Last year I was doing my normal daily chores at the pond. I drove by my big pond and was disappointed to see a single dead hybrid striped bass. It was about four pounds. I don't like to waste anything, so I decided to drive up to my tree line, which is made up of Colorado blue spruce trees. It seemed like a good idea to place the hybrid striper at the base of one of the trees to serve as fertilizer.
I am truly a creature of habit, so when I drive my John Deer Gator from place to place on the farm I always follow the same paths, but there isn't a path to the blue spruce. Consequently I'm now in territory I don't drive every day.
After dropping off the fish I now have to return to a path, and this involves driving down a steep slope with some medium length prarie grass toward the horizontal aeration pond, which is currently dewatered.
Now I digress for a moment. My property is known as "glacial till". A big ice mass moved through the area tens of thousands of years ago. When it receded it left a bunch of big, pink rocks that likely came from somewhere in Minnesota or Canada. I've made a big firepit over the years by collecting the medium sized stones that range from fifteen to fifty pounds. Earlier I had tossed two rocks in the forty pound range into the back of the 'gator.
Now back to the big slope. I turned the gator toward the little pond and gunned it at full speed, which in a gator is about twenty miles an hour when you're going down hill. I wasn't paying a great deal of attention, so it was my great misfortune that a thousand pound stone which was sticking about a foot out of the ground was directly in my way.
When I struck the mammoth rock at full speed both Gator headlights blew out, the bumper sustained a huge dent....but worst of all the Gator tipped forward on impact and the forty pound stones were launched out of the back of the vehicle. One of them hit me in the right ear as it blew by. If it would have been about four inches to the left it would have either killed me, or more likely knocked me out so that the gator would have careened into the empty pond and most certainly would have flipped.
For a moment I sat and shook. Then I went to the cabin, poured myself a shot of whiskey and saluted God that he saw fit to give me some more time on this earth.
Anybody else got a stupid stunt story? Feel free to cut and paste from another thread. David u's story about tipping heavy equipment was my motivation for writing this story. His account gave me a chill.
