Ski-Doo, Ski-Don't

It's been a while since I've written, and it's only partly because winter can be a monotonous season. In fact, I credit my laziness in writing mostly to my number one fans, my parents, who I am with almost 24/7. Since they either witness my ordeals or are told instantly about them, it seems a bit silly to write things down for them to read. They appear to enjoy reading what I write, though, and I've chosen to be flattered by this, rather than insulted when they favour reading me to listening to me. I don't blame them, really. Sister and I got back from our big European excursion at the beginning of December, but somehow it already feels like ages ago. I considered it a great relief to be home from distant lands, and am still most content to be back in this familiar place. I don't know that I came back with as much wisdom as I would have liked to, but I did come back with three very clear resolutions. The first was that I would like to drink better quality coffee. I'm going to call a spade a spade and admit that I have a slight addiction. But I could quit any time. Most of the time on the trip, we bought instant coffee and filled thermoses for ourselves. I just kept adding more and more of those little freeze-dried flakes of instant caffeine. I was chasing the high. Filling the void. But I could quit any time. Anyway, that's not what made me want great coffee, because that was not great coffee. It was when we stopped at the cafes that I experienced truly great coffee. Espressos. Espressos as thick as the hair on a dog's butt. I've just been informed that the expression is 'thick as the hair on a dog's back', but I think my dad's version is clearly better. Anyway, since espressos came closest to filling the caffeine void, I resolved to find a way to make better, stronger coffee back home. Thanks to my Christmas gift-exchange buddy's diligent research, I now have a glorious coffee press that makes glorious coffee in the morning. Sometimes I buy espresso powder. Sometimes I use excessive amounts of coffee grounds. Always, I have a gloriously dark coffee. But I could quit anytime.

My next resolution was to read more. I started craving books when we were in the last part of our trip. I think it was a combination of feeling overwhelmed by general travel and being in Italy, where the masses of people made me feel overwhelmed twice. I just really needed to absorb myself in a place where the people were imaginary. Sometimes imaginary people are my favourite kind of people. I would download library books on my iPod and read them when we got stuck in a lineup. It was a sweet release. I remember when I was growing up, before the days of wifi, and then before the days of dial-up, how I used to rent huge stacks of books from the library. I wanted to do that again. Fortunately for me, I have a grandmother with a great library. When I visited this grandma over Christmas, I left with a plethora of books, from history to comedy. She has excellent taste, and, what's more, she saved me from embarking on my reading resolution with Don Quixote, which I'd started about a year ago. I've only gotten far enough in that story to know it is the thickest book imaginable and features the oddest character imaginable. My third resolution will not take long to explain (even for me): I will not go on that long of a trip ever again. With these three resolutions enriching my life, I've been really happy to be back home!

Shortly after I got back, we weaned the calves, vaccinated the heifers, and gave everything some spray-on 'pesticide' to get rid of any parasites. It was a couple days of drudging through snow-filled corrals, but it felt good to be working with livestock again. Since then, it's been a pretty set routine of keeping all the animals fed. The calves took a few weeks to settle into the routine, but once they did, feeding became pretty simple. We'd start the tractor every three or four days and shred hay into different paddocks around the yard. Then, every morning, we'd use a truck with a grain tank to call the calves into their new paddock, feeding them grain as well. The cow herd is even simpler, as we just shred out feed for as many days as we fed the calves for. Even though the routine stayed the same, the weather that February brought was tough. It may give every Western Canadian something to commiserate about and agree on, but it sure made feeding costs go up. Before the February cold, the cow herd was eating about five bales of greenfeed a day. In the cold snap that lasted the whole month, they were eating eight (so, a jump, per cow, from about twenty-four pounds to thirty-nine). We're happy to see the warmer weather coming in now.

So, up to now, I've been giving you a brief summary of life on the ranch, but now we're coming to the portion of the words that convey why I was inspired to write in the first place.

Due to a lack of snow, and then to extreme cold weather, we haven't started up the snowmobiles all winter. They've been sitting in the back of a shed collecting dust and bird poop since last spring. We decided to pull them out of hibernation and take a drive through some pasture land, so we got to work starting them up. To Dad's surprise (but not to mine because I don't understand snowmobiles), the Arctic Cat fired right up, after only taking the spark plugs out and pouring gas in them about ten times. Ten is apparently a surprisingly few amount of times to do this for the Arctic Cat. I would soon learn that two hundred was a surprisingly many amount of times for the Ski-Doo.

