The Stick

Distracted as I am by schoolwork at the moment, I am going to attempt to write down some stories that come from one of the better story-tellers I know. This is a man who can take an ordinary task and get himself into a right good fix, but always lives to tell the take. He inspires his family daily, and his name is Grandpa.

Once upon a time, Grandpa was fueling up a tractor. It was the type of tractor that had a sizable hole on the top of the engine, through which the fuel went in. The fuel was making its way into the tractor via the farm tank. Via the hose. Via the nozzle. The nozzle is the important part of that series. Not because it is special but because it is, as far as I know, like every other nozzle on every other farm tank. To release fuel, the handle must be held up. Even if you are gifted with strong hands, it isn't fun to hold this handle while the tank fills, and it's even less fun with a tractor tank. That is a lot of nozzle-holding. To remedy this, farmers everywhere have been propping up gas nozzle handles to keep the fuel running while they go about their business.

My grandpa has one of these props. A designated stick that has a permanent residence by the gas tanks at the farm. So of course, when he was fueling the tractor, he put this stick in the nozzle and went around the tractor to do some greasing. This was to be a quick fuel run. Leave the tractor running, put a half tank in while greasing, then keep going. When the tractor was around half full, Grandpa went to shut the fuel off. Unfortunately, when he was taking the stick out, it fell. Into the tank of the tractor.

“Bloop!” went the stick. I don't imagine Grandpa heard that with the tractor running. If a stick falls in a gas tank when the tractor engine is running, does it still make a sound? I think it does. I think it went “Bloop!”

It's not the end of the world that there was a stick in the tractor tank. It couldn't really wreck anything and a new stick could be found to take up residence at the gas tank, I'm sure. Perhaps it was the indignity of it all that prompted Grandpa to take action. It may have been the tantalizing way the stick was floating just below the hole. Perhaps the stick, by performing lazy circles directly in the spotlight that shone down the hole, was taunting Grandpa. Perhaps it got personal. I can't say for sure what train of thought led Grandpa to reach down into the hole, but I would hazard to guess that the same train of thought also led him to push his arm in past the elbow. Eventually a different train of thought made him finally pull the plug on the operation; he was stuck.

I guess you could say he had gotten himself into a...

Sticky situation.

When did he stop using his body weight to push his arm into the hole and start trying to pry himself out? I'm not sure. I do believe there was a moment of pause between the stubborn pushing and the frantic pulling though. In this moment, Grandpa briefly pondered four things. The first two were that his cell phone was sitting on the tractor seat and that the tractor was still running (with a half a tank of fuel to keep it that way). The next thought was that his arm, stuck as it was past the elbow, would soon begin to swell.

His final thought was, “I'll be damned if they find me this way!”

And then he began to struggle.

To the old man's credit, he prevailed. He was not discovered elbow-deep in a tractor's fuel tank. He could not, however, keep the incident a secret; and not just because he's French and likes a good story. It's because people were bound to ask him how he had gotten those deep gashes above his elbow. Gashes caused by the panicked twisting and pulling of one's arm out of a smaller-than-Grandpa's-arm-sized hole.

The real kicker is, he never did get the stick for his trouble. My Dad's favourite part of this story, though, is that Grandpa saw his old nemesis again, after the old injuries had healed. The tank was full then, and the stick floated across the opening, taunting Grandpa. He had a good long moment of thought before he decided against reaching in again, but it was a close call. If that's not a mark of how traumatizing the experience was, I don't know what is.