TRACTOR TRACTION

Question:  How many men does it take to rescue a ride-on lawnmower?

Oh, the trouble into which we get ourselves.  Oh, the lengths to which we will go in order to conceal the trouble into which we get ourselves.

I answer a phone call the other day from a friend.  Her voice isn't what I would categorize as frantic, but she is definitely worried with a tinge of anxiety peppered with a hint of desperation.  She would like to borrow my youngest for a quick chore, more of an assistance, actually.  Unfortunately, youngest is on his way to a weekend lacrosse tournament as a coach, and he has two minutes to get out of the house, hit the highway, and make his way to the rendezvous spot on the way to Stowe, Vermont.

This information does not appease my pal, so I urge her to clue me in; perhaps I can help.  It turns out she was mowing close to her garage when the ride-on mower rolled a little too far down a small embankment.  The tractor is now wedged on a concrete curb.

Before anyone passes judgment here, I will point out two very important facts:
#1.  The concrete is actually rounded, so it's more like a steep ramp;
#2.  This friend recently had her entire knee replaced and may have over-trusted the new knee just a tad.

Anyway, when she tells me the lawnmower has gotten hung up on the curb, I instantly worry that she means her front curb.  I picture her being tossed from an errant tractor, sprawled into the street within an inch of her life, and I am now the one in a panic.  Of course, I am not going to let on that I am upset for her, so I instruct her to stop trying to move the tractor and go do something else, have some juice or something, and assure her that I will be right there to help.  I rush Coach Boy out the door with barely a fond farewell, and rush even more to rip through the four miles that separate my home from hers.

As I round the bend near her driveway, I note that no tractor appears to be slipping down the short but steep area in front of her house, nor do I see the tractor teetering toward the road.  This means that she is not lying half-squished in the street.  Perhaps the lawn mower is on the other side of her house or at the bottom of her yard's good-sized hill.  Or maybe --

I pull into her driveway and see it.    Half-on and half-off the front curb by her walkway that leads to her door sits the tractor.  It seems like it should be able to drive right down the convex concrete, and this would be mostly true if it weren't for the mower blades.  The blades seem to be stuck on the paved part of the area.

I am as relieved to see that the situation is not dire as I am amused to see that the situation is not dire.

The sight of her predicament sends me into a fit of howling laughter, but only because I can tell she is probably not hurt.  The sound of my howling laughter brings my friend from behind her garage where she has been working in another part of the yard, obeying my suggestion that she leave the mower until I get there.  I am sorry for laughing, but my friend admits that this is the first moment she has smiled about the debacle since it happened nearly an hour ago.  Chalk up points for we optimists.

My friend would like to see some resolution before her neighbors get home.  If they see what has happened, they will probably do several things, not the least of which is berate her for trying to rescue the tractor while she is still recovering from knee surgery.  I can see from the position of everything that she has already managed to get the blades up as high as they will go, and that she has maneuvered the mower into a straight shot over the ramp-like curb. However, the curb's slope is stopping her from rolling the tractor the rest of the way over.  The front wheels are down on the driveway; the back wheels are up on the walkway above the curb.

We are intelligent women.  I have great confidence that we can solve this conundrum.

(My bad photography - Tractor is on the curved portion of this curb.)

After a couple of minutes of consultation, we agree that we need to lift the front tires to less of a severe angle and maybe, just maybe the rest of the tractor will follow, completing the trip over the curb.  My friend grabs some wood then says, "The mower is too heavy.  We might not be able to lift it."

Nonsense.  We are smart, strong women.  Oh, yes, and we don't want the neighbors to see this.  So we set about lifting the tractor's front end.  My first attempt does not go well.  It's not so much that the sucker is heavy (and, believe me, it is very heavy), but it's more of an awkward sense of where to support the machine so we can lift it.

The second attempt goes very well.  We manage to get one of the large pieces of wood wedged under the front tires.  Then, to cut down the drop the rest of the tractor will take, we add a second piece of wood to the first so that the tractor's descent will be less of an angle, hopefully high enough to prevent the blades from scraping again.

My friend sits on the tractor and starts it.  Slowly (like the Three Stooges going to Niagara Falls) the tractor moves its way forward, completely free, completely fine, none the worse for the wear.  Best of all, the neighbors (unless they read this blog) will never know what has happened.

We celebrate with tall glasses of ice water, then my friend heads out to continue mowing her yard and I head toward a luncheon date with a work friend.  Within a minute, we have returned equilibrium to the universe.  Except for my loud laughter when pulling into the driveway, no one might even suspect that there was ever anything out of the ordinary to start with, even though for us things like this are our normalcy.

Therefore, let's revert our attention to the original question:  How many men does it take to rescue a ride-on lawnmower?

Answer:  NONE because girls rule.