[AT] Best Show On Tracks = WOW!!! -LONG-
Dave Johnson
webguydave at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 24 09:17:09 PDT 2008
Being self employed does have a couple of benefits ( sadly, a regular paycheck is not one of them!) and so after a very late in the pm consultation with myself, took Friday off to run up to Woodland, Ca. That's close by, as these things go, about 2 1/2 hrs from Gilroy. I thought about calling up Grant in Hollister for some company but on such short notice that went by the boards (sorry, Grant!).
Like I said at the top...WOW!!!!
I have never seen such a collection of crawlers, both in number and diversity ( mostly Cat, Holt & Best) in one place. If you got it, you brought it, big, small & everything in between. A big percentage were obviously runners, though some examples were 'awaiting restoration' to put it kindly!
Friday seemed to be lightly attended, and everybody had seemed to have time to chat about projects. Not only that, it seemed that if you wanted to fire up and take a spin around the exhibition area, well, go for it!! So anywhere you looked, there was something operating... heaven on earth!
Watching the demo of a 1906 Holt combine pulled by a 21 mule hitch that morning brought home the changes in farming thanks to mechanistion (sp)... the sheer number of hands required to support the teams and the combine stand in stark contrast to the harvesting effort of today. Almost unimaginable! I counted 6 on the combine alone, plus handlers for the teams. Friday morning there were 3 breaks in the hitch itself initially, then the restored combine threw the same chain twice after the hitch was repaired.... that pretty well wrapped up the Friday Am demo!!
Turned out a couple of (musician) friends brought their two mules for the hitch; having horses for a number of years, I'd forgotten how calm (and smart) mules can be. No one acted up much (when on got a little frustrated with his set and reared/pawed briefly, the others just stood there!) even in the increasing heat of the morning. And that itself brought back something I'd forgotten; Dad used to tell me of plowing with mules when he was a kid back in Daviess County (Ky); apparently when they got tuckered out they just sat down in the traces, and that was that! The work was done for the day!
As Dave Ernst said, it was a bit toasty, and got hotter! I planned on staying on through the 5pm 'playhour in the dirt' but just sort of melted about 4pm - and I had watched 'early birds' moving dirt from the shade of a Lima shovel a bit earlier, so I packed it in for the coolness of the vans' A/C.
Saw the 'Wild'fire in Fairfield just getting underway as I drove home, and took a break from work Sat sitting on the truck tailgate to watch the thunderheads move through - nearly all dry lightening that started half a dozen fires locally, and more than 750 statewide - now I hear there are 850 across the state, with some being let go because of too few resources. Just last week - before the thunderstorms - we had a string of 8 fires that broke out along Hwy 1 between Watsonville (think strawberries) and Santa Cruz (think envirionmetalists) that consumed a number of houses in short order; even at that point CalFire had difficulty in getting resources to fight them.
The amazing thing is that this streach of road is a few hundred yards from the ocean, and is enveloped in fog more often than not!!! Even to it's tendr dry... part of the problem is that groves of trees have been allowed to grow up along the hillsides of the highway, and though Calfire advised homeowners to thin or remove, the County of Santa Cruz refused permits to remove or thin, reportly telling homeowners that CalFire overstated the risk!! D**n treehuggers!!!!!!!!!!! I think there's a well deserved lawsuit in this!
OOP!! drifted off topic - sorry! Jeesh! Upside down commodity prices, floods in the midwest, fires in the West.. .what a year this is turning out to be!!
Dave in Gilroy, CA 'Home of the Stinkin' Rose!'
ps yep, I shot plenty of pictures - I'll drop a line when I get them posted
"Dave Ernst" said....
I took about 100 pictures and a few of the Holt steam crawler known as Holt
101. He fired the boiler on propane and then added wood for the smoke. I
think he had a throttle-governor bug an when he started to move the first
time it lurched hard enough to almost unseat him....
I'll post pictures somewhere other than the forum when I get time.
Dave
ps. I was there from 6am Friday until about 5:30 pm
and was thoroughly cooked in the 102 degree heat.
Saturday from 6am until noon. It was 103 degrees then, about 10,000 people
and I left......
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