The
Arrival of the Header
There's not an animal in sight with this latest episode of happenings at Spring Rock.
Well! It's been all fun and games here lately. After the long wait for the header to get here, it arrived, wrapped in high drama.
Last year’s harvest was encumbered with many header
breakdowns. Graeme would just get back
into the swing of things, harvest-wise, and something would break, crack or just plain refuse
to work on the header. It has served us
well for many years, and the truth of the matter is, that the poor header is
just old and well and truly entering its troublesome years. With a good harvest behind us, the decision was
made to find a newer, second hand header with all the special bits and pieces
Graeme wanted. It took some time to
track down the perfect header, but once it was found and our header budget,
drastically increased, Graeme agreed to buy it.
There was a long wait between the agreeing and the actual buying, all to
do with the header’s present owner’s (who was trading it in on the latest
model) wish to keep hold of it until he actually had his new header on his
property – a very wise move that ensured he still had a header if something
went wrong with the arrival of the new one arrived.
The day finally arrived and the header was available for
us to buy. Getting an invoice to pay for
it from the dealers was surprisingly difficult; I suppose they were just busy
trying to sell all their other trade-ins, but the invoice was finally emailed
the day before the header was due to arrive here and we could now pay the
invoice. At least we thought we
could. First, on Monday the bank made
paying for the header very difficult.
Poor Graeme had to make more than half a dozen calls, with each one
timing out while the person on the other end went off to find the answers to
Graeme’s problems. When the bank app
told Graeme that there hadn’t been any activity for a while, so it was shutting
down the session, Graeme had to ring back each time, explain his problem all
over again only to have that person put him on hold while he/she went to find
the answer and of course, it timed out again.
Graeme, despite the obvious frustrations of this little exercise,
managed to stay calm and polite to each person to whom he spoke, but I did
think I saw a bit of steam coming out his ears.
Once that was finally sorted and the payment for the
header was made all we had to do, was sit back and wait for the header to
arrive on Tuesday. Well, that didn’t go
according to plan either. Tuesday
arrived bright and shiny, with blue skies and dry roadways (the importance of
which will become clear later on). The
salesman rang to say the truck was having difficulties (unspecified) and hadn’t
arrived at the dealership as yet. This
was around lunchtime and there wasn’t enough time left in the day for the truck
to drive the long trek to get the header here during daylight, so they were
rescheduling for Wednesday.
Wednesday’s weather forecast was for rain, followed by
more rain. Our 2km roadway from farm’s
our front gate to our machinery shed is not a pretty sight after a bit of rain
after a lot of rain it’s even worse.
Navigating the sloshy bits and the deep puddle bits is not for the faint
hearted. The day started with 40mm of
rain (which our crops greatly appreciated) and rain just kept on coming all
morning, only varying between showering and pouring down. The header left on its long trek at 9.30am
and we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Graeme advised the salesman not to bring the
truck on to our lane, but to offload the header on the main road (tar) and
drive it along the lane (dirt) and then on through our gate and ultimately to
the machinery shed where a nice, new spot was waiting for the header to settle
down until harvest.
The salesman, who arrived with the header to teach Graeme
how to use all the high tech stuff, and truck driver took this good advice and
all looked hopeful for a successful delivery of one header. That’s when the fun and high jinks
began. The salesman drove the header
along the lane and, with a false sense of security, continued through the
gateway and on to our farm roadway.
Having never before seen what Spring Rock laughingly calls a roadway,
the salesman seems to have lost all confidence and decided not to follow the
soggy tyre ruts but to straddle them and choose the ground less waterlogged –
big mistake. The higher parts of the
roadway did not have a firm base, made from decades of cars and machinery
compacting to ground, underneath. The
header slipped sideways and into the newly erected boundary fence.
Graeme, who had driven our four-wheel drive out to meet
the salesman (well really he drove out to greet the header, but we’ll say he
went to meet the salesman), managed to bog our car a short distance along our
roadway from the stuck header. I wasn’t
present for the discussions that took place with two stuck vehicles (can you
call a header a vehicle?), but the upshot was that the salesman opted to forgo
the header tutorial for another day, walk back up the lane to meet the truck
there and drive back to his dealership, leaving Graeme with the stuck
aforementioned vehicles to sort out. The
salesman did say he’d wait a few days to bring the header comb down here. He had intended to bring it Thursday, but he
wasn’t going to brave our roadway again until it had a chance to dry out a bit.
Graeme walked back to the house, collected me and the tractor and we drove out to free the car from its ignoble position, stuck deep in the mud. I busied myself taking photos of the stuck header and the bogged four-wheel drive to share with Ethan, our farmer type grandchild. With the tractor doing all the heavy work, and me behind the wheel just steering the car as the tractor pulled it out, the car was soon out of the bog and trying to look like the whole embarrassing incident never happened. Graeme decided to drive the car back to the house (for which I was truly grateful), finish his interrupted lunch and have a well-earned cup of tea before tackling the header issue.
To remove the header, Graeme had to dismantle our new boundary
fence and drive the header out through the opening, then put the fence back
together. The header wasn’t bogged, it
just didn’t seem to want to do anything but snuggle up to the fence, no matter
how many attempts were made to steer it in the other direction. One silver lining to this whole dark cloud
incident is that our neighbours decided to plant the paddock on the other side
of this fence to crops this year. He’s
run stock in that paddock for a number of years now and if Graeme had to drop
the fence with sheep or horses in there, the unsticking the header process
could have been a lot more fraught. Thankfully,
the header behaved once Graeme was in the driver’s seat and it was a simple
matter of driving it out of the problem area and onto the roadway. All Graeme had to do then was put the fence
back together, drive the header down to the machinery shed, get me to drive him
back for the bike and then back again for the tractor and we could put this
whole distasteful episode behind us.
The header is now ensconced in the machinery shed. Hopefully it has now got all its bad
behaviour out of its system and will now become a model member of the Spring
Rock community who no longer wants to get up close and personal to fences.
