almost hitting things

It's Friday and once again, I'm not sure how it arrived so quickly. I was pretty sure that it had only been two days since I last posted on Monday. The earlier talk of driving and chaining up conjures up memories of how many times I have almost wrecked a pick-up at work and all the things I have hit or almost hit.

Places in the field have names like Ice Canyon (not that bad), Snake Hill (pretty bad), and Jackass Pass (the last place we lost an axle on one of our trucks). I slid a pick-up into a ditch on Snake Hill in icy conditions a while back. It's a pretty helpless feeling to have been going about five miles per hour and still lose any ability to control a vehicle. We've been in ruts so deep that the pick-up was basically dragging on the skid pan the whole way down Jackass Pass. I've seen us break all manner of chains and tow straps and lift straps trying to do things we're really not supposed to do because we got something stuck doing something else we probably weren't supposed to do.

Now, what is fun is getting to drive a smaller half-ton pick-up about a day or two after it's rained. There's almost no weight in the rear and you can get it to slide with almost no effort. It's fun to give it a little extra gas going into a turn and getting it to fish-tail just a bit and counter-steering your way through the turn. Now maybe I shouldn't be doing that, but if I'm ever out driving a half-ton pick-up in the field anyway, it means I'm running some errand that, in ideal conditions, I wouldn't need to be doing. Thus, I view the sliding out as my bonus for having to run said errand.

As for hitting animals, I haven't done anything too terrible. I haven't hit anything that could do real damage to a pick-up like a deer. I've seen what happens when a big truck hits a deer and it's not pretty. Suffice to say, the truck wins. By a lot. I have seen lots and lots of deer though and come pretty close to hitting one on a couple occasions. Always try to remember that most deer travel in groups so don't fixate on missing just the first one you see because there are probably others right behind it. Some of the animals don't spook too easily and you can get fairly close. I was about ten yards away when I took this picture. And then sometimes people are just herding cows down the road. Hitting a cow would probably get me into a lot more trouble than hitting a deer seeing as how the cow is actually owned by someone. As for rabbits, well, I'm not really sure how many rabbits I've run over by now. Some, not tons, but a couple handfuls. They just dart out in front of you on the dirt roads, especially at night. There was one that I subconsciously swerved into, but I'm pretty sure it was the killer rabbit from Monty Python.