Wagon wrecks

“We had a little wagon wreck,” my friend Ron Lowery wrote.
Seems he and Julie were rolling the wagon through the yard by hand to wash the mud off. I guess the septic tank cover was just worn out, because the wagon fell in…
“Julie was pretty unhappy when she got splashed. We had to pull it out with the truck.”
After 40 years of working wagons, we have some pretty good wreck stories.
Mom has never held a line in her life, but she’s ridden a million miles in the wagon. And she’ll stay hooked.
In fact she was in a pretty exciting wagon incident when she was still just a babe in arms.
Grandad farmed with a team and granny often went to the fields with him. Once she was on the springseat beside grandad with mom in her arms and the team ran off. A line broke, so grandad was trying to circle them with the other one. Frances (the wife of grandad’s cousin) was on the ground and when the wagon came flying by, granny pitched the baby, my mother, out to her. So I guess mom was exposed to wagon wrecks early.
When I was a teenager and we got wagon I fever, daddy was always trying to break something to work.
His friend Doug Holt had a bay mare that matched a bay horse he had and at the time of this story they were just breaking them to work together. Those two made a good team and we even used them to race at Clinton, but on this day they were still green.
Keith and I were horseback. Daddy and Doug were in the wagon.
After a pretty good preliminary work, daddy hollered mom out of the house to take a ride and see how good the horses were doing.
A paved state highway runs in front of my patents’ home. The plan was to take it a short way to the neighbors’ driveway, which served as a shortcut to the dirt road heading to my grandparents’ house.
The drive had a big tin horn with a pretty deep hole on each end.
Horses learning to work don’t always respond immediately, and somehow they missed the drive a little and the wagon wheel went off in the hole at one end of the tin horn. It turned over.
It seems every wagon endeavor involed beer…a lot of beer, so the wagon box was full of beer cans now rolling all over highway 206. I grew up in a dry baptist county and in those days, getting caught on the highway with beer would have been a worse offense that getting caught with a bomb – not that anyone could have recognized a bomb back then.
Daddy yelled for Keith and me to gather up the beer cans. Meanwhile, Doug and daddy were trying to straighten out the team. They hadn’t come unhooked, so a number of things were in a bind, not the least of which was a set of green horses.
While I am frantically picking up beer cans I hear “I’m under here.”
It wasn’t urgent or loud, no panic. It was just a matter-of-fact statement.
I guess we’d all forgotten about mom, but then again, we know she can take care of herself.
“Keith and I can’t pick this wagon up, mom.”
“I’m OK, I can wait.”
It took a little while for daddy and Doug to get the team loose, straighten everything out and access the damage.
Once that was accomplished, Keith said “Dad, we need to get mom out from under that wagon.”
By now it had probably been 20 minutes, but daddy went to hopping around like he was on hot coals. Which made me laugh out loud cause it was the first he’d thought about her.
it ended up taking the horses to set the wagon back on its wheels. Mom was no worse for the wear.
“You want to go back to the house?” Daddy asks.
“Nope,” mom said. “I started with you and I’ll finish with you.”
She’s like that.