One time my wife and I were heading up to Lubbock (525 miles northeast of here) to see the farm show, and we got up north of Somerville and were cruising along, starting to get into the hill country up toward Gatesville... as we come around a bend, there's a little S-10 pickup sitting all screwed up on the paved shoulder, halfway out into our lane, with a small (about 10 foot) cattle trailer flipped on its side behind the little pickup... We stopped and flipped on our flashers, since we were one of the first ones there. Betty tended to the late-50's early 60's old chubby white guy, who looked about like he was fixing to have a heart attack. We were in a bad spot, having just crested a hill, so the wreck wasn't visible from the crest of the hill and the speed limit was like 65 or 70... Apparently, he'd been hauling a BIG old bull and cow-- the bull must've been close to 2000 lbs and cow was not much smaller... well, that's always a fun time-- cattle will move around and stomp and dance and push and shove each other, and even hauling calves, when you get a couple 450 pounders shove over from one side to the other, it can get a little squirrelly on you... you have to drive slower, and you have to be ready to make MINOR countersteering adjustments to keep going straight... make a big move, sling them ALL to the other side, and you're likely to go out of control or flip...
Well, with this little baby S-10 pickup and a decent size trailer, and two BIG bovines, when they moved, it threw him COMPLETELY out of control, and the trailer flipped... the cow and bull tumbled out of the trailer, jumped off, and ran into the backyard behind the house right in front of where he'd managed to skid to a stop... I felt like that the trailer sticking out in the traffic lane was creating a big risk of someone topping the hill and plowing into the thing, making a bad situation worse... SO, I sent one lady to back up her car closer to the top of the hill with her flashers on, and I pulled my pickup around to pull the trailer out of the way... needless to say, the tongue of the trailer and the bumper of his truck were both twisted around like a pretzel from flipping over... so I had to hammer the ball hitch apart, threw a chain onto the trailer axle, and drug it off to one side... unfortunately, it didn't really want to come out of the lane... so I drove my truck off into the ditch and finished pulling the trailer off the roadway... what I DIDN'T realize is that the ground was very soft from the recent rains they'd had up there, and when I backed up to let the slack into the chain to unhook, my truck promptly got stuck to the axle in the thick, red, greasy sandy clay soil... OOPS! So, there I sit...
By this time, a big ol' diesel dually with the 35 foot cattle gooseneck trailer is rolling by-- the local veterinarian... so he gets out to lend a hand... apparently he knows the old fellow, and offers to round up his frightened stock and take them back to the clinic, where he can pick them up later on... so he backs his rig onto a nearby country road across the highway nearby, and gets his horse out of the trailer, which is already saddled up. Within a couple minutes he had the bull and cow lassoed and in his trailer... he asks about my truck, and I told him I pulled the trailer off the road for him, but got stuck in the process... He unhooked his diesel dually from the gooseneck and pulled across to help pull me out...
Of course while he's doing that, the stupid DPS troopers arrive... I start explaining the wreck to them and they think somehow my truck is involved since it's stuck in the ditch... I explain three times I got stuck after I was pulling the trailer out of the road before another accident happened since it was on a blind hilltop curve and couldn't be seen by approaching traffic clearly, and they FINALLY get it through his head... I waded into the muck and hooked my chain on my truck, the dually pulled up in front of me on the edge of the road, I hooked up to his hitch ball, jumped in the truck, and got a tug out of the mud... The EMS arrived and the DPS were handling the scene and they were all looking after the old man, so we packed up and left...
When you're hauling cattle (or any livestock for that matter) it's more like driving a tanker truck... when that stuff gets to sloshing and moving around, you can flip REAL EASY if you don't know what you're doing!
Later! OL JR
