Journey to the Center of the Earth

Back when the Hopper boys, David, Glenn, and me, were growing up, daddy got us two burros.  They were wild and hard to catch and even more difficult to ride.  On one particular day my baby brother Glenn decided to take the family John Deere 1020 tractor and chase the burros.  He chased them with a disc hitched to the tractor.  He was having fun using the John Deere as a horse.  We were creative e and named the John Deere, John

There was a place in the pasture where water from the highway and hillside drained.  It was damp, not muddy until brother ran across it several times in pursuit of the uncontrollable and untamed burros.  John went down in a soft spot.  My brother was stuck.  Daddy, David, and I went down to help.  The first thing we did was unhitch the disc.  Our utility vehicle was a 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe.  We used the Plymouth to haul firewood, pull the John, and all the other things people would use on a farm to pull the disc away from the tractor.  Then we used the Plymouth to try to unstick the tractor.  All we tried was vain attempts of futility.

The more we tried to free the tractor, the dipper it got.  Daddy decided to use a power pole to free John.  We slide the pole under the front of the rear tires and chained the pole to them.  Daddy assured us that when we moved John forward that the pole would raise John up and out to firmer ground.  It seemed like a very intellect solution to a dumb attempt to corral wild burros with a tractor.

Being the oldest and more experienced at helping daddy in easier said than done situations, daddy gave specific instruction for freeing John.  “Get on John and put it low gear.  Idle John down and slowly ease off the cutch.  Be careful and stop John when it picks you up and out.”

Sounded like a plan to me.  Something happened that would be the start of a long and challenging attempt to lift up John.  I did exactly as instructed.  When the rear tired started to rotate the pole, it became a giant twelve feet scoop and John was sinking deeper.  When we finally surrendered to the gravitation pull of the earth, John was so deep that the seat was below ground level, and I had step up to the surface.  The whole episode looked as a giant ice cream scoop in a giant bucket of chocolate ice cream.

For days neighbors would offer to help free sinking John.  Neighbors used tractors, log trucks, chains, cables, and the like but John was on a journey to the center of the earth.  More rains came and John was an attraction site for everyone traveling County Road 50.  People laughed, joked, and made fun of the Hopper Folly.  Garden time was coming, and John’s rear went lower, and the front went higher.

Finally, one of our neighbors owned a landscaping business.  He said, “When we get some day days, I will help ya’ll get that tractor unstuck.”  That day finally arrived and Larry, our neighbor appeared on the crime scene with a large Massey Ferguson tractor.  It had a large bucket on the front.  Larry had us put a large log chain around John toward the rear.  I dug around in the mud to put the chain around John.

Larry put that big Massey Ferguson bucket direct over John and lifted the bucket.   His tractor strained, shacked, and finally up came John.  I will never forget the sound freeing John.  It was a sucking sound similar to the sound a commode makes when flushing.  Larry put John on dry ground.  Larry said, “You would never get that tractor out by pulling.  The earth had suction on it.  Pulling it straight breaks the suction.”

Daddy got rid the burros.  We never did ride them, but the Hopper boys became very good defensive football players that honed their tackling skills on wild burros, Welch ponies, and later on loose hogs.  We never used John to chase livestock after the sinking fiasco.

I have shared this story many times in sermons.  When I studied Greek, I learned that Peter walked on the water when Jesus bid him to come.  He did the impossible until he lost focus on Jesus and he began to sink.  Sink in the Greek, katapontizo means to drown.  The less Peter focused on Jesus the more the earth overwhelmed and sucked him down.  An experienced fisherman and swimmer was drowning.  When Peter called on Jesus, Jesus lifted him having power over the gravitational pull.

My Greek professor explained that katapontizo was the concept of the pulling down which reminded of the Hopper boys and John.  The professor reminded the class that we do not sink in sin, sin draws us especially when we take our eyes off Jesus and focus on circumstances

 “But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.”  Matthew 14:30 KJV

At a Sunday dinner after sharing the John Deere illustration, a man approached me and told a related story.  He said that from the Tuscaloosa Waffle House he witnessed a dozier preparing the ground for a Shrimp Basket Restaurant.  It started rain and the construction company left the dozier on site.  It rained for several days and when they tried to retrieve the dozier it was stuck. 

 

As he had breakfast each morning he said that he watched the dozier slowly sink.  He said that the last thing he saw was the exhaust pipe sticking up as the dozier journeyed to the center of the earth as I had referred in the sermon.  He laughed and said just remember when you eat at the Shrimp Basket there is a large dozier underneath.

WINTER STORM WARNING

The National Weather forecast for the American Southeast for January 10, 2025, predicts a winter storm.  There is not anything more devastating and initiating panic for people in Alabama to hear than WINTER STORM WARNING.  Alabamians just do stupid stuff and create shortages, chaos, and waste.

