Or what we could do...

Sep 3, 2008 4:32 PM, By Jeff Ryan

So we kicked around some ideas . . . literally. Okay, it wasn’t so much kicking as pushing. A quick after-hours exercise with the skid loader on my part (sans witnesses) revealed that the building could be lifted from the foundation. Not only lifted, but perhaps even gently nudged in a horizontal direction.

A meeting of the corporate brain trust eventually produced a potential solution, in part because of the role the building had served for years. It stood next to the spot where we park all of our gooseneck trailers. We realized that those gooseneck trailers were pretty much the same height as the foundation of the granary. If, say, you suddenly realized that you could, say, shove that building around, you could maybe park a trailer in such a position as to gently nudge that building right onto that trailer. Next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a shed ready to go places in the world!

We got everything into position that we needed. It didn’t take a lot of nudging to get the shed onto the flatbed trailer. Once it was on, the next step was to figure out how to get it out of the yard. The local Amish farmers have been known to move a building or two in their time. They do it with horsepower. We did, too, but we did it with a John Deere 8420 MFWD at the helm instead of a team of Belgians.

Once we got the building loaded and mobile, we made another discovery. Remember the somewhat cubic dimensions of the shed? You can’t sneak it underneath every power line in the yard when it’s almost a 20-foot cube. A 14-foot cube, no problem. A 16-foot cube, probably. Twenty feet, though? That would require the other Amish solution tradition. They have been known to park a kid on the roof of the building they’re transporting. Not just a kid, though. It’s usually a kid with a stick. As they come to the power lines, the kid holds his stick up and makes sure the building fits under the power line.

Again, we had another corporate powwow. On a 2-to-1 vote, it was decided that The Chairman Emeritus would be nominated to climb up and hold the stick.

Then we switched back to the practical, but yet imaginative, side. If we were sneaking it under the power lines, why did we have to get it under all of the lines and go out the driveway? Why not sneak it under only one or two and go through the hay field instead? With a little bit of Drivers-Ed work, we could do a 14-point turn with that puppy and end up driving straight through to the hay field and not even risk hitting all the other power lines out to the road. Not only that, but we’d skip the whole block-the-entire-roadway-for-a-half-mile-in-the-middle-of-the-day issue. The cows were at the distant pasture on the other farm, so there wouldn’t even be any traffic to get to the timber to unload this shed. Everywhere we looked, it seemed, there was nothing but upside to this deal.

You may find this hard to believe, but I was the cautious voice of reason when it was time to get the shed on the road, as it were. It was resting on the flatbed. The key word there is resting. Having transported cargo of various types and dimensions over the years, I have a couple of rules to live by for successful transport. First on that list is: Strap it down!