Working on the Route

While I am cooling (not really, its been 95 + degrees and humid in Martinez the past week) my heals waiting for a decent offer on this house AND in between work at the College of Dental Medicine and golf, I have been scoping out rail trails in Minnesota and Wisconsin to assess which ones will give me the proper north/south coordinates. It appears I will need to ride the Blue Ox trail between International Falls and Bemidji. This might be a major test in that it appears that this trail is not up to standards of most Rail Trails. The Blue Ox trail has not been surfaced with gravel, limestone or other smooth materials. The ride will be rough, with packed dirt, ruts and balast rock trails. The good thing is that this trail is mostly north south and over one hundred miles in length.  If the maps from from Rails to Trails Conservancy and Google are accurate, I can get sixty percent of the north-south route done in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. Then I will need to go further east and west to find rail trails that will give me the proper latitudes to include all north-south coordinates of America's trails.



This is one of my favorite Connie Cards.

Probably close to the thousandth one she

has made---I Love Connie Cards!

Connie's cards are something to brag about. Each one is original and unique. I feel fortunate to have received over one hundred the past 8-9 years. Card making is only one of many talents. There are dozens of needle work pictures donning the walls of our home and the boys homes. I am so glad she had them nicely framed so that generations to come will enjoy her talents. Along the lines of card making, Connie has completed numerous scrap books of the boys growing up days along with the her life, my life and other relatives. Her talents are sequestered by others so she makes cards and scrap books for the cost of materials. The biggest challenge is finding time for her to do all these creative projects in addition to reading more than one hundred books per year and putting together impossible (for me anyway) jigsaw puzzles. Adding to this, she continues to do part time work with the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Gosh, I will really be in the way when I officially retire July 31, 2012.


Selling the Recumbent

Maze Recumbent similar to 3rd from right

As I said previously, after falling off my recumbent on the Maiden Ride, I was ready to rid myself of bumps and bruises inherited from ubiquitous recumbent spills. So six weeks ago I placed an ad on Craig’s List. With no inquires after three weeks, I dropped the price. It took another two weeks for a physician to take a look. Although he had never ridden a recumbent, he thought he could just jump on and start riding. I was worried his coordination was not up to snuff and he would crash on his first try. After a couple tries it was obvious he would hurt himself before he learned the ropes of peddling, slow speed, turning and balance. Thank goodness he decided to discuss the deal with his wife. When his wife said, “Absolutely not”, that took care of the guilt of selling a tough ride to an uncoordinated doctor. A few days later I received an email from Michelle in South Carolina wanting to know if I still had the bike. Her husband Keith, wanted to work on his weight but was too big to ride a road bike---too painful for his tailbone and back. He told me he had lost more than a hundred pounds dieting but could benefit from another hundred fifty pounds shed. Needless to say I fully agreed. He was a big boy but he had the agility of a NFL nose guard. I felt a lot better about selling the bike to him and having driven fifty miles to Girard, Georgia to meet for the transfer. Especially when Michelle emailed; “We aired up the tires, Keith got on it and went through the yard, out to the road and away he went! Thanks so much.”

Driving fifty miles to Girard, half way between my house in Martinez and Keith’s, became a nostalgic trip for me. A rural landscape opens up down that way, with plowed ground, wheat fields and multiple herds of dairy cows grazing away. There were many more milk makers in these pastures than what I was in charge of on the Carroll farm. After brother Dick went off to college, I inherited the daily milking responsibilities. I think I milked 15 to 20 cows every day including Oaky, my favorite cow. She was a Guernsey as were most of our milk cows. Like my brothers before me, I used two Surge bucket milking machines. They were stainless steel so you never knew for certain when they had completed the task. I guess that is why my dad insisted on stripping each cow dry once the guesstimated milking machine ended its cycle. Stripping a cow is not like what goes on in bars and clubs around the world, but it is a way to assure the cow is dry and will make the maximum level of milk for the next milking. I was never very good at hand milking or stripping them dry but I was good with Oaky. In fact the biggest kick I would get out of milking was, squeezing a prime Oaky teat and squirting a stream of milk five to ten feet at litters of stray cats that would come around at milking time. I could squirt a rope of milk into the mouths of the more talented cats. The less talented felines would get their meal from milk soaked fur of their buddies in the line of fire. It was a giant Lick-a-thon. It was so funny seeing kitty after kitty tumbling over each other, battling for a stream of the tasty warm hors devours.

