Wisconsin in October Part I

After polishing off 8 or 9 cheap beers on Sunday afternoon in Jeff's garage on his semi rural property outside of West Bend, Jeff and I decided that it was time to start carving some pumpkins. He reached into a drawer in his workbench and pulled out the tool we would be using, a short barrel .38 Special. He went back in the house and came back with a box of hollow point bullets. This is widely considered to be the best ammunition for most pumpkin carving jobs. Sometimes a standard smaller caliber round is what you want if you are doing more detail work, but since I was a beginner at this I decided to stick with what we figured would get us the best results under the circumstances.

Jeff fired off the first set of rounds from a crouching position about 50 feet out from the gourd we were working on. He took careful aim, pulled the trigger taking out a large chunk right off the top. I took the gun and tried it from the same distance. Squeezing off the first round when firing a handgun is always a little bit of a shock. It's louder and there is more recoil than you'd ever think from watching people shoot on TV and in the movies. Nevertheless, I gave the effort great concentration and emptied all the chambers on the revolver, missing every time. I didn't even come close. That's another misconception from the movies I think is that it is easy to hit a target with a pistol. It is not. Not even after several beers which I was sure would have calmed my nerves and help to steady my hand thereby improving my aim.

I kept having to walk back into the garage to get more ammunition as I was getting frustrated by my lack of success. I considered putting a few slugs into the chicken coop or some other object that would have provided an easier target. After a while Jeff went to get a scuffed up old .25 cal. semiautomatic from Michelle's bedside table. Jeff and Michelle never bother to lock their doors, even if they are going to be out of town for a while, but ironically she likes to keep a semiautomatic within easy reach when she crawls in bed at night. Rather than point out the irony I instead hastily took the gun back outside with a pocket full of bullets and a fresh beer and got back to blasting.

After a while Jeff offered to take us for a walk down the road to visit his neighbor Gary the Farmer. Gary was a stereotype of the quintessential Wisconsin small farmer. He said he grew up about 11 miles down the road in Saukville and that out of all the kids in the family, he was the one who had moved farthest away from home. He had a weathered looking face that did not betray very much emotion. We watched him pull a hopper full of grain with his old 1950's tractor into the lower level of the old barn. The grain was unloaded onto a conveyer belt that carried it into a large trough which a group of a dozen or so black and white steers would come and eat from. I thought I liked the look of some of the cows as they gazed back at me with that gentle, curious cow look, and I asked Gary if it ever bothered him to take any of the cows to market. He looked back at me like it was a really stupid question and answered "Well.......I ain't had a complaint yet." Gary must have liked us ok because he came back over to Jeff's garage with us later for some beers. Jeff speculated that all the farmers like to come to his place for beers because their wives don't let them drink at home.

I liked Gary and actually came to respect him a great deal. He knows that there is no way he could make ends meet just by running the farm, even with the extra acreage he is leasing. So he works at a factory as a machinist putting in upwards of 40 hours per week before coming home every evening to do chores around the farm. He said that if he won the lottery that he would just buy as much land as he could possibly farm. That's all he really wants to do, aside from some hunting and plenty of beer drinking. He was a very honest sort of character and is an example of someone who is helping to preserve the old, honest lifestyle of the small family farmer. It's more of a labor of love for Gary, but without men like him, small farms would disappear.

By the time we got back to Jeff's, Jim had arrived and was sporting a bigger, shaggier beard than I had ever seen on him before. It was something that had clearly taken a lot of time to cultivate. We were glad Jim had made it out that afternoon, although by this time it was running late, I was getting pretty loaded, and my wife was starting to think about heading out. She had been there, not drinking, and for the most part watching Rachel all day and was starting to think that maybe this was too much of a good thing. All the cigarette smoke billowing about in the garage wasn't helping things either. Before we left, she asked me to change Rachel's big 'ol poopy diaper. Trying to be a good husband I readily agreed, and took her upstairs and laid her out on a blanket on the kitchen floor and went to work. I remember it being a terrific mess and feeling pretty miserable at the time as Rach cried and carried on while I struggled to get her cleaned up while doing my best not to get poo all over Jeff's kitchen floor, but we finally got it taken care of. After a long series of goodbyes, we set off on the lonely country highway heading back for my mom's house. I could tell Bree was a little miffed, but overall we had had a good time that day. It's always fun when to go out there for a visit and when we do we can always expect to get some new and entertaining stories told with humor and enthusiasm. Unfortunately we had not been there the next weekend when they were going to be throwing their big Halloween party when they would be serving an an entire pig that was to be roasted while stuffed with bratwurst and saurkraut (a Wisconsin favorite) and Jeff would giving hay rides around the property on a trailer he would be towing with his 1950 Ferguson tractor.