On the road

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Yepper, there were a lot of 10 to 15 year olds in up[state N.Y. in the 1970's checking their muskrat traps every morning before school bragging how many they caught. My Dad was an engineer...wished he'd been a trapper and showed us how to make money. Anyway, got a lot of good trout fishing in...rock-bed streams.... cold streams off winter flows. I miss those streams, miss the rocks...Texas, where i am, is one big silt bed...not a rock larger than your fingernail to be found. Augering is easy here.
 
I dont care if your going 2 mph if a front tire falls in a hole or hits a rock and turns sharp you can flip over. Wheels jerk sharp one direction you slide forward, thumb pins throttle, over you go. Head meets a rock, log, hard dirt, etc just right and you can be a goner. Head injuries are no joke.

Dave your going to say "500 of my neighbors move cows and nobody has every flipped and died". And while that maybe true for you, ask my ER nurse wife about telling a parent their child is dead after a traumatic brain injury from a atv/snowmobile accident.
 
I dont care if your going 2 mph if a front tire falls in a hole or hits a rock and turns sharp you can flip over. Wheels jerk sharp one direction you slide forward, thumb pins throttle, over you go. Head meets a rock, log, hard dirt, etc just right and you can be a goner. Head injuries are no joke.

Dave your going to say "500 of my neighbors move cows and nobody has every flipped and died". And while that maybe true for you, ask my ER nurse wife about telling a parent their child is dead after a traumatic brain injury from a atv/snowmobile accident.
Thanks chevy, I just went and ordered myself a helmet for my bike. Even the gateways are a hazard at the moment and a challenge to get through due to the wet boggy conditions and because I have to hit them at a bit of speed I get thrown around a bit. I ride through my scrub block a lot and on windy days branches are a hazard falling from trees. So a helmet is a bit overdue.

Ken
 
I dont care if your going 2 mph if a front tire falls in a hole or hits a rock and turns sharp you can flip over. Wheels jerk sharp one direction you slide forward, thumb pins throttle, over you go. Head meets a rock, log, hard dirt, etc just right and you can be a goner. Head injuries are no joke.

Dave your going to say "500 of my neighbors move cows and nobody has every flipped and died". And while that maybe true for you, ask my ER nurse wife about telling a parent their child is dead after a traumatic brain injury from a atv/snowmobile accident.
I have been thrown by a lot more horses than atvs.
 
To each their own. Take what risks you deem acceptable. Plenty of people ride motorcycles at 70mph without helmets, plenty of them get shoveled off the road into a 5gal bucket after hitting anything larger than a squirrel as well. Take whatever risks you feel as acceptable.

Letting my kids ride an ATV without a helmet isn't one of them. I have no desire to bury my child or feed them thru a straw for the rest of my days.
 
To each their own. Take what risks you deem acceptable. Plenty of people ride motorcycles at 70mph without helmets, plenty of them get shoveled off the road into a 5gal bucket after hitting anything larger than a squirrel as well. Take whatever risks you feel as acceptable.

Letting my kids ride an ATV without a helmet isn't one of them. I have no desire to bury my child or feed them thru a straw for the rest of my days.
You can't protect them from everything. Cell phone and a steering wheel are just as dangerous if not more so .
Just lost two senior girls here cousins going to a ball game, pulled out in front of a log truck. Took one a little over a week to die.
No one will ever know why.
 
I remember Mark Darveaux. He was one of the popular kids without even trying. He asked to borrow some change so he could buy something from the machines in the lunchroom. I told him I didn't have any money. He knew I was lying, and I knew he knew. The next day he was dead. He was walking down a road late at night and a lady hit him. I heard he ended up in the wheelwell between the tire and the fender. I don't know if that was true.
Regret is a funny thing. I've always wondered if that kid would be alive if I'd given him my pocket change.
I insist that people buckle up in my car/truck because I've had two friends die being thrown from cars. I choose not use helmets, but I wish my kid did. Not much you can do...
 
Just read an oSo yesterday I was on highway 30 headed to the post office. I met a young rancher headed the other direction on a quad. He had his #2 daughter (about 5) sitting in front of him. Pretty quick I saw another quad pull on to the road following him. I thought here comes his wife. I was wrong. It was his oldest daughter (7 or 8). On a full size quad. Wearing a cowboy hat, pony tail flying in the wind. With 3 cow dogs riding on the back of the quad. You might live in ranch country if you see scenes like this with some regularity.

Just read an obituary for a 26 year old cowboy from Hopkins county Texas that was killed in an ATV accident.
 
Not many young people realize how valuable animal fur was back in the day. In the mid 70's as a 10 year old it was nothing for our group of 6 to skin a couple hundred rats a night. We got a quarter a piece, threw the carcasses in 55 gallon drums and I'll never forget the name of the truck that picked them up. Nice and large in all caps on the side of the truck "THE FAT PEOPLE". The first time I saw it I about peed myself. In fact those were the first black people I ever spoke with, just as an aside. All we had to do was skin them, the dad would skim the fat off and stretch them. I moved away before I got old enough to run my own trap line, $7 each was a lot of money if you knew what you were doing and could trap 30 or so in a day. It was damn cold on that marsh checking those trap, but as a kid it was all kinds of awesome.

We then moved about 10 miles away where we started a dairy farm, I then got to work every day for room and board. It's all good, builds character, but they did give me gas money so they could get that extra half hour of work out of me if I rode the school bus.

Yup. We don't have muskrats here, but we have plenty of coons. Good quality hides were bringing $20.00 or more back around 1980, and that was a lot of money back then. $26.00 was the most I ever got for one. I never had a trap line, but a buddy did, and I helped him run it a time or two.

I did participate in quite a bit of spotlighting for coons. There was also a market for coyote and possum hides (maybe others; but that's all I can remember). I'll never forget that they paid $4.00 for possum hides, or $2.00 for the whole possum. My buddy and I decided real quick that as bad as they smelled it wasn't worth $2.00 to skin a possum.
 

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