Holstein Cow

The cows I saw on my drive down to Girard were Holsteins, known for their high production and lower butter fat. Holsteins are the most common milk cow today. Their black and white patch design is readily recognized becoming a logo for such businesses as Gateway computer. We did not have Holsteins on the Maze farm.

My dad had a thing about Guernsey cows. Probably because they had a Scottish or Irish heritage, being bred and developed in 1700 on the Isle of Guernsey, near Normandy. Before I was assigned head milker, my job was to “go get the cows”. Essentially I was the herder, bringing the cows from the pasture to the lot by the barn. I would take my favorite dog Carlo (some time I will write why he was a favorite) and my beat up football along to entertain myself. I loved football and kicking punts as high in the air as I could, would give the necessary hang time to run underneath and catch it. The cows meandered ahead while Carlo and I lagged behind. Once the cows were in the barn and locked into their stantions, I forked hay in their feed trough. Winter feeding was a challenge for this boy. We had hay and corn silage feed bunks in the lot that were about six feet high. It was all I could do to trudge through five inches of mud and then lift bushel baskets of silage above my head and dump them into the mangers. It was a particularly ugly event when we had to feed the cows silage when it was raining and snowing. The silage that one of the brothers shoveled down the silo chute, would quickly become water logged making the weight of this cow food more than double that of normal silage. To add to the misery, stinky fermented corn juices would run out of the wood baskets as I carried them on my shoulder; drenching me to the bone. God I hated that feeling of being cold, wet and smelling like some moonshiner that had fallen in his mash.

Shamus-like Bull

Another cow story, actually a bull story; I should share while I am on the cow topic involves Shamus. To maintain a heard and propagate new milk cows, a bull is necessary. We occasionally paid a veterinarian to perform artificial insemination, but the bulls were the big story. One particularly mean bull, Jim, aka Shamus, was a particularly potent inseminator. He darn near killed or at the least seriously injured my brother Don. We were all scared of this bull. He would snort around, throw his head side to side and dart for any opening he saw. My dad seemed to think he could train him to be a good boy but the only way he could handle him was with a pitch fork. It was my dad’s routine to release Shamus from the bull pen and let him run to the west cow lot and drink from a large water tank. On one particular occasion, while my brothers and I were working on the silo, Shamus decided he would charge brother Don. Don had a hammer in his hand so he swung at Shamus’ nose to turn him away. Don missed and the bull snared his coat, flipping and dragging him like a whipped bull fighter. Don grabbed Shamus’ neck, keeping the mean old bull from goring him with his vicious horns. My dad came running with his pitch fork, jamming it into his back leg. The bull was distracted briefly and Don was able to slip out of his coat to free himself, only to get trampled. It could have been a lot worse. But if that was not enough, my dad decided to let Shamus run with the herd for short period. It was easier for my dad to round up the cows and bull with our new and only pickup truck. It was a 1950, green, Studebaker with big round fenders. One time while herding the cows with Shamus in charge, the bull  decided he wasn’t having any motorized herding in his pasture. He charged the truck full force, spearing his horns into the fenders; ripping metal and crushing the once polished dome fenders. And, if that were not enough, Shamus turned around a rammed the other side. Since insurance did not cover such damages, the truck looked like a demolition derby wreck. We drove the beaten truck for twenty years; not the way I wanted to get around town and be kidded by my rich “friends”. I figured if I didn’t get a drivers license, I would not be embarrassed behind the wheel of a beater. I got my license when I made enough money working for the railroad and Langes Diary. I bought a 1956 Pontiac and gave it to my mom. She was forever grateful not needing to drive the truck, so was I.