Electric blue snake

When we were moving from one marsh to another, we had to hook the boats and drag them with the tractor over to an open area where they could be picked up by the tines on a tractor or an end loader and loaded onto the trucks. As it happens, we often had several boats that had their chains buried underneath them. We saved those boats for last by taking the easiest ones first. Two men or strong boys could pick up the front of the boats, reach under and grab the chain and get it out from underneath. Then we would use the tractor to stack one boat on top of another and haul them to the staging area two at a time.
Once when we were moving from one marsh to another, it was just me and the foreman moving the last of the boats. He was on the tractor that day. When he was gone hauling a couple boats down to the trucks, I was up in the woods using a crowbar and a block trying to fish the chain out from under them so he could just grab and go.
I was quite successful in my misson. However, there were two that were too heavy for me to trick up onto the block. One of those was upside down and wouldn't budge. So when he got back, he shut off the tractor and got down to help me. The first one of those, he just picked up the front by himself and I grabbed the chain. The second one, we had to pick up one side and flip over to right it. He hung onto the chain as we flipped it so it wouldn't be buried again. As soon as we stood it up on end, I saw the most AMAZING electric "dragonfly" blue snake, about six inches long. So vibrant and spectacular I immediately shouted for him to look. He saw it, but it was not nearly so amazing and spectacular. He is color blind. All he saw was a snake. It promptly slithered off into the tall grass. After we dropped the boat down, I looked for the snake, but it was long gone.
I have asked several people about it. Most suggested it was a blue racer. But all the pictures I have found of those are just regular blue or a blueish black colors. No spectacular, vibrant, nearly flourescent blue snakes anywhere to be found.

my only joke

Did ya hear about the dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac?

I guess he stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog...

Marsh Goddessing

Out at the marsh, a typical day would consist of getting to the marsh early and checking over the cats. We would crawl underneath and grease them, check the oil and fuel and make sure we had everything we needed, such as pulling hooks, chains, tools, etc.
I loved to be the first one out on the marsh in the morning and the last one to leave the marsh at the end of the day. If we weren't too far from shore, we would usually go in for lunch. Sometimes I would stay right out there and eat my lunch all alone on my cat in the middle of the marsh. When the dragonflies were particularly active on a body of water, I would sit there and just watch them. They would fly around me and land on me. It was magical.
Because I could feel how solid the mat was beneath me, I got very, very good at pulling out boats that got stuck. The other cat drivers would just unhook a stuck one and let it sit. If we could, we would let it dry for a few days, which made it hundreds of pounds lighter, then go pull it out. But sometimes we HAD to move it right then.
Spinning up the marsh with a cat was bad, bad, bad. The Department of Natural Resources and county foresters were very involved in over-seeing our operation. Wetlands protection, you know. We used vegetable based greases and had to be diligent about any potential spills. A leaking cat had to be grounded immediately until repaired. If we tore a whole in the moss mat, it would not be healed in our lifetime. It's a very slow growing environment. So we had to be extremely careful. We always saw scars that other mossers had made. We found it very frustrating. So the foreman taught me right away how to pull those boats out without spinning up the marsh.
If someone else got a boat stuck, they would holler for me on the radio to go get it. When we were working in really wet conditions, sometimes there would be 10 or 15 that had been drying for a few days and I would dedicate the day to pulling them all out. I loved that.
I never cared if I got dirty.
I would drive my cat over and back up as close as I thought I could safely get. Then I would grab my trusty chain, hop down and either walk or wade over to the chain on the boat, hook it to my bigger chain, hop back on the cat, put it in a low gear and pull slowly forward. Most of the time, I was able to snatch it right out. But that's because I would choose the best angle to grab it from. If I did start to slip a bit, I would backup, unhook and try another angle. If it seemed too soft, I would use a longer chain, just to sneak it forward a little, so I could use my shorter chain again.
Occasionally, we needed to get two cats hooked up a boat just to break the suction. And twice, we had to pull an empty boat over and manually move half the moss onto the empty boat with pitchforks to lighten it up enough to move. But we didn't make them too heavy after that.
I really liked the boat hauling gig. It suited me. I was working with the crew, but I also worked alone a lot.
Unfortunately, employees came and went. We went through a lot of young men that had no idea this was WORK when they signed up. So we lost a couple cat drivers at once, and the foreman needed me to drive next to the machine.
I HATED that job. It was stressful. My neck would get sore always looking one way. I had to be responsible for the safety of the two men on the boat behind my cat, while I drove within feet or inches of the harvesting machine, matching my speed with the machine, careful not to jerk my boat riders into the marsh or into harm's way. I had to keep track of the two people riding boat, the machine operator, my cat, the harvest machine, watch for stumps in front of the machine, watch out for critters, holes in the marsh, bees, monitor the radio in case somebody was hollering to me, look forward at where I was going and backwards at my riders. I really hated it. Weeks and weeks of a sore neck and a bad attitude, while the lazyiest guy on the crew got my gravy job of boat hauling. I was mad. But they needed me, so I took one for the team. Someplace in there, I insisted the foreman take over. He told me no, it was too stressful. Arrrgghhh!!! That excuse didn't work for me!
But after doing it for several weeks, one day I realized my neck didn't hurt anymore and I realized I WAS good at it. And then I had that pride of having conquered my misery and actually getting very good at it. The boat riders preferred me because I was smoother. Sometimes the other excellent driver and I both worked out on the marsh. Then the boat riders got really spoiled. So when a less experienced driver drove again, they really suffered, getting jerked, sometimes right into the marsh.
Someplace early into my job there, while I was still boat hauling, one of our guys quit. I ended up with his radio. Because I had the only radio out there, the foreman, who was often up on the landing, would call me and have me go tell the guys what to do. Once I started driving next to the machine, suddenly, I was in charge while the foreman was gone.
That was cool with my core team who came back year after year. I didn't have to boss them around. We were a team. Ww did what we had to do to get the job done safely. And I never once considered myself in charge of them. MostlyI just kept things moving and made sure breaks were the proper amount of time. Sometimes I had to get after the youngsters to keep them working. I called it straw bossing or being the company girl. It was mostly glorified babysitting then. I hated that too. Some of the younger ones must have had a problem with the only woman being in charge of them or someting. They had attitude and defiance occasionally. Once when it was just me and four just-past teenagers, I had a complete mutiny. The foreman was out on sick leave and they knew he wouldn't be back for days, possibly weeks. They didn't want to work. I had to stand up on the tracks of my cat and scream at the top of my lungs that this was WORK and they were being PAID to work, not F-off. One ended up quitting that day. It was too bad, he was the best worker of the bunch of them. But management and the foreman backed me up that I had done the right thing. I tried convincing him not to quit, but he had other irons in the fire anyway and is still doing the job he left us for.
A few years later, there was one young guy who was worthless from day one. I said he would not work out. He was lazy and did not listen. He refused to do things properly and I felt his defiance was a safety issue. So a few weeks after he started, I'd had it. I stopped everything. We shut off all equipment and I told him that either he could do the job safely, or he was free to walk in to shore and explain to the foreman why he wasn't cooperating.
