“Mattie-boy,” my friend David whispered, “someone’s stealing your loader!”
It was just after six on a cold November morning. The house was as dark as the moonless, mud-torn yard. The Ladies were asleep; thus the whispering.
I was asleep, too. I’d heard the persistent beep of something large and diesel-powered backing up, but I figured it must be a fuel truck – perhaps the very first delivery from the new company we’d signed with.
“What kind of fuel company makes deliveries at six in the morning?” I wondered.
But as soon as David said the word “loader,” I knew he must be right. I’d heard two diesel engines of different pitches, and two different back-up beeps: in other words, a flatbed and a loader.
Our loader.
I hopped out of bed, felt around in the dark for my shirt and jeans, and proceeded to get dressed. No time for shoes.
No time for turning on a light, either. I couldn’t figure out where my zipper had gone until I realized that I’d put my pants on backwards.
David and I rushed out the front door to confront the thief. No doubt we were menacing with our crazy hair and bare feet.
It wasn’t a thief after all, merely the driver from the rental yard who’d come to retrieve the loader.
“You can’t take it!” I cried. “We’re not done yet.”
There’d been a misunderstanding. I thought I had the loader until noon. The rental yard insisted the pick-up time was 6:30.
The driver called his dispatcher, never looking away from the two wild-eyed men standing barefoot on the frosty concrete next to his truck.
“Just tell me who I need to talk to,” I said.
“He says he wants to talk to someone,” the driver reported. Then, after conveying a few half-hearted offers from the rental yard, he sighed, snapped the phone shut, and said, “You can keep the loader.”
David and I celebrated with a cup of coffee. We’d prevailed! The loader was still ours!
But there was a serious side to the confrontation. What if someone had been stealing the loader? Rushing out half asleep and barefoot to confront a determined thief wasn’t very bright. Especially a thief with his heart set on a gorgeous, low-hours, Bobcat T-190 compact loader with nearly new rubber tracks and an excellent toothed bucket…
I’d never operated a Bobcat, but that didn’t stop me from renting one for a weekend of outdoor work. I had a long list of tasks to accomplish: moving several cords of unsplit locust firewood; demolishing a huge shed and loading it into a 30-yard dumpster; digging up the roots of a few trees; excavating the back yard for a patio; and shifting 22 tons of gravel.
The rental yard offered a special rate for weekend work: you only paid for a day and a half of time, but you had the use the machine from Friday afternoon to Monday.
I was an instant convert to the Bobcat T-190. I’d watched some training videos on YouTube, and received a quick orientation from the driver who delivered the machine, but there was genius in the simplicity of the controls. Two joysticks, one for moving the Bobcat in any direction, and another for manipulating the bucket.
We started with the firewood, which gave me a chance to practice a series of relatively simple repetitive tasks. As I gained confidence, I moved on to the more difficult stuff, like knocking over the shed and using the Bobcat to smash the debris into manageable pieces. From there it was on to more complex operations, like excavating right next to the outdoor oven and the deck; and finally, most delicate of all, placing gravel evenly over a large area without making deep ruts or tearing the landscape fabric we’d laid.
The Bobcat was a warhorse. It powered through massive roots. It scooped up dense Perry County mud as if it were nothing. It rumbled along the road at a good clip no matter how much gravel was heaped in its huge bucket. And through it all, it responded to the joysticks with absolute precision.
So maybe now you’ll understand why David and I were willing to defend it with our lives. We got an unbelievable amount of work done in just a few days, and much of the credit was due to this ingenious and powerful machine.
I read up on the Bobcat this week. The first compact skid-steer loader was invented by two brothers, Cyril and Louis Keller, in the mid-1950s. The Keller brothers repaired farm machinery in Rothsay, Minnesota. A turkey farmer came to them with a request for a loader that could maneuver inside a pole barn.
The first “Bobcat” had a 6 horsepower engine with a rope starter. It had two huge front wheels that were independently controlled with levers, and a tiny third swiveling wheel in the back. It looked something like a backwards tractor with a prison grate for a bucket. And, in fact, the Kellers used steel bars from the windows of the local prison to make the scoop, since that was the only steel they could find that was tough enough.
A history of the company, from the Keller brothers’ first ugly-duckling of an invention to the enormous, multi-national Bobcat Corporation of today, can be found on the company’s website, www.bobcat.com.
Spoiler alert: Bobcat USA was sold in 2007 to Doosan Group of South Korea. The ferocious and nimble T-190 was born and raised in this country. Bobcat still has a strong manufacturing presence in North Dakota, but now its owners live overseas.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 11 November 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
