Taking on earth-moving equipment

There isn’t enough ibuprofen in the world, I told people, for how I’m going to feel in a few hours.

It was a reasonable assumption. It isn’t every day I climb up on a Caterpillar 410 backhoe and dig up cedar stumps for a couple hours.

As it turned out, though, I wasn’t the least bit stiff, just jazzed over how much fun it was.

Bill Yow, who has known for a couple years that I wanted to operate a backhoe, set me up when his neighbor, Phil Young, started using one on the Young farm.

They eased me into the whole thing.

Bill drove me to Phil’s place in a 1967 Chevy pickup.

That’s an experience in itself.

At Phil’s house, his wife, Ruth, said the closest she’d ever been to the backhoe was looking at it out the living-room window.

“But if you want to go do this silly thing, it’s up to you.”

She didn’t exactly say that, but I could tell she was thinking it.

Phil told me to drive the Alligator across the fields to where the backhoe was and Bill could ride along, but not drive.

The Alligator is a green John Deere device that looks like a golf cart without the top and is supposed to go over all kinds of rough terrain.

It did.

But when we were getting out, Bill quoted a line somebody once used on him.

“We’ll have to go back and do it over,” he said, “because you missed one pothole.”

Up on the backhoe, Phil showed me how to turn the seat around, explained what levers to use and what moving them in different directions would do.

Front, back, left, right — that’s a lot of remembering.

I spent time swinging the bucket left when I wanted it to go right, fiddling for the proper angle and scooping when I meant to dump.

For a while Phil and Bill watched me. When I couldn’t get the dirt out of the bucket, Bill kept flipping his hand at me, but I didn’t understand what that meant, so I told him to stop that.

And then Phil turned his back on his very own backhoe and walked away with Bill, down to the lake, where Bill smoked maple tobacco in his pipe and they looked across at the cows in the woods.

Just ignored me.

And by George, I got five stumps out of the ground — two big ones and three smaller ones. I had to have help with the largest.

It went more than five feet into the ground, but Phil said I really got it out, he just did the last little bit.

By the end, I was thinking strategy, the best place to put the bucket down, the best angle to dig into the ground, the best time to scoop, the best side to pile the dirt.

I pulled the last two stumps up with one try.

Good strategy, I told the guys.

The trouble is, having tried operating the backhoe once, I want to keep doing it. Maybe I’ll get the chance, because Phil said, “Come on over anytime you get tired of plinking on your guitar and plunking on your piano.”

Hey, Phil, I’ll work cheap.

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Contact spitzer@salisburypost.com .