1. Bad things usually happen at the worst moments.

 

If pipes froze in July, or even September, it would be a lot better. Water repairs are always more pleasant when you’re not wearing mittens.

 

Livestock follow this rule religiously. They always break through fencing on dark and stormy Sunday nights. They prefer blizzards, but will settle for Class 4 hurricanes.

 

Similarly, water-proof boots always fail when you’re standing in water, never when they’re sitting high and dry on your mudroom floor.

 

Wood fires go out when you’re cold; ladder rungs break when you’re standing on them; and tires go flat when you’re driving somewhere, although recent improved models will go flat just as you’re about to go somewhere.

 

2. Good things resist happening when you most need them.

 

When you really need a nice-as-pie day, it comes in September with all the others, not January when it would lift your spirits. Rain, I should point out, rarely comes during a drought

 

Every farm-carpentry project sooner or later presents a philosopher’s dilemma--a choice between good character and its opposite.

 

The character path requires undoing what you’ve done and redoing it better to reach the point at which you currently are only different. Doing over will require a 75-cent part that you have to get from a town 35 miles away. This, however, is the proper way to do the job. 

 

People who do things the right way the first time got good-citizenship stars in the third grade. They were the Robins. I was tracked into the Crows, a demotion from K through 2 spent in the Grackles.

 

The other choice is to fetch a super-sized nail, bang it in with a sledge hammer and hope that it either doesn’t double over into a yoga pose or split the nail-to wood (which will require driving for the part).

 

Over the years, I have usually chosen the nail after weighing four variables: 1) how disgusted I have become with the cosmic uselessness of the project at hand; 2) how angry I am at still being a Grackle; 3) the odds that my wife, Melissa, will see me fail after cheating on the right way to do things; and 4) my testosterone level.

 

I can report that, so far, bigger nails bend worse AND split the wood. No nail I have ever used was big enough. Failure forces me to conclude that I should have used an even bigger nail. We address many problems this way.

 

Fortunately, hammering a railroad spike into a frozen water pipe usually breaks the blockage.

 

3. Jamming the pedal to the metal almost always makes things worse.

 

Men understand that kicking any dysfunctional machine is always the best and cheapest way to fix it. I have kicked photocopiers, soda dispensers, freezers, ATMs and cell phones with uniformly excellent results.

 

It follows that stomping on a gas pedal is the gender-appropriate way to improve the performance of any stuck machine that runs on four wheels and the liquid remains of ancient ferns.

 

I have gunned it when I’ve been marooned in floods, hung up on stumps and wallowing in mud holes larger than Maryland. Results have varied, but rarely exclude the catastrophic, which I figure is the result of not gunning it enough.

 

Wet, grassy slopes are the blood-oath enemy of the heavy foot. I have personally witnessed the slope down to my creek plotting the wreck of my farm truck by calling in a cloudburst from a sunny April sky.

 

When facing a slope, slimy with ice or mud, flooring your truck’s gas pedal will always get you 85 percent of the way up…and not an inch more. The more times you make a run at it, the lower you get each time. Many of our finest public policies draw inspiration from the Law of Diminishing Returns, which started behind our barn.

 

Gas-pedal gods are easily angered. They hang out in the rear differential where they feast on wet-slope rage. Rouse them, and you will find yourself either doing a forward roll off the road or at the bottom of a ditch the size of the Panama Canal.

 

The ditch, by the way, is always too steep to get out of by gunning it. You are then forced to get help from a kind-hearted stranger, or your wife, who, for unknown reasons, doesn’t spend half her life in messes of her own making. It goes something like this: