My little sister, Anna and I grew up on my great-grandfather’s farmstead, which meant that, until I was a teenager, we had various rotting outbuildings dotting our property, and to this very day a cavalcade of old farm implements parked here and there. In the woods behind our house, there was an old John Deere tractor, a couple of cultivators, and a old pull-behind wheat thresher. In it’s heyday, the thresher probably looked something like this:

It’s the one on the left.

Being kids, we would play on it, jump off of it and make up elaborate games revolving around it in a carefree childhood excuse to spend hours of our time playing on this wonderful conglomeration of rusted metal and razor-sharp pressed tin. Good old American fun.

Unlike the example above, our thresher had an exposed hopper on top, basically a big funnel bin that held the grain before it was dumped into an awaiting truck bed. It was made, like most of the rest of the machine, out of pressed tin and was like a slide if you sat down in it.

One day, while playing on the thresher with Anna, I slipped and slid down the hopper on my stomach, right into the auger mouth at the bottom, stopping only when my chubby little ass wouldn’t fit through. At first, we laughed about it, but when I tried to get a hold on something to pull myself out, I realized that there wasn’t anything within arm’s reach. I couldn’t get any purchase on the slick tin, and my butt was wedged tightly in the opening. Anna tried pulling me out, but, being only three or four years old, she wasn’t much help.

After a little panicked contemplation, I told her to go get our mom, who was out in the garden, all the way across our property from the thresher. We grew up on a five acre chunk of land, so this was quite a ways away. So, she took off, leaving me alone, my big butt wedged in the bottom of a hopper.

Minutes passed…

And passed…

It was a windy day, I was in the middle of a cove of trees, downwind from my mother in the garden. Nevertheless, I started screaming for help. This must have gone on for tens of minutes, but it felt like hours. I even took the time to pull out my pocket knife and start etching my last will and testament into the bed of the hopper. I was a melodramatic little shit.

The “R.I.P.” is still evident there, today.

Eventually, my mother wandered back to the combine after seeing my little legs kicking uselessly out of the bottom of the hopper. Anna had never actually told my mom about my plight. She got halfway to the garden, decided that she wanted a cookie and some milk, instead, and wandered into the house. She was three, so you can’t really blame her. But I did, and still do. Not that I hold a grudge or anything…

The kicker of the whole incident, aside from my unintentional Winnie the Pooh impersonation, was that all I would have had to do to get free was take the G.I. Joe toy out of my back pocket. It was pressed against the top of the opening, and simply taking it out would have shot me out the other end, out onto the forest floor. But no, instead I wound up dribbling snot and tears down my face, carving my tombstone on my great-grandfather’s wheat thresher.

Next Week: Nate tries to bungee jump off his garage…