Funny Farm
Farms aren’t usually thought of as wellsprings of humor, except for the clichés about farmers being dumber than a mud fence. Over the years, however, there have been a few memorable moments of comedy on the farm, ranging from camp to Kafka, the former arising from the partial gift of a jackass.
Oh Jerusalem! A clever friend of mine, George, bequeathed to me a half interest in a star-crossed jackass named Jerusalem — my half being the front half, which meant I got to feed him. The world has seldom seen a more dolorous and eternally patient jack than Jerusalem. It seemed he could stand motionless in the same place for days.
George came over one day — not that he was gloating over the genius of his gift — and noted that Jerusalem was standing in exactly the same place as the day of his bequest. I joked that I’d had the jack stuccoed into a yard statute. It’s possible we had a few beers before going out to visit Jerusalem, and it’s also possible George was in a frisky mood for other reasons. In any event, George mounted Jerusalem and toasted me with a bottle of Grain Belt. We both laughed for a long time, as the jack played straight man.
Suddenly, it was as if a stick of dynamite went off under Jerusalem’s tail as he honked and bucked, tossing George a full three or four feet into the air above gyrating hooves and hindquarters. George hit the ground laughing so hard it took him a minute to realize he landed squarely on his beer bottle — fortunately horizontal in orientation. “I could sue you for a broken ass,” George noted, limping back to the house and rubbing his gluteus maximus.
Seldom does one get the opportunity now given me, as I reminded George that the offending, and thus responsible, half of the bucking ass belonged to him.
Dead Ned. Then there was the time I and two hired men built fence passages through a small cemetery so a center pivot could make a full circle. If that sounds confusing, the backstory contains a bit of gallows humor. The farm I managed near Moffat had a small private cemetery located in the west cardinal point of the quarter section, and the cemetery boundaries were excessively fenced, which meant the center pivot in that quarter had to stop at the fence, backtrack about 350 degrees dry, and start over again wet. Not at all efficient.
After some research I located the guardian of the cemetery, a feisty woman named Mary who lived in Pueblo. She chewed my ear off over the phone when I asked if we might cut passages in the fence to allow the center pivot to go all the way around. The previous owners of the farm had set fire to weeds in the barrow ditch and immolated the cemetery’s crosses to ash.
To abbreviate the details of what proved a long negotiation, I finally convinced Mary to allow us to pass the pivot through the cemetery on the pledge that we would fertilize, water, and groom the cemetery grounds, and provide a backhoe for future burials. That’s when I learned the bodies were three deep in each grave plot, and I vividly recall the night Mary called to tell me that a gentleman of local renown had to be buried in two days. Ned (an alias to protect the deceased) was a man who, until the night of his passing, had fended off death with miraculous consistency well into his nineties. He’d survived three wars, five wives, horse kicks, artillery wounds, otherwise fatal diseases, endless nights imbibing with Jack (Daniels) and Jim (Beam), which might have had something to do with his having been run over twice by his own tractor. There were many who still couldn’t believe that a hole in the ground could keep him down.
A week or so after the burial and service, I and two hired hands began building four-foot wide passages in the cemetery perimeter fence that would allow the end two towers of the center pivot to pass, thus making an efficient 360 degree rotation. The grass in the cemetery grounds stood about three feet tall at the time, and as we worked, a plaintiff, ominous groan came from deep in the wavering stems. The two men working with me (whose names I will omit to prevent embarrassment) looked at me, heads shaking negatively. Then one said, “No way am I, or we, goin’ in there.”
As their fearless leader, I grabbed a six-foot dirt chisel and ventured into the tall grass where I came upon a calf elk in death throes: mouth foaming, body horizontal with legs sweeping back and forth reflexively. Looking down on the poor creature, I noticed my two hired men looking at me with rapt attention, and I couldn’t resist saying, “Ned, come on now, we put you down last week, and that’s that. You can’t come back now. It’s too late.” Whereupon I used the dirt chisel to put the calf out of its misery, producing a truly horrible death cry that I must admit had an unexpectedly human tone. My two hired men went straight to the pickup and drove back to the farm shop, leaving me alone in the cemetery.
Booboolina’s Last Stand. I found a puppy alongside the road one day and brought her home, raised her on half and half and meat scraps, then named her Booboolina (BooBoo for short) from the widow in Zorba the Greek whose somber eyes were similar to those of the pup.
Booboo roamed with us during cattle roundups, and one day in the brush I saw from horseback that she was in hot pursuit of a jack rabbit. Booboo had just emerged from a difficult puppyhood among older, and wiser, dogs on the farm, and as far as I knew, this was her first solo pursuit of a jack rabbit, something the older dogs already understood to be no more fruitful than sticking their nose into a skunk hole. The jack darted and twisted from side to side as it loped along, as if not really taking Booboo seriously, acting as if out for a morning stroll. Yet, because Booboo was small and agile, she appeared to be gaining on the jack, and when she got within nipping distance I heard the unmistakable yelp of imminent capture.
Just then the jack came into a small clearing in the brush where it slid into a roll, emerging from a dust cloud on its back. Booboo charged with a yelp, only to be mercilessly thumped on the nose by the jack’s cartwheeling hind legs. Stunned, Booboo stepped back, rubbing her nose with the side of her paw, and trotted home, tail between her legs while the jack stayed on his back, thumping the air now and then just to thwart off any other predators.
Quittin’ Time. On the designated spring-ahead day of daylight savings in the year 2000, everyone was so concerned about Y2K and what it was going to do to our computers, cell phones, clocks, and fertilizer orders, that I, four of my men, and my secretary all advanced the clock in the shop by an hour, resulting in the shortest work day of the new millennium.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
