S'NO FUN!
Originally published in Horse Directory, March
2013
By Tom
Gumbrecht
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| DannyBoy plowing snow.. |
The winter
storm they were calling “Nemo” was predicted with the normal Weather Channel
adjectives such as “storm of the century”, “apocalyptic “, and the now familiar
“superstorm”. By Friday afternoon I had
begun to take it seriously. I had moved my grain pickup day to Thursday from
Saturday, started the snow blower and generator, and picked up diesel fuel for
the tractor; almost as an afterthought, I did as much grocery shopping as one
can do at Dairy Barn.
By 7:00 p.m.
I did preliminary passes with the snow blower on the house driveway until a
shear pin broke on the machine. Pelted by sleet and windblown snow, I opted to
put it away and fire up the forty year old Kubota 4WD tractor parked under the
canopy and warmed with an electric block heater. It had never let me down, and tonight was no
exception. There was about 4” of wet
slushy stuff down already, and now it was being frosted by fluffy white
stuff. I put the tractor away feeling
satisfied that I had gotten a head start on the job I would be doing tomorrow.
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| I guess I know how I'm spending my weekend.. |
At 9:00 p.m.
I walked down to the barn to do night check, and my hard work had already been
defaced by Mother Nature. It was hard to
tell where I had plowed not two hours ago. I made the decision to lock my
horses in their stalls overnight, something I hadn’t done since the night of
Hurricane Sandy; the last time previous
to that, I don’t remember. A few small
branches were snapping already and knowing that to be a sound which to a horse
means “run”, I decided to play it safe as the paddocks were already quite
slippery.
Mary was
still at her job as an RN at a hospital in Nassau County, and at 11:00 p.m. the
snow was already a foot deep and our street had not yet seen a plow; I let her
know that I didn’t think it was safe to travel. She agreed and set up a cot in
her office, sleeping as best she could in the midst of hospital activity. When
I awoke on Saturday morning, I was a bit shocked to see the snow almost to the
top of the three foot fence outside my window.
I dressed and let the dogs out and they promptly disappeared into the drifts
into the back yard, bounding along like rocks skipping on an undulating ocean
of white. In their enthusiasm, they didn’t even want to come back in to eat
breakfast. Bundling up, I grabbed a
shovel and made my way to the barn, a 30 minute ordeal to go 200 feet. While on
my trek, I wondered whether anyone who cares for horses on a regular basis
truthfully likes snow. I’m not sure I
have ever met that person.
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| The tractor "shed" falls to Nemo.. |
My horses
were as happy as ever to see me, perhaps a bit more so due to the unavoidably late
breakfast. After preparing their feed, and giving hay and water and mucking
their stalls, I set about to plan my attack on the great white tsunami that had
inundated my little horse farm. That
would involve somehow freeing my tractor from the collapsed canopy that had
enveloped it overnight. After an hour
shoveling snow from the canopy roof, I
was able to crawl in and start the tractor, and raise the bucket to lift the
roof off of it. Fortunately I found a post and stood it underneath the ridge
pole which allowed me to back the tractor out.
Moving snow of this depth with a small farm tractor is a long process,
and as the minutes turned to hours I had to remind myself how at age 13, I
would have killed for the opportunity to spend a day moving snow with a
tractor. That thought made my job easier
for a while, but ten hours on a tractor in the snow can make even the most
enthusiastic smile wane.
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| Thankful for my 1970 Kubota.4WD tractor. |
In all, I
spent 17 hours moving snow on the weekend of Nemo, made easier on the second
day by friends Joanne and Dan lending a hand for half a day on Sunday. It occurred to me that while I can sometimes
secretly resent the twenty minutes it takes to dig someone out of a snow bank
from an ill-advised attempt of driving up our unplowed hill, I have not ever
once, felt even the slightest tinge of resentment, despair or exasperation in
spending two full days to make it possible to continue to supply the most basic
services to my horses. They wake up to
two and a half feet of snow and think, seemingly, “Oh, so I guess that’s what
today will be. Walking around in deep
snow; that’s fine”. They have taught me
to begin to think the same way, although I sometimes learn slowly.
I think now
that I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend a harsh winter in
rough board with a leased horse prior to having my own barn. It gave me the
confidence to branch off the road of the rider and enter the road that leads to
horsemanship. While I may not have reached my destination I’m still travelling
that road, and I seem to never tire of the scenery.
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