25 The Day the Cat Drowned

If you are a logger especially a Gyp logger drowning a cat is not a very good thing to have happen to you.  It happened just after dad had acquired an old Caterpillar RD8 and was using it to haul logs down to the beach.  The old RD8 was much larger then the Caterpillar sixty and it could haul a much larger load of logs.  This made it less maneuverable and more apt to get stuck when hauling logs down to our muddy beach.

This particular beach had a unique feature that resembled a chocolate pudding with a skin on the top.  You could carefully haul logs across it, if you didn’t twist or turn, drop your load, and beat it back to the beach without breaking through.

This particular day my dad drove carefully across the beach with his load, unhooked the logs as usual, climbed back on the tractor, but as he turned for shore, the tracks twisted through the last layer of the skin and the old RD8 went in with a slurp, both tracks just a spinning.  The creamy blue clay covered everything but the top of the tractor, and the cat just sat there no matter what dad did in his attempts to extricate it, