Tractors, Bees and Hindsight

 

 I did some lawn maintenance work as a young lad. I also had a terrible allergy to bees and wasps. One afternoon we were mowing this large field out in front of a chemical plant up in Axis, Alabama. I was driving this really big Gravely brand mower. It had five blades on it and a large, powered vacuum bagger on the back. OK kids. Do not do as I do, do as I say. It was a three wheeled rig with a single wheel in the back. It gave zero turn a whole new name and if that single wheel in the back hit a hole it would bounce you pretty hard. It also had a kill switch in the seat so if you bounced just right it would just shut down. That being a real pain I decided to disable the kill switch so that wouldn’t happen. 

Introduce a few thousand yellow jackets. While riding along I disturbed a hole in the ground and out poured hundreds if not thousands of yellow jackets. Two or three nailed me right away and as I waved and flapped at them a few more got me, so I leapt from the tractor and took off running. Did I mention that I disabled the kill switch? You guessed it. After running about a 50-yard dash flapping my arms like a fool I realized the tractor was heading out toward highway 43. By the time I ran it down it was nearly to the highway. 

I mentioned allergies right. By that time, I was in a real-world emergency with my allergy to stings. I had been hit on the arms, legs and face. All in all, about ten stings and I was on course to full anaphylaxis. I had an EpiPen or two in my truck, but it was a half mile away. I popped a half dozen Benadryl and made it to the truck with not much time to spare. First pen done, then the second. Have you ever taken adrenaline? Amazing stuff. Needless to say, I survived. Once I could breathe again, I drank a bunch of water, paced around and bit and then I decided on revenge. I drove back to the scene of the crime, and I could see a couple of those little bastards flying around near that hole in the ground. You could have dropped a softball in that whole and never saw it again. I engaged the blades and parked the tractor right over the hole and I ran. I ran like a little bitch and kept running. I sat under a tree for about ten minutes while that Gravely made mincemeat out of a few thousand yellow jackets. It was very satisfying.  

After finishing up the job I literally had to scrape yellow jacket goo from the blade box with a putty knife. That was kinda satisfying too. The moral of the story is lawn tractors are better than bug spray, EpiPens are awesome, I hate yellow jacket and last but not least. Do not disable the kill switch on the tractor seat.