrating couple of weeks or three."

I waved my hand at her.  "Yeah, but that's you.  We're talking about me now."

She snorted and waved her hand, "Oh, okay, that's just me."

"Focus, Mom.  It's all about me right now."  Hands were waving, fingers were pointing to me.  "Focus."

"Okay," she breathed, recovering from laughing and wiping her tears.  She tucked her hands between her knees and leaned forward.  "I'm focused.  Go."

Mom got the Reader's Digest synopsis.  Not here.

First I had trouble getting the spear off the tractor.  It's a nifty little 3-speared jousting device (weighing way more than I can pick up) that is attached to the tractor's bucket with a bolt and nut through a hole. The spear stabs those big round hay bales so you can move them.  My nephew puts it on because he is a strong young man, and he usually takes it off for me so I can use the tractor.  He had left it on the night before because they needed to get to his nephew's soccer game.  No biggy as long as it's just finger tightened.  I can get it off.  Usually. 

The trickiest part is figuring out lefty-loosey with a wrench on an upside-down nut you can't see.  You can't see it because the bucket is low enough that it won't accidentally fall on your head.  This is important for me.  I know that there are some people who think all those mishaps over the married years were because of the drinking, you know: the concussion in the bathtub, the trip over the cat and through the sliding glass door, the death-by-toilet episode, the cell-phone debacle.  But I have proven over the past six months of sobriety that this is actually a finely honed talent of mine.  Who else can get a concussion while feeding a cat?  I think the step of keeping the spear low is vital for me.

So I would figure out lefty-loosey with my hands (my fingers know) and then try to duplicate it with the wrenches.  There are two wrenches: one for the nut and one for the bolt.  The wrench on the bolt kept slipping.  I switched wrenches, letting the shorter handled monkey-wrench wedge itself against the bucket, and concentrating on the nut I can't see.  This takes a bit of positioning of the body between the spears to reach it. The wrench on the nut fell to the ground.  I un-positioned myself and scooted it out from under the tractor with the other wrench.  Then I repositioned the monkey wrench, figured out lefty-loosey with my fingers, and tried again.  (Have I mentioned that my nephew is a strong young man?)  The wrench clattered to the ground.

"This is unacceptable!" I yelled, throwing in a few cuss words that I very seldom use anymore.  I stomped to the tractor, climbed up, turned it on, and raised the bucket.  I would just leave the tractor running which would decrease the chance of hydraulic failure and death by tractor-spear.  I didn't even need my fingers to figure out lefty-loosey: I could see it.  One good tug to counter the super-strength of my nephew, and the nut was free to spin, and the bolt was removed. I marched to the seat, lowered the bucket, and left that spear in the dust.

I entered the vineyard in triumph, lowered the shredder to a nice low height, and turned it on.  Within 10 feet, I had snagged a roll of wire hidden in the grass (it was in front of the bigger roll of wire that I could see and so went around). I turned off the shredder. Cuss, cuss, cuss.  People just leave things lying all over this ranch, and by golly, why can't they pick them up?  I'm going to pick up every darned stray object on this ranch all at once on purpose so I don't continue picking them up one at a time accidentally with the shredder.  By golly.  Cuss, cuss.

I backed the tractor up and the wire nearly came loose.  Hmmm.  Maybe this wasn't as bad as I thought; the wire didn't seem to be wrapped tightly around the blades.  I got down and tugged on it.  No movement.  Back on the tractor I went forward, and the wire moved.  I backed up, went forward, backed up, went forward.  I got down and tugged.  No movement. I bent over, ass in the air, head by my knees, trying to see under the shredder.  I knelt down and tried again to look under the shredder.  I'd have to get it out of the grass so I could see. I left the vineyard and drove back to the shed where the tools are, dragging that wire all the way.  On the driveway to the barn, I could see that the bundle was stuck on the bent corner of the shredder's frame by just one wire.  I got wire cutters even though I know that I can't cut fence wire with wire cutters, but the bolt cutters were in Robert's truck last I knew.  I got a hammer and tried pounding it down.  I went to put the hammer away, and TADA!!!! There, hanging on hooks in all their vibrant red glory were the bolt cutters.  I grabbed them.

As I turned around, I saw dog shit on the floor of the shed with a distinctive Teva print smooshed through it.  Some dog (obviously not my dog, because she is a good girl) had shit in the shed.  Naturally I stepped in it.  I sighed and went about the business of snipping the wire and tossing the smashed-up bundle in the bucket to put in the trash trailer.  I wiped my foot on the grass, got on the tractor, dumped the wire and shredded the darned vineyard.  Without further incident.  Except for the rebar from the removed row 13 which is now lying next to row 12 which caused a ruckus but didn't get caught.

"Okay," I said to Mom, "I'm done.  That's it.  This fall I'm picking up all the crap around the ranch.  But first I have to go move the lawn mower because it's sitting behind your van."

"Okay," she said.

I left the room, but turned and came right back.  She put her head down on the desk.  "What now?"

I told her about my Facebook status.  I thought it would make a dandy t-shirt, or an awesome first line for a novel, but I used it on Facebook: "Shit happens.  I just never see it until after I step in it."

I'm going to go shred now.  Wish me luck.

