Chapter 52: Rainy Days and Mondays

Morning broke.

Somewhere morning broke but it sure wasn’t here, it was dark, gloomy and still raining hard.

In keeping with 21^st Century mass media traditions I gave the storm a name, I called it “Tropical Storm Bitch”. Michelle was the only one who chuckled.

Thankfully the wind wasn’t a major problem and I could put the awning back up, the seven of us could survive in the camper and under the awning. I made the coffee on my wood stove in my tent. We shared my rain slicker as we rain between covered areas, it was raining that hard.

The livestock were miserable and I needed to come up with a quick plan for them, it appeared that one of my tarps was about to make the ultimate sacrifice. I gathered two of those stupid emergency rain poncho’s out of the truck for Amos and Holder to use. We fetched one of my two extra large tarps, hatchets, stakes and line from the storage room.

We huddled under the awning to make a plan; actually we drank coffee and tried to procrastinate but we got busted by Michelle. The first step was a run to the sapling pile, we chose eight about twelve feet long and we them back to the awning. We sharpened both ends of five of them, one end to help it anchor in the ground and the other to hopefully fit the eyelet on the tarp. The other three we tied together at the center so we could twist them out to provide a center support.

The plan was to use the heavy corral fencing to hold down one end of the tarp and use the poles with guy lines to keep the other end and sides upright. It should work, for a while anyway.

We unfolded the tarp and rolled it into a giant cigar, the tarp was 50’x50’ so it was quite a large cigar. We ran that cigar out to the southeast corner of the corral, unrolled it partially and while Holder and I worked on our eventual hernias lifting the corral sections Amos stuffed and spread the edges of the tarp underneath.

We then raced back to the awning and complained loudly; the joys of bonding as men. There was fresh coffee in our cups which was appreciated quietly.

We moved the poles out next and laid them out as best we could figure. We laid out the guy lines and stakes as we hoped they go. We flipped the tarp over the corral fence and rolled it out as best we could in the mud. We worked each pole as a team; setting up the pole, sinking the tent stakes, and finally tightening the guy lines a enough to keep it upright.

The five outer poles went up without too many face-planting mistakes and we followed by quickly tightening all of the guy lines. Suddenly we were out of the rain.

The center of the tarp however was quickly gathering water so we set up the tri-fold center pole pushing the center up almost a foot higher than the edges. We’d have to keep a constant eye on it but we could at least feed the poor horses now.