First of all, we tried starting the thing and nothing was even turning over. We hooked a battery charger onto it, but even after the battery appeared to be working, it still wouldn't fire. Then we pulled a rag out of the exhaust. Miraculously (everything about engines is miraculous when you don't know anything about engines), the Ski-Doo turned over a bit. We thought it was the solution to our problems, but it was not. The Ski-Doo still didn't start, though it at least made some promising noises. I thought they were promising, anyway, and Dad must have too, because he persisted. Since the gas-in-the-spark-plugs had worked so well on the other machine, we went to work doing the same process. Over and over again, we (and by 'we' I mean Dad) unscrewed the spark plugs and clumsily attempted to get at least half of the gas into the spark plug hole (the other half went wild – the Ski-Doo is not set up well for this process). Then, after screwing the spark plugs back in, he would try pull-starting the snowmobile. Every time, it was the same thing; it would start for just a few seconds, until the gas ran out (there was just a dribble in the spark plugs). After a ridiculous number of times going through this process (my hands were cold just watching Dad's hands getting cold), Dad gave himself the ultimatum of, “If it doesn't start next time, we have to try something else.” (By 'we' he meant himself.) This ultimatum kept him going through the next ridiculous number of times of doing the process. I don't know if he knows what ultimatums are. After using up a liter of gas in this manner (which says a lot when you consider only two tablespoons is used in the spark plugs – though two tablespoons probably also missed and dripped down in and around the engine), we decided to pull out the big guns: ether. In my head, which doesn't contain a lot of automotive-related information, ether is magical engine-starting juice. When I was quite young, I remember starting the snowmobiles with Dad and using ether. I remember them roaring to life after it seemed like they would never start. I seem to remember asking Dad what the heck was in the can he had just used to spray the engines to life, and him saying, in his flippant way (the same way his mother told me her broken finger was caused by a pecking chicken), “Ether. It's magical engine-starting juice.” Since then, I've wondered why we ever struggle to start an engine (I am also afraid of chickens). Why don't we just whip out a can of magical ether, spray it around the troublesome engine in roughly the same quantities that my pubescent brother sprayed Axe around himself, and start that puppy up? Since we don't do that, I have just had to assume that there must be some negative to it, though I can't imagine what (neither could my brother when we told him to go easy on the Axe).

Anyway, since it was time to spray some ether, I apparently had to start helping. Dad correctly assumed that I would not know the right hole to spray the ether in (so, it's definitely not like Axe, then), I had to pull-start the engine. Not that my pipes can't handle pull-starting an engine, but I like to stand back in those situations where Dad is putting his face into an engine and trying to get it to fire. In times like that, I am overcome with the thought that it could blow up. Since I like to dwell on worst-case scenarios, I imagine how my flesh would peel, and my glasses would melt into my face. I may never get my eyebrows back in this fictional scenario that I made up. Not that I'm unconcerned for my father, but why should two of us be marred? Anyway, I got over my qualms as I always do in these situations; I assume that Dad knows what he's doing and he wouldn't put his face there if something was going to blow up. And now I need to take a moment for a tangent of sorts. It's another childhood memory that serves as a foreshadowing of this very day. Actually, I may have even told it before because I like to whip it out when I need to illustrate that Dad isn't always right. Anyway, it was the autumn of my tenth year. I had a little baby 4-H-calf-to-be on a halter, happy as a pig in mud to be petting a calf, because that's always been my jam. Dad was moving a young cow through the corrals and I asked if I should get onto a fence. Dad said no. He said I'd be fine. He said the cow wouldn't bother me. And then she did bother me, in the form of chasing. Somehow, I ended up being the one that gets mocked for this happenstance, just because the only climbable fence in the mostly-slab-fenced corral happened to be behind the angry cow. Obviously I donned my tunnel-vision and my brown pants and I booked it towards that fence. I never get a pat on the back for my quick leg work. Dad: “Are you okay?!” Me: “YOU SAID SHE WOULDN'T CHASE!”

