Anticipation, Coffee Cups, Quantum Physics and a Ford F150... Submitted by Dave

Anticipation is a big piece of farming.  From experience we know that most things behave according to an established set of rules, whether or not we understand them, and we anticipate predictable outcomes when two or more of these things interact.   A mug of steaming hot coffee will usually sit on a table and stay there until I reach for it.   This despite the fact that quantum physicists are only able to identify five percent of that coffee cup as having actual mass, the other 95 percent being empty space and forces that hold it together or keep it from flying off the table and providing a hilarious example of the zeroth (yes, it exists), first and second laws of thermodynamics by pouring itself into my lap.  Kids, and grown men, are a great demonstration of how non-native this skill is.  Take that same coffee cup in the employ of a small child and you understand the inevitability of the sippy cup and hair loss in male parents.  With luck inanimate objects with no moving parts provide training wheels for learning how the physical world works.  Gradually we work our way up to dealing with inanimate things completely beyond our control like the weather.  Ultimately, in a fit of optimism based on earlier successes with coffee cups and dressing appropriately, some of us marry and expect that we can predict what is going to happen next.  Since I provide Barb with lots of writing material about how my irrational optimism and foray into farming has flummoxed her ability to predict anything in this relationship, I will leave the really deep thinking to her and will focus in this essay on experience with inanimate objects with moving parts.  .

Back in mid fall I had spent a good part of the day processing chickens.  The end of this year’s batch of chickens was in sight and I was really looking forward to finishing them off.   The actual processing doesn’t take all that long.  But the time required for preparation and clean up always surprises me.  One of the clean up activities is getting rid of the various inedible portions of the chickens.  The feathers end up in a compost pile, some parts end up with the pigs and some end up in the woods.  It was this last component category that took me out into the back fields with my old truck.  It’s a Ford F150 circa 1990 and it has rust issues.  I bought the truck from an employee back in the late 90’s.  He was a good mechanic and the truck was in good shape except for the rust.  Despite my vehicular incompetence, it still starts fine, runs strong, idles a little fast, and, by and large, is a handy vehicle.    The rust prevents it from passing a vehicle inspection  and thus it has been relegated to off-road farm activities. 

After tossing the buckets of chicken stuff into the back of the truck, I bumped along the slightly modified logging road that leads to the fields and headed for the back 40.   The final stretch of road is a steep little section which has caused unsecured cargo to tumble out in the past.  Sure enough, I crested the rise and I noticed that an empty container had fallen off the back of the truck.   This was not really a failure of anticipation, no, this was a demonstration of sloth… a topic for another essay.  Not a problem, I thought, I’ll get rid of the chicken guts and pick up the container on the way down.  By way of background, the emergency brake doesn’t work on the truck since the cable snapped a long time ago.  This isn’t a big problem.  I always leave the truck in gear when it sits.  So half way down the incline I shut off the engine and put the truck in low gear.  As my near constant companion, New Hampshire Public Radio, was providing the farm equivalent of a “driveway moment” I left the key in the ignition in the energized position.   I hopped out and walked back to pick up the container.  With errant container in hand and most of my attention on the radio, I turned to face the truck just in time to hear the engine roar into life.  Now as a middle class male who grew up with vehicles that were considerably less than new, I have much experience with cars with failing starters.  Many was the time that parking the car became an exercise in locating inclines without forward impediments adequate to getting a rolling start before popping the clutch.  All of these experiences flickered through my brain as I watched the truck begin driving itself down the road. 

If one can remain detached, it’s an interesting sight to watch an inanimate object start up and head off in some direction completely undirected by human hands.  It’s a potentially dangerous equivalent of what as a 12 year old boy my friends and I used to call a “dismount”. We’d peddle maniacally up to the edge of a hill and hop off our bicycles to watch them bound merrily down the hill before crashing to a dramatic conclusion.  After reading this to my 12 year old son, I admonished him not to do this, at least not without me there to watch too.

The truck gathered speed and headed for the embankment on the side of the road where I happened to have piled some stone and gravel.  With an anticlimactic thud the truck’s joy ride came to an abrupt end.

Fortunately, no harm was done.  I returned the empty container to the back of the truck, made a mental note to self not to do that again, noted that the Car Talk Guys were laughing in their trademark way on the radio, started it up and headed back to the farm.

One of my favorite sayings is that “it is better to be lucky than good”.   Given my inability to anticipate all unintended consequences, I will try to do better but I will also hope that my luck doesn’t run out.