We set off after lunch to start retrieving the logs from the fallen poplar, which the tree surgeons removed from the neighbour's hedge and logged yesterday morning (when they must have been very early, since they rang me to ask if it was OK to do it that morning at quarter past seven, and by the time the Systems Administrator wandered up there at half past ten they'd finished and gone). With the rise in heating oil and electricity costs, the popularity of log burning stoves has soared, and the price of logs has rocketed. I was concerned that if we didn't retrieve it fairly quickly we'd find that someone else had got there first.
The piles of logs looked very big seen close up, much bigger than they'd seemed from my car as I drove home last night after the beekeepers' committee meeting. The land in the spinney drops gently away from the public road. The Systems Administrator reversed the truck on to the level patch of grass at the top of the slope, looked at how far we were going to have to carry the logs, and said we could get the truck closer than that.
You can guess what happened next. It got stuck. Flatbed Ford Transit on earth track after the amount of rain we've had. We tried putting small branches under the wheels, but the truck declined to even start climbing on to them, and just dug its back wheels in a little deeper. We walked home, collected some boards, drove back to the spinney with them, and tried to put them under the wheels, but the truck did not want to drive on to the boards any more than it had wanted to drive over the branches. The Systems Administrator hit the boards repeatedly with lengths of poplar branch to try and jamb them under the leading edges of the tyres, but the truck spat them out each time.
I said that our friend Roger had a winch on his Landrover, and why didn't we ask him for help. The SA would much rather have solved the problem unaided than bother anybody else, but I couldn't see how we were going to get the truck out without outside assistance. The SA suggested we could buy a winch. I said that there was nothing to attach the winch to, and the SA gestured at the electricity pole. It was a very large pole, but I said that I did not think you were supposed to use electricity poles as attachment points to winch trucks out of the mud. The SA said that if the truck were jacked up so that boards could be slid properly under the wheels it would get going. I said that I was mechanically useless and knew nothing of such things, but that I was sure Roger wouldn't mind helping out.
I asked Roger, grovelling terribly. He said that of course he would help, asked what sort of truck it was, and said he knew why it had got stuck. Actually, the SA had some theory about differentials but I personally blamed the mud, the slope, and the sliminess of a thick layer of poplar leaves. Roger is a good hearted man with a natural engineering bent, who really likes Landrovers, and seemed entirely happy to do a good deed helping out the escaped townies who had got themselves into such a fix, and he agreed to come in the morning and rescue us, for which I offered some wood, a bottle of wine and my eternal thanks.
After I had arranged for us to be towed out the SA went back with the jack and some more boards, to try the plan of getting the truck properly on them, while I reverted to gardening, planting the tulips from their pots into the dahlia bed. After a while the SA returned saying that the truck was now on the boards but needed some gravel for added traction, and disappeared again with a bucket of grit. I continued to pull parsley out of the dahlia bed until the SA came back for the second time, saying that the truck had just spat the boards straight out behind it.
It is just as well that I know somebody who has a Landrover with a winch on it. Roger says the Landrover would be able to do the job without the SA even releasing the truck's handbrake. I think the moral of the story is, if you have an elderly flatbed Ford Transit, don't take it off road, even a little bit.
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