Another reminder to join the Mistake-makers’ club !
Thinking back of mishaps in my family, it strikes me that the most dangerous place for us has been the countryside, rather than around the home or on the highway. Example: Missouri has its share of venomous snakes: both my mom and dad were bitten by copperheads.
As a kid visiting my grandparents' farm I foolishly wanted to see what the blades of the PTO-driven sickle bar mower felt like, and that sent me to the doctor to put back part of my fingertip. Here's what a rear-mounted sickle bar looks like: wicked!
As a teenager, my middle brother was driving an old style nose-wheel tractor on our grandparents’ farm and ran over a hay bale with a rear wheel, which caused the tractor to tilt and balance on the front gear and one rear wheel for a heart-stopping moment. It landed upright and life went on. Here’s what that 1954 tractor looked like:
My most recent close call happened at my brothers’ farm. We had been piling up old logs and branches from the river for burning. The piles were about twelve feet high and sixty feet across. Starting the burn was no problem, with enough diesel fuel and a propane torch. Here's a brother at work.
I volunteered to tend the pile from upwind, using our Cat track-mounted skid steer. I should have used our backhoe. A backhoe is a good-sized machine, so that puts the front-mounted bucket a good ten feet from the operator’s seat.
A skid steer puts the operator much closer - these machines have a short wheelbase and a small bucket, so driving forward to shove unburned logs into the pile puts the operator face to face with the log heap. There’s no safety margin, given how close the bucket is to the operator. Here's the farm's second skid-steer to show its compact form factor. I'm balancing (not lifting) a glue-lam footbridge beam.
What almost happened that day is one more reason I'm not a believer in Murphy's Law. But I am a believer in learning from one's own mistakes.