Sunday, highway drivin’
It all looks about the same
Nowhere, just arrivin’
Still I play the game, yeah yeah
I’m home, grown, growin’ my own and I need ya
Need ya to beg my pardon, to tend my garden
((c) Joe Walsh)
Here I am…after tending my garden
Gotta love the James Gang. For my money, Joe Walsh, one fine guitar player, has never achieved the same level of musical success with the Eagles that he achieved as the center man for the power trio from Cleveland. Ah, the creativity of youth. Anyway, That’s me in the picture above after working four hours in our family vegetable garden, pulling eight wheelbarrows of weeds from a jungly mess. It was over ninety degrees and the sun was high and hot as I sat on an upside down plastic five gallon bucket and pulled and tossed weeds in the sweltering heat. There’s a word we don’t often use even during the height of summer up here in the northland. It’s a rare experience for a northeastern Minnesota boy like me to experience a day of sweltering in my own backyard. Well, Sunday met the definition: high heat, blazing sun, and over powering humidity. The thermometer on the garage wall said 93 degrees in the shade. But weeding wasn’t my only task while AWOL from church.
On Saturday, Rene’ had discovered that our outdoor hot tub wouldn’t turn on. After a couple of futile attempts to clean the filter and re-set the GFI breaker, she called her brother, Greg, an electrician by trade.
“Maybe it’s another snake,” he offered.
I was listening in to the telephone conversation.
“I doubt that,” I’d said with some authority. “It’s nearly 100 degrees out. There’s no reason for a snake to crawl into a motor to stay warm.”
Just to dispel his theory, I opened up the cover to the hot tub motor and pump, stuck my nose down by the motor, and sniffed.
Nothing.
The thing is, about five or six years ago, a big bull garter snake did take up residence inside the motor housing. The serpent coiled itself around the warm windings of the motor and was snug and safe until the pump called for the motor. Yup. Instantly fried garter snake. We didn’t discover the dead reptile for a week or so. I’ll spare you the details of what we found. Suffice it to say, you don’t forget the stench of a week-old dead garter snake in a confined space. Rene’ conveyed my opinion. Greg said he’d stop by on Sunday.
True to his word, my brother-in-law pulled in as I was pulling weeds. The two of us explored the possibilities of why the hot tub wasn’t staying on.
“I smell something,” Greg opined, his long, pointed French-Canadian nose inspecting the air around the pump motor like Inspector Clouseau on a murder case. “I think you might have a dead mouse in there.”
“Or a snake,” I offered, as if I’d come up with the idea.
Sure enough, when I pointed a halogen beam flashlight into the space behind the air vents at the front of the motor housing, I saw the familiar black and yellow stripes of a coiled garter snake. After debating the wisdom of trying to tear the motor down, evict the serpent, clean the motor out, dry it, and rebuild it, Greg and I took the thing apart.
“Well,” Greg said as the motor sat on a low brick wall drying in the sun, “maybe you’re right. Maybe we can save you six hundred and fifty bucks.”
That’s what a new motor and installation had set us back the last time a snake decided to call our hot tub home.
“At least it’s fresh,” I said as I tossed the mangled reptile into tall grass.
We took Greg to breakfast at the nearby Blue Max Resort for his trouble. After a hearty meal of eggs, toast, and hot coffee, Greg took the motor back to his cabin to blast water from the coils with compressed air. I went back to my garden.
“It’s working,” Greg called out later, rising from his knees as he listened to the motor purr. “Seems to be running just fine.”
I didn’t stop what I was doing. I simply waved goodbye as my brother-in-law put away his tools and drove off in his truck.
By 2:30pm, the garden was free of weeds and in need of a good soaking. After the great deluge of June, we hadn’t had rain in weeks. The ground was as hard as iron and the newly revealed corn stalks, potatoes, melon vines, bean bushes, and carrot sprouts were thirsty. I set up a new 360 degree tripod sprinkler I’d bought at Menards and opened the hose. You could almost hear the plants sing.
A flat of raspberries from the Munger veggie garden. The plants are a combination of shoots given us by Rene’s late mother, Merc, and a few taken from our old Sears farm house located upriver from the new place.
Peace.
Mark
PS If you want to hear Joe and his mates sing the song that inspired the title to this blog, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeErugWXZ4. Be patient: It takes a few moments for the organ to key up…
