MY BULLDOZER
There is nothing quite like a bulldozer. My neighbor, Chuck , owns an old Cat, and last week he loaned it to me to get the farm cleaned up for Spring. Trees and briars have grown up everywhere, and after last year’s back breaking efforts to clean things up with shovels and saws, I decided that it was time to bring in the heavy artillery. Until this season, I had never driven a dozer before, but Chuck assured me that it was easy enough. My first project involved the annihilation of a rotting chicken coup. When learning to use any new tool, a demolition project is always the best training ground. Within an hour, the old shed roof was on the ground. Destruction is addictive however, and after dinner I was creeping across the yard again, shopping for things to mangle. I decimated a few fence lines and pulverized some huge rocks in the pasture. It felt great. By weeks end, my bulldozer and I had uprooted, smashed, dismantled, and obliterated nearly every inch of our place, but try as I might, by Friday night I was unable to lock in on another target. I parked the yellow monster in the drive, threw a tarp over the cab, and went in to call Chuck to thank him for the loan. But, as my hand reached for the phone, I paused; surely, there was something else out there I could destroy. The demolition bug had bitten me hard, and it wasn’t letting go easy. Next morning, I fired her up again bound for one last objective, the sheep shed, an old building whose roof and walls were in need of some restoration, and which had begun an agonizingly slow descent into the creek running beside it. I had once considered moving the little shed with my tractor. I really like the old building, and my kids used it as a playhouse, but the thought of flattening it began to overtake me. I raised the blade... driving forward, keeping the side of the shed in my sites. The throttle was up full, and I couldn’t have been more than a few feet from the building when the dozer stopped abruptly, the engine unwinding slowly down. I was out of fuel, and would have to bleed the diesel lines before restarting. The break gave me time to look out over my unrelenting path of destruction. The ravished landscape suggested that I might have gone too far and, if not for a fuel shortage, that I could have destroyed something of real value. That’s the problem with setting out to destroy something, it always feels too good, and the destruction nearly never ends when it should. Perhaps our nation’s leaders should be trained on dozers before we give them the keys to our tanks and planes. Overcoming the addiction to destroy is something we should all learn first in our own back yard.