 

Having lived in Illinois on the Wisconsin state line, I experienced snow, lots of it.  When I started kindergarten in 1958, I experienced a snowstorm for the first time.  I opened the car door to have violent winds blowing snow.  Daddy had gotten me a bag of cheese curls for a snack and the wind ripped the bag from my hands and scattered those delicious cheese curls in the snow.  The yellow against the white was etched in my mind.  It was beautiful and overwhelming at the same time.  My bag was gone with the north wind and my little heart broken.  I started to cry.  Daddy said it would be okay and handed me another bag that he had bought for him.  I figured that the Abdominal Snowman had a yellow treats in the snow that was very deep for a small boy.

 

When I started the first grade, momma received a list of things that were required for men to attend South Beloit Elementary.  Momma had never been out of Alabama.  The list was foreign to her.  I had to have a snowsuit and snow galoshes.  Believe it or not I walked to school in the snow.  First time I wore my new galoshes someone stole them and replaced mine with an old worn pair.  Momma was not happy with those Yankees.  Snow was part of living up North.

 

Back in Alabama, snow, which is more ice than flakes paralyze.  Stores run out of milk, bread, and cold cuts.  It was 1985 when a winter storm paralyzed central Alabama.  It was a Wednesday night, and I was returning home from conducting a Prayer Meeting for a pastor friend who was out of town.  The rain fell and temperature dropped as rain turned to sleet and ice.  I can close my eyes and visualize the windshield wipers as they moved pushing the frozen Slushy.

 

Nothing really accumulated and we went to bed.  Around three in the morning there was an eerie silence.  The electricity was off.  I heard from time sounds as a shotgun shooting in the woods.  I looked out the bedroom window and it bright white.  Going to the back deck of the house I stepped into snow, about a foot deep.  The sound was limbs from a pine ticket breaking under the weight of the snow.  As daylight came, my neighbors and I discovered that electric power lines were down everywhere.  It was not good for all of us with total electric homes, but I did have and use a fireplace to help heat the house.

 

From Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon, we had no power.  We mattresses and cover to the great room where the fireplace was.  I used it to cook meals.  My son Andy and daughter Angel loved it.  They said it was like camping.  I moved all the refrigerated food to the snowbank on the back deck.  County water continued and I heated water in five-gallon buckets by the fireplace.  By Sunday power was back.

 

That Friday night I decide I would take a bath.  My wife asked how I would do that.  I told her like I had for most of my life.  We did not have and inside bathroom until the spring of my senior year of high school.  My family washed in a foot tube with water heated by the potbellied stove.  She laughed until I appeared clean, shaved, and hair washed.  Saturday night she asked if I could heat her some water.

 

The next year, 1986, we had another winter storm.  It was almost the same scenario but worse.  Fearing another winter storm people went crazy.  We had an extra frig in the basement.  Living in the country you buy enough food stuff to last a week or longer.  I asked if we needed anything, and my wife said a gallon of milk.

 

One again it was a Wednesday night, and I went to the local Wally World (Wal-Mart) to buy a gallon of milk.  I went the store, and I encounter pandemonium.  People panicked. There were people pushing a buggy of milk and pulling another full of break.  I stopped amazed and puzzled.  The store was out of milk.  Pushing and shoving everywhere.  Frighten people ran and screamed.  I thought just what it will look like if the world was ending.

 

Suddenly a man yelled, “Winn-Dixie has a truck load of milk!”  I imagined it looked as did the Hebrews when they left Egypt.  I went to the car and drove to Winn-Dixie where a tractor-trailer loaded with milk was unloading.  It was the same as Wal-Mart.  I got a gallon of milk, out my index finger in the handle, threw it across my shoulder, and proceeded to the checkout line.

 

I man pushing a full buggy of milk and pulling a buggy of bread stopped me and asked, “That all the milk you gonna get?”

 

I replied, “Yep, all I need.”

 

He reminded that there was a winter storm coming.  I told him that this is Alabama and how long does snow stay on the ground especially since the ground is not frozen, three maybe four days.

 

It did last for four days.  A neighbor went to check on folks in our country community.  He found a family that had made fun of our country/backward way of life.  The Birmingham transplants did not have any electricity due to down lines, no water because the pumping stations had no power, and no heat trying to burn green logs in a fireplace.

 

My neighbor invited the family to his house where his wife had a hot breakfast with biscuits, hot coffee, and a warm house.  After thawing out and returning home, my neighbor gave them some dry wood, showed them how to start a fire with kindling.  From then on the Birmingham transplants had a different attitude toward county folks.

 

Nowadays I question what has happened to common sense?   I like what a fellow Alabamian said, “A country boy can survive.”

 

 "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."  Matthew 24:22