Today I received the following e mail from our friend from the north, Stephanie St. Germaine and with these days of rising fuel and food costs and and corruption in government both local and federal, we could all use a laugh:
Survivor -- Wisconsin Style:
Due to the popularity of the Survivor shows, Wisconsin is planning to do its own, entitled 'Survivor - Wisconsin Style'.
The contestants will start in Milwaukee , travel up to Sheboygan and on to Manitowoc and Green Bay . Then they will head over to Wausau and up to Rhinelander and Minocqua. From there they will proceed up to Ashland , Washburn, Bayfield and Superior .
Then back down through Hayward , Shell Lake , Rice Lake , Amery, Hudson , back over to Bloomer, down to Eau Claire and all the way down to Madison and back over to Milwaukee .
Each contestant will be driving a pink Volvo with Minnesota license plates and large bumper stickers that read:
Bret Favre is gay. Hillary in 2008. Deer hunting is murder. Go Vikings.
The first one who makes it back to Milwaukee alive wins.
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The other day, in order to avoid all the construction currently being done on Interstate Highway 94, I exited at Baldwin and drove Highway 12 East.
Suddenly I was passing a farmstead that looked vaguely famiiar -- and the more I stared at the out buildings as I went by, the sharper into focus came the memories.
It was the barn that I had helped one Mr. Paul Smith re-roof as part of my summer job before starting my sophomore year of college at Eau Claire State.
Here's how it worked: He put up four ladders, two conjoined and then extended to their fullest length, About four rungs down, he strapped an angle iron. Running the length of the two angle irons was a two by twelve foot plank.
The first day was spent ripping old rotting shingles off the roof. They dropped to the ground and many landed in an indentation directly below the two ladders.
The next day, Mr. Smith began replacing the old shingles with bundles of new shingles. That was my job --- to throw a bundle of new shingles over one shoulder and slowly climb one of the ladders and deposit the bundle at his feet on the two by twelve, then climb back down, retrieve yet another bundle and begin the ascent again.
With the ladders at their fullest extension, there was quite a bit of "give" and "bounce" as I climbed upward. I couldn't help but notice that he had the ends of the two by twelve dangerously close to the edge/ends as they crossed the angle irons.
At one point I believe I even pointed this out to my "boss" -- something he readily dismissed as coming from a kid who didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Just keep the singles coming I was told.
About the third trip, I had just deposited the load of shingles, and started my descent down the ladder when I heard the sickening sound of metal letting loose -- and the next thing I knew, the two by twelve went hurtling past me, followed by my boss, who was falling head and right shoulder first -- a drop of about 15 feet.
And that is how he landed head and shoulder first, right into that indentation in the ground which was full of rotten, wet shingles.
When I reached him, he had been knocked unconscious. The first thing I noticed was the fact that there was blood running out of his ear. Not a good sign! I ran towards the house and yelled to the wife of the farmer to please call an ambulance as my boss had just fallen from the roof and I feared that his neck was broken.
I returned to the fallen. He still was unconscious and blood still was trickling from his ear.
Finally he began to stir.
Leaning down very close to his bloody ear, I said: "Don't move! Your neck may be broken." Turns out that was not the best thing to say to a man who is just regaining consciousness. It only served to startle him. He sat up very quickly and said "WHAT????"
Obviously I am no doctor. I had misdiagnosed. When he sat up, I could see that the reason his ear was bleeding was due to the fact that the little knobby part directly above the ear lobe had been partially torn by a nail in his fall -- hence the blood.
Still I told him to please lay very still until we could determine exactly how badly hurt he really was. So he did lay back in the rotten shingles until I spoke the absolutely wrong word -- "ambulance" -- where upon he actually leapt to his feet and cursed me loudly.
And it was about then that the ambulance came down the drive way.
The next morning, bright and early, his car pulled in our yard to pick me up to go back to work on the shingling.
I have never seen a man with that severely sprained of a neck. He drove with his head at a cock-eyed angle an did a lot of wincing with pain at intersections.
On the job site, whenever he needed to get a look at the roof, he would have to walk about 40 paces out from the barn, and then turn his body just so to get a look at what he wanted to see.
The ladders, however, were spaced much closer than they previously!
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