He started yelling at me. I got so mad I wanted to come down off that cat and thrash him. I have never been so mad at a co-worker or anyone else, ever. Before I had a chance to do that, my buddy got down off his machine and told this kid to do what I said, right now. The next thing I knew, they were dukeing it out in the marsh. I hollered on the radio for the foreman to come out right now and get this kid. In the kids defense, he held his own against the bigger stronger more mature co-worker. They broke it up just as the foreman arrived. He calmly got the story, then fired the kid. I felt bad about that too. We could have spared ourselves all of it, if they had just taken my word that he wasn't going to work out. The kid was so negative about the work, he dampened the spirits of the entire crew. After he was gone, we returned to our camaraderie and great teamwork. I was really glad I hadn't come down off my cat to thrash him. He would have pounded me.
I suppose it sounds like I loose my temper a lot. That's not so. It's just that in working outside in nature like that, you develop a certain intensity. It's like the survival instinct stays on lukewarm because things can happen so fast. You have to be and stay completely 100% in the NOW to deal with things that come up.
We drove the cats on the marsh, but we also had to drive them through the woods hauling the boats in to where they could be unloaded with a tractors' tines into a pile. Sometimes the landing roads were less than ideal and we had to drive over roots and sometimes trees and stumps. You had to be very careful so as not to "throw a track" while doing so. Sometimes they went back on easy, by just going the opposite direction. If you had a boat behind you, you had to have another cat or a tractor move the boat out from behind you so you could back up. If the tracks were thrown bad, it could take hours and hours to take then apart and put them back together.
One day my usual cat went down with a mechanical problem. So I had to drive this one that had a scoop seat. The cat worked okay, but I didn't like the seat. Nothing to brace against if you hit a bump. So, I was driving that cat. The tracks were a little wider and I hadn't taken that into consideration as I backed down the landing road to hook another boat and bring it in to park it where the tractor could grab it. I was backing over this stumpy area where I had taken my usual cat probably a hundred or more times over the past week. As I entered the tricky area, where a big hump was on the left and then quickly on the right, because of the wider track, it didn't line up just right and I clipped the bank and then the whole cat dropped about three feet and I was bucked HARD and nearly thrown right into my own tracks where I would have driven over myself on hard ground and been completely crushed. Because I was in the NOW, I was able to hang onto those handles and throw my clutch in. But I was right on the pivot point, so I was in the air in the front and the back of the cat. I let the clutch out slowly and backed up to where it was level, shut the cat off, smoked a cigarette and shook for several minutes. I was completely alone because the guys were on the marsh and up on the landing. Stupid, stupid girl, nearly eaten by a cat.
I knew immediately that I hadn't taken the wider track into consideration. I was so grateful that I'd been focused on what I was doing and was able to stay in the saddle so to speak. So after my smoke, I resumed my boat hauling. The very next pass, I adjusted my approach and it was smooth. About a half hour later, I was looking back, making a continous, smooth approach over the stumpy area, when I looked forward to see my foreman wallking down the trail from where I had just come, to see me smoothly manuervering the problem area, with a big smile on his face and a thumbs up. I was SO glad he wasn't coming to check on me to find my lifeless carcass laying there. And I was equally grateful he hadn't been there to see my bucking bronco stunt because he would have pulled me off that cat and clipped my wings right then and there. I never even mentioned it to any of my crew.
Wider tracks came into play another time.
The guys made an approach for me to haul boats between these two birch trees. I drove my usual cat through there no problem. They had measured it and said all the cats would fit. I had a few inches on either side of the tracks. But I was good. So I didn't even clip the trees, like a few other guys did. Because I was good at it, I was left alone to do the run. There was a cat on the marsh side of that road, so I grabbed a boat with that cat and proceeded to drive through. It didn't look like it would fit. So I called on the radio and said I didn't think that cat would make it. The foreman told me they measured it, it would fit. So, I sarted through, sudden stop. Both tracks were wedged up tight on both sides. Yup, I figured. I was ticked because I didn't want to have to cut down either one of those beautiful trees. But, we were able to hook the tractor to one of the trees and pull just a little to release the tension on that side and I was able to wiggle the cat out without cutting the tree down. We made a different landing road after that. It turned out that cat still had the older, wider cleats on and no one had remembered that.
One time when I was in charge, we dropped the fancy harvest machine into a pre-existing hole on the marsh that we had not seen because it was covered with moss. I knew right away that we needed the foreman because I could tell it was NOT going to come out easy. The guys wanted to try because the foreman was gone, way across the marsh at the landing we had just left a few days before, moving the rest of the equipment over to our new one. We tried, but it was sinking deeper. I was pretty rattled. We were working in a pretty wet marsh. I had no idea of the water depth, but it was a pretty wet marsh. We tried everything we could, including hooking two cats to the machine with chains. But I could not drive both cats, so we had tension problems between the two chains, snapping first one, then another chain in the process. We couldn't reach the foreman by radio, he was too far away. It turns out, he heard me, but I couldn't hear his response, which had been just to leave it. We decided we had to leave it. I was worried about the machine sinking more overnight. So I hooked it with a chain to my cat and left it sit there like that. The next day, we hooked it to two cats again, and with two drivers who could coordinate with each other, we pulled it right out, just as nice as pie.
The name Marsh Goddess came from my boyfreind who had to listen constantly to my mossing adventures and how much I loved that job. He started calling me that right away. Not long after that, I told my foreman about it. There was a guy out there who's name was similar, well, not that similar, but with equipment running it was hard to discern who the foreman was calling on the radio. So the foreman after trying to raise me on the radio, to no avail, said "Marsh Goddess," which I heard clearly. The name stuck.
I left that job to pursue a full-time job that I really do like. But it's not nearly so adventurous or rewarding as mossing. But hey, NO deer flies!

