I'm Not Dead... Yet! (47 page)

My heart was already feeling better.

One day I was in the barn changing the bush-hog to a fertilizer spreader, I noticed something moving, peripherally. I quickly snapped my head and this time, it wasn’t a mouse. It was a large, shiny black snake about four inches in diameter and at least six feet in length. No matter how evolved I had become, I will never make friends with a snake.

Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so ‘at-home’ anymore, staring at this very healthy reptile. I was holding an empty, 50-pound fertilizer bag—just a limp piece of plastic. Like an episode from
Green Acres
, I began to wildly swing the bag at the snake, as if it were a weapon (that would blow away in a gust of wind). The big black snake looked up at me, very unimpressed. Bored with me, he slowly slithered away. Now I was on ‘snake alert.’ I did learn that black snakes are very valuable to farmers. They ‘eat the critters that eat yer crops, an’ they kill copperheads which kin kill you.’ I eventually had a couple of run-ins with copperheads, but they wanted as much to do with me as I did with them.

There was a new harmony on K.J. Farms. One day as I was writing I saw a black bear cross in front of my window. I had my camera handy to take pictures of deer and their fawn, a family of twenty-two wild turkeys, and just about every bird in North Carolina. I was so impressed with the bear, that I wanted to follow it and get a better shot. I grabbed my camera and ran outside. The bear went over the fence and into the forest near the Blue Ridge Parkway. I sprinted to the fence, scaled it, completely gasping for air, but I had to get a close-up of the bear. And then, I heard Karla’s voice, as if she were sitting on my shoulder.

“Robby—it’s a bear. B-E-A-R,
bear
. Climb back over the fence and get inside the house as quickly as you can.”

I nodded appreciatively to the phantom Karla on-my-shoulder (John Denver had ‘Sunshine’ on his shoulder to make him happy—I was much more blessed), retraced my steps, and sprinted back toward the house.

The Infamous Tractor Accident

I had only been a farmer for three and a half weeks when I took the tractor to the place C.M. told me to never go: the top of the hill. It was on May 29, 2003. I remember that day because it is Karla’s birthday.

I became ‘the fool on the hill’ who didn’t listen… the stuntman in me actually thought I could pull it off.

When it came to my tractor, I most certainly did not park my ego in the barn. C.M. said Marvin Storie had bush-hogged the hill, so why couldn’t I? It was Karla’s first birthday in our new house

and I wanted our vast lawn to look like Yankee or Dodger Stadium.

What could be more beautiful?

Ever since I was a kid, when I walked into a baseball stadium I loved the sight of a perfectly groomed baseball field. If anyone on this planet deserved ‘groomed grass’ on her birthday, it’s
Karla Jayne DeVito
.

Karla and Zephyr went on a field trip with his new fifth grade class to the New River. I ran down to the barn, started up the tractor, and headed up the hill. The first two runs down the hill were perfect. The smell of the fresh cut grass was hypnotic. And most people say I must have been hypnotized to go back up that hill. As an avid skier, this hill was a black diamond and the tractor was taking to the moist, dewy grass beautifully.

On the third time down, the tires lost traction on the grass, and the back wheels locked. I learned a new term that day—when your tractor’s back tires lock and you go flying down a hill, it’s called ‘ball hooting’ (think ‘yaw’ but in southern mountain farmer lingo). The sheer weight of this gigantic farm machine sent me barreling down the mountain at a speed no tractor should reach. I did not panic. I assessed the situation and used my skiing logic. If this were a black diamond I’d just keep my shoulders straight, heading down the hill. There was plenty of pasture at the bottom to slow me down before crashing through the fence. All I had to do was keep the wheel straight and enjoy the thrill of the ride.

