Bridging the gap, looking down the frame to the 1 acre pasture on the north edge of the ranch.
A year ago last April, I looked at a washed out gap along the east edge of the farm yard with a few of my local buddies from Saturday morning coffee and I uttered a few words…. seemingly harmless at the time, but began a project that almost became a legacy.
“Do you think we could push some dirt in there to get across to the other side?”
Well, the talk turned to culverts, wash outs, bulldozers and ….. bridges.
Plans, grew, testosterone flew, and men had visions of power equipment. Big power equipment. This kind that uses tracks to move, not just tires.
“You could take the wheels off a flat bed trailer and slide it across and have a bridge….” and then, just like a star of a television drama right before the commercial break, Bob says,” and I think I know a guy who has one.”
The “bridge” arrived a week or so later (wheels still intact) and it became a “one of these days” project. It sat on the north edge of the farm yard through most of May 2009.
And June.
And July.
And August. Well, in August, Bob did come by and flip it over and cut oft the wheels because the seller of the bridge “has to have these wheels this week”. And then, both the wheels and the trailer sat through August.
And September, by then, it was named “the bridge to nowhere” because it sat there, doing nothing and going no where.
And it sat through December’s ice storms, January’s winter thaw, February’s cold snap…..
It sat during a birthday, a new year’s eve and a another birthday.
Hidden through most of the summer by tall grass, the “bridge” sat in the middle of the new horse pasture. I had two offers to buy it, as-is, from my neighbor to the north and a passer by.
But as the fencing for the pasture went up — more on that in another post — Bob moved the trailer down to the gap and a few days later, popped it across the open space. October.
An angle grinder cuts through a rusted screw that once held a wood floor to the frame of the flat bed trailer
The wooden floor was rotted away and mostly missing. The strong screws were now rusted to the frame and there are three gaps for the flooring and about 6 remaining rusted screwed per support cross member. I cut out the screws with an angle grinder and will lay down a new wood floor and build a railing.