Swamp Tales

I call this blog Swamp Tales because while I worked out in the marshes, everyone always asked me, "How are things in the swamp?" I kept telling everyone, it's not really a swamp. A swamp is a wetland dominated by trees. Trees do grow in the marshes, but usually on ground above the water table. The ones that grow on the marsh are mostly stunted.
We worked in the Central Wisconsin marshlands. As the glaciers receded, meltwater was left to form Glacial Lake Wisconsin. Over time, the low-lying areas became marshes. The marshes look more like a grassy plain. The predominant plant is sphagnum moss, also known as peat moss. Decomposition is slow in the acidic environment. The moss forms a mat on the water, growing on the backs of previous generations of the plants. The thickness of that mat varies a great deal.
Sphagnum moss, because it can hold up to 20 times its weight in water, is used as a soil amendment. People who grow orchids particularly like it.
Many plants grow in the marshes as well. Pitcher plant, sundew, various beautiful orchids, marsh mallows, St. Johnswort, really too many to list. Tamarak and spruce seem to be the predominant trees.
Working and driving equipment on a mat of plant material over a mostly unknown depth of water, was also dangerous. We always had to be concious of that.
I could have called this blog marsh tales, but I chose swamp tales because everyone always asked me, "How are things in the swamp?"
I think of a swamp as a murky, sometimes dirty, messy place that is also magical and beautiful and filled with wonder. And that pretty much sums up my entire life.

Porcupine chasing

Once there was a particulary bothersome porcupine. This particular porkie liked to chew on the hoses of the cats. It would also chew on the seats. Our gloves. Anything. After the second time the guys had to replace the hoses on one of the cats, they started plotting the death of the critter. (In the old days, mossers and loggers used to kill porcupines for such behavior. I said, oh please don't kill it. They told me they wouldn't, but I saw the look they exchanged. The look that said, when I wasn't there, they would. I knew his days were numbered. I dedicated myself to finding a porcupine deterrent. I tried several things, including pepper. Nothing worked. There was still critter sign around the cats and tractors.
One day, I and Randolph got to the marsh first. I saw the big porcupine get off the track of one of the cats and lumber towards the woods. I went running down the incline towards the marsh where the cats were parked. The porkie was moving faster now and I realized I wasn't going to get close. Hollering, I reached down to grab a stick to throw at it, got ahold of one of those bent over but not broken ones and as I picked it up full of fury, I smacked myself right square in the forehead. I then reached down and grabbed a chunk of root that wasn't attached to anything and threw it towards the porcupine. I walked back up the hill with a red welt on my forehead to Randolph, who hadn't seen the porcupine and had no idea why I thundered down the hill hollering, to smack myself in the face with a stick.
We had no further incidents with that porcupine.

Hazards

There were many dangers working out on the marsh. When you work outside, things can happen fast.

We had a guy that was allergic to bees. We got stung when we'd we would accidently pull hives up from under the moss. Ground bees apparantly love building nests in the drier marshes. He had to be rushed to the hospital twice. After that, he moved on to another job. We had another guy who got swarmed by ants when the mossing machine pulled up a colony and dropped in right into his arms. He also had to be rushed to the hospital.

A big solid tree tipped over once and smashed onto a truck where three men had just been loading the moss. One was still up there and heard the crack. He'd cut trees all his life and knew what was coming and jumped clear. That big solid tree was hollow on the inside almost a third of the way up. Crazy. We'd used its shade many times during our lunch breaks, never suspecting the danger.

We were always aware that we were standing on a mass of decomposing plants, suspended over an unknown amount of water. In some areas, the water was only a few inches deep. In others, it was many feet deep.
One time I was standing out there, handpulling with my trusty mossing hook, when my left leg dropped through to just below the thigh. It happened extremely fast. My co-worker gave me support while I wiggled out. My other footing was still solid, but it was a trick getting out. I couldn't touch bottom with the one that fell through. We stopped pulling in that spot and moved over aways.
On that same marsh, several days and at least a half-mile away, a 17-year-old co-worker stepped off the boat and dissappeared up to his neck. By the time I thought, "What the.." he had grabbed the edge of the boat and sprung up out of the water, back onto the boat, saying, he couldn't touch bottom. I was so very glad that it had been him. He was fast, with awesome reflexes. I had just been on the boat not long before that. I expect I would have dropped like a rock. There would have been none of that leaping outta the water like Flipper.
We immediately stopped mossing there. We couldn't see the hole he'd stepped into because the top of the marsh was covered in about 6 inches of water. We also marked the spot with a big stake and a red warning bandana. I pointed it out to the county forester when he came, so he could make note of the location.