Just then, my front wheel hit a huge ground hog hole, twisted sideways and I found myself airborne! The massive tractor flipped end over end, high above the field below. Again, I didn’t panic but tried to find the horizon (as if that mattered or could help me). I remember the sequence of words going through my mind: ‘Horizon, sky, impact; horizon, sky, impact; horizon, sky, ugh.’ The ‘ugh’ stood for the last moment of impact. The declivity of this particular hill was deceiving; I always looked at the hill as steep, but I didn’t realize the true quality of the drop until I was the one being dropped.

The tractor rolled, flipped, fell, tumbled, skipped, plummeted and finally landed with such force, that it ‘stuck the landing’ like an Olympic gymnast. It not only stuck the landing, it was stuck 4 feet into the dirt, stuck. I did a mental body check and to my surprise, I was only slightly hurting. The strange thing about that was that I wasn’t sure exactly ‘what’ was hurting.

I got out of the tractor and surveyed the hill and the damage. I’d never be a groundskeeper at Yankee Stadium, I thought. ‘Look at the tractor size divot near second base!’ The groomed grounds of the hill were now a mess based on the accident. I had to fix it! It was Karla’s birthday and this was my plan and it had to be carried out perfectly (she deserved the best!)—now, there was a 4-foot hole in the middle of the ‘infield.’ The first thing I had to do was fix the exhaust pipe on the upside-down tractor. So I pushed with all of my might and ‘righted’ the ‘wrong’ tractor. Good! That was a start. I grabbed the exhaust pipe to bend it back in place until I realized it was as hot as the sun.

“AHHHHHHHHH!”

Now everything that was slightly hurting before was getting more and more intense, not to mention the burns I now had on my stupid hands for trying to fix an exhaust pipe on a tractor that was still running.

I had to get back on the tractor and do my best to make everything look better than okay before Karla got home.

I mowed for another 40 minutes until the pain was so intense that I could hardly move. I pinpointed the most excruciating pain: my left shoulder. It must be dislocated, I thought. I knew all of my plans for Karla’s birthday were not only dashed—I was condemned to reality. She was going to be furious with me for even attempting to get the tractor to the top of the hill. I put the tractor away, took off my shirt and wrapped it around my hands and tried to straighten the exhaust pipe, because nothing says ‘tractor accident’ more than a buckled and bent exhaust pipe—even though I was completely forgetting the 4 foot hole in the middle of the hill where the tractor finally came to a stop.

When Karla and Zephyr returned home from his field trip, Zephyr saw the deep hole in the ground from a quarter mile away. “Mom, look at that hole! Do you think Dad’s in the hospital?”

To which Karla replied, “Of course not, sweetheart.” She drove up to the barn and saw the tractor parked neatly inside and said, “See. Daddy’s fine. If he was hurt the tractor would be in the field.”

I drove myself to the hospital.

The admitting nurse said, “Hey—Robby Benson! C’mon in. Don’t be shy.”

She sized me up: Overalls. Grass stains. Tractor oil. A whole lot of hurt.

“So, didja ball hoot?”

“Ball what?”

“Tract’r accid’nt?”

“How can you tell?”

“Yu’gotcha a roll bar.”

“Yes! I do. How did you know?”

“Wore y’seat belt, didja?”

“Wow. You’re good.”

Then she looked me in the eyes and said, “Y’flipt it.”

Embarrassed as if I was the city-guy in
Green Acres
I looked down. (Learning the North Carolina accent is actually pretty easy: just know your clitics: C’mon/Y’flipt.)

“How many times y’flipt?” she asked.

“I think it was two. And a half.”

“Yer a lucky man. Usually the next words ya hear after ‘He flipt the tractor’ are, ‘and the funeral is… ’ Let’s get a doc in to take a look atcha. Ya wan me ta call your wife?”

“No! I’ll call her when I’m done.”

It took three strong doctors pushing and pulling to pop my shoulder back into place. Nothing showed up on the X-rays, but when I was still in excruciating pain ten days later they did a CAT scan and saw the cup of my shoulder was broken in three places. Because I felt like an idiot for getting in the tractor accident in the first place, I asked the orthopedic surgeon on-call what he was doing that afternoon.