Harvest

Glossary of Vineyard Tending Terms:

bird netting: a net which is placed over the grapevines in a continuous feed without cutting it to fit the rows (penalty for cutting: the Wrath of Mom) for the purpose of trapping birds for the cats and border collie to chase and catch.  (Incidental benefit is that the netting prevents the birds from eating  3/4 of the grape.)

hedging: a) daily stroll up and down the aisles dressed in Easter finery and strappy high heels, waving hedge trimmers at the vines (source:  commercial for Saks--or was it Macy's?)  b) drudge work of trimming back rampant grapevines which seek daily to recreate that gut-wrenching final hand-holding scene in the old black and white film "Last of the Mohicans" across the aisles.

actual attire with live grasshopper (not jewelry)

netting platform: a metal contraption that attaches to the back of the tractor with a flat place for standing, a hoop to hold the bag containing the bird netting, and a boom or arm with two hoops for feeding the netting out over the rows of grapevines.  Along with netting for one acre of vineyard, the platform costs the equivalent of two years' profit.


verizon: when the grapes start turning purple indicating that "The Birds" are about to do a Hitchcock on the vineyard.

verizon

                                                                            

So what They said about bird netting was that once it was on, you were done with everything except spraying and praying until harvest.  A few weeks of relief from the daily grind during the height of summer.  Hallelujah.  That's what they said, and by golly, that's what Mom and I were determined to believe.

While we were finishing the hedging so we could get the net on, I said, "That net's going to be tough to get off."

Mom said, "The vines stopped growing sooner last year."

"What?" I was confounded.  Cabernet vines stop growing?  Maybe in October.  Mom and Dad planted the damned cabernet because they were a "vigorous" vine.  The reason the no work in the vineyard from verizon to harvest sounded so good to me was because of the vigor of those vines.  Vigorous is now one of my favorite cuss words meaning something akin to "royal pain in the ass."

"They always slow down after verizon, and we stop hedging in early August."

"We stop hedging when they harvest, Mom."

"At least it will give us a break."

Putting up the netting was a snap.  (Ha.)  It only took four of us: me to drive the tractor, Victoria to stand on the platform and feed the netting out of the bag and through the loops on the boom and Susan and Robert to walk behind, spreading the net out and draping it over the vines.  Snap.  Four hours of snap, and I was doubly determined to be done until harvest, when we'd take the net off the day before the pickers came.

A week later, Susan told Mom, "The wind blew the netting off the vineyard."

Mom looked out the window and said, "No.  The vines are just growing through it."

"Oh.  That's going to be fun to take off."

Every day, I walked by the vineyard on the way to help Mom take care of Dad, and thought, "Oh, that's going to be a bitch."

So what did we do about it?  Mom sprayed.  We prayed.  That's what they said to do.  I was praying that the vines really would stop growing.  Soon.  Before it was impossible to take the net off.

Robert

Grape harvest always, always, always takes place in August, usually the same weekend as the TICA South Central Regional Show and Banquet.  I usually miss the show because of the harvest.  When the Regional was in Austin, I did both harvest and banquet!  This year I actually planned to miss the harvest and go to the Regional in LaFayette, Louisiana.  Well, the grapes couldn't have me missing it, so harvest was about 2 weeks late.

Susan

When I got home from Louisiana, Mom told me that now They said that we were supposed to go through the vineyard daily fluffing up the netting so the vines didn't grow through the holes and entangle the net.  She would pay me $10 an hour (my going rate for shredding the fields) to help trim the vines off the top of the net before harvest for three or four hours a day.  Mind you, one hour in the vineyard is plenty of work for me, let alone for my 75 year old mother with her bad knees.  But we did the time.

"Why do I always make mistakes?" Mom said.  "I make new ones every year, but there's always something.  In another twenty years, I should have this down."

"Oh, I can just see us out here in twenty years, Mom.  I'll be the one in my seventies needing a walker.  You'll be 95."

We finished with a day to spare.  Well, of course we just thought it was a spare day.  Turned out to be the day we should have put the platform on the tractor because naturally that fifteen minute job took over an hour.

Even though Mom and I had put in the grueling hours it took to get it ready, taking the netting off was still not a snap.  I have decided that the only snap around here would be if we changed the name of the place from River Ridge Ranch and Vineyard to Murphy's Law Happens.  Now that would be a snap.  Snap.

Below, the bored tractor driver tries to entertain herself which draws a chorus of objection from the rest of the crew: "No texting while driving!"   She replies, "I'm not texting!  I'm posting on FaceBook." 

Next year's warning label:  "Do not read warning labels while operating tractor."

Patrick

It took five of us this time, with Victoria's boyfriend Patrick helping on the platform to pull the netting through the hoops.  We were supposed to have the netting off the day before harvest, but Susan's husband had an auction (Charlie is an auctioneer) on Saturday, and their projected arrival time of 3:00 to help with the netting turned into twice later than the usual two hour tardniess.  By the time the shredder was off the tractor and the platform was on, we had about a half hour of daylight left.





We worked through dusk.  "Do you want flashlights?" I hinted to Susan.

"Do you have one?"  She asked with a definite note of hope in her voice.

"Yeah, they're in the house."

Victoria

"Oh."  We worked through full dark.   Susan and Robert had to stop about every five feet to untangle the net from the rebar ties.  I could see because the tractor had lights, but they couldn't.  So I went to the house and got flashlights.  We were going so slow that we quit after another two rows, hoping that we could keep ahead of the pickers in the morning.

That didn't happen either.  Harvest time was set for 6:30 in the morning, when the earliest hint of light allows limited vision.  The pickers showed up at five.  They were only a row behind by the time we got back to it, and they caught up with us, and passed us.  They lifted the net and draped it on the top of the vines to pick underneath.  This made it a heck of a lot easier to take the netting off--definitely the reason we finished at the same time as the pickers (as opposed to an hour later).  Susan said, "Next year, we're taking the net off after they pick."

The harvest is in.  The grapes are done.  Until it all starts over again.