Dad, laughing: “You ran towards her...” Me: “IT WAS THE ONLY FENCE AND YOU SAID SHE WOULDN'T CHASE!” Dad, still laughing: “Yeah, but you ran towards her.”

Anyway, I'm sure I'll bring that up in the future to make the point that Dad doesn't always know what he's about. Like the other day, when we were starting the Ski-Doo.

Bolstered by Dad's confidence in his own mechanical skills, I was willing to get in there and help out by pull-starting the Ski-Doo. “Watch your elbow on the rafter,” he warned me, as I grabbed the handle. I noted the rafter, which was at just the right spot for me to nail my elbow on when I pulled. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be hitting that. “Are you ready?” I asked. “Yep. Go.” Dad said. I let her rip, and whipped my elbow back into the rafter. A per my experience with the magical starting fluid called ether, the Ski-Doo fired up and was able to stay running as Dad sprayed the can as much as he could. Eventually it stalled out, though, and even though I took this failure of ether as a sign of end times (at least, for that engine), Dad was determined to keep trying. Once again, he unscrewed the spark plugs, dribbled some gas in and out of the holes, re-screwed the spark plugs, and poised the can of ether. “Try again,” he said. I gave a weak pull that didn't do the trick (because I never said my pipes can handle pull-starting an engine twice – also, I was a little gun-shy of the rafter), but Dad sprayed away with the ether, anyway. I was a smidgen concerned that he was applying it a little too liberally before I was ready, but I just pulled again. Elbow. Rafter.

POOF!

The engine didn't turn over. It blew up.

Now, even though you should assume that I'm exaggerating when I say it 'blew up', it still most definitely and objectively started on fire. Dad forgetting to hook the spark plugs back up is what sparked it, the ether fanned the flame, and all of that gas that had been dribbling down during this whole process was fueling it. “Fire!” said Dad, who doesn't often resort to exclamation marks when he gets his own self into a pickle. “There's a fire in the engine! Quick! Get some snow in there!” Dad turned and grabbed at some of the snow that came in along the edge of the shed we were in. I turned and did the same, picking up as much as I could, which was just a little bit more than if I tried to grab water with my bare hands. That is to say, not very much. At the moment, though, it didn't matter that we couldn't grab much of the hard snow along the edge of the shed, because the fire was down in the bottom of the engine, and none of what we were throwing was falling into it.

“It's not going in! I need a stick or something to poke the snow into it!” Dad was sounding pretty darn concerned, and I once witnessed him laying down in a pasture beside his horse, calmly informing his shocked daughters that he had broken his leg. I've also watched him finish tagging a calf, then set down rope and tagging box and lay down in the bush, telling me that his heart started beating erratically. Now, if he ever lays down outside, I know it's serious, but that's not the point. The point is, he doesn't really panic, but his voice was starting to sound a little panicky. Fortunately, Dad wasn't to the point of laying down yet as the Ski-Doo engine crackled and flickered with fire. I managed to struggle out of the little corner I was crammed into by the Ski-Doo and find a stick nearby in the shed. I passed it to Dad. “Here you poke the snow in, and I'll grab snow.” I'm not going to pretend I did this for any other reason that to get my meltable face out of the explosion zone a little farther. With impeccable, if a bit self-centered on my part, teamwork, we set about our new emergency duties. I went outside to shed to more effectively grab armfuls of snow, while Dad poked and prodded the snow I was piling on the engine into the fire part of the engine. I felt a whole lot like Spanky as I stumbled, slipped, and shuffled out of the shed, scooped in an armful of snow, then stumbled, slipped and shuffled back to the Ski-Doo, losing all but a pittance of my load along the way. If you can picture Spanky, from the Little Rascals, doing that, you've pretty much got the picture.

We did get the fire out before it caused any lasting damage (we think). We did also get the Ski-Doo started after dragging it into the shop to warm up over our lunch break. Turns out, the gas line was air-locked (that's a direct quote, because once again, I have no idea what I'm talking about).

Dad and ether have had better days. So has the Ski-Doo.

But for me and Spanky, it's pretty much average.