Working ontop of water like that, we watched for lightning like mice watch for hawks. As soon as we saw lightning, we'd head for shore. One of our guys had been struck before, twice, though not at that job. He could tell a storm was coming before the clouds even told so.
I and another guy were standing in the small trees next to shore during a thunderstorm. usually, there would be vehicles to sit in. But this day, everyone was gone with the trucks trying to get a big truck unstuck from the forest road (that happened a lot too). We were standing there, wearing rain coats, getting soaked anyway, when lightning struck a small tree right next to us. We both went running up the hill and just then one of the guys with a truck and topper came rolling in. We hopped right into the back of his truck without a hello, how are you? at all.

I was cruising along once thinking what a cool job it was when, over the sound of the cat, I heard a big SLURP, WHOOSH sound. Having already been smacked in the head by something coming up off my track, more than once, I threw my clutch in, while I leaned just a little to the right. A tree trunk, about two and a half inches in diameter, about four feet long attached to a huge root system and hundreds of pounds of mud, moss and debris plopped onto my left track. If I had not thrown that clutch it at precisely that moment, the clump would have swatted me right off that cat and down into my track on the opposite side.
I shut my cat off and thanked the Powers That Are. I spent the next 20 minutes trying to get the trunk pried out from between the cleats on my track. I tried to push the mound off. It was so heavy I couldn't lift it. I kicked and kicked at the trunk and it wouldn't budge.
I had a radio most of the time I worked out there. But this was in the early days before I had the radio. I was right next to shore, but it would have been a very long walk back to the landing we were working out of. I knew they would be looking for me before I could walk back. I had already tried driving a little forward and a little back, then trying to push it off, to no avail.
I finally figured out to take the chain I used for pulling stuck cats out, and wrapped it to the trunk, walked over to a sturdy tree and chained it tight. Then I started my cat and backed up about two inches, ever so slowly. It pulled it right off! I was really happy. But I never forgot my near miss.

My buddy G was standing beside me on the ground once, when I was loading a cat onto a trailer. I had done this many times before. It was November and we were packing it up for the year. The trailer was wet from the cat I had just loaded before. I didn't notice, but a thin sheet of ice had formed. About half-way up the ramp, the cat slid sideways. It stopped, but was cocked at a funny angle. I had to go back down and start over. Pretty heart-thumping while I got my composure. One of the guys said he would load it for me. (My leg was jumping like a rabbit. Shaking uncontrollably. I could not make it stop. It was pretty emabarrassing.) I said no, I could handle it. I was afraid that if I didn't load it myself that I would be afraid to load. I was so proud that I had learned to do it, I didn't want to give it up. So I waited a few minutes and then just as nice as pie, rolled it down and went right back up, no problem.

G got bucked right out of his seat on a cat once. He was hauling boats in and decided to cut through some brush, hit a stump and was thrown forward onto his gas tank. He just missed going down into his track. His arm had caught on the brake and that flopped him onto the gas tank.
That was as bad as the time his cat went sideways on a trailer. It was before my time. He had been driving up the trailer forwards when it went sideways.He was already up on the bed of the trailer. It slid off the edge and one of his coworkers, thinking and acting fast, got onto his track, balancing the pivot point and prevented it from going over the edge and potentially crushing him. G later taught me to load by backing up the ramp, the cats are more stable that way, he said.

I got hurt once. I was standing on my cat track up on the landing. I had just put gas in and I was handing the empty can to somebody on the ground, when a wooden cleat broke out from under me. One leg went through the track, which scraped a little, but the one I injured was straight out when I went down landing across the track and making a terrible crack. I had bent my knee two far the wrong way. It really hurt bad. I immediately cried, which I hated to do in front of the crew. I could barely walk. I had the weekend to heal up. For three weeks I limped around on that leg. I'd been to the doctor twice. Using a cat analogy, it felt like my knee was slightly off the track.
The third week into the pain and suffering, working the whole time, I was walking down a trail when Mother Nature fixed my leg.
When you drive the cats through the woods, brush gets run over. Many times the brush is laying down but still attached by the roots. I was walking along alone on my way up to the vehicles when I tripped over one of those laid down bushes. I flew through the air towards the ground. When I got to the full extent of my trajectory, all that connected me to the ground was the toe of my mossing boot. My leg snapped again. I came down hard on my shoulder. Even as I hit the ground with a big thud, I knew my knee was fixed! I was battered and bruised but very, very grateful. It didn't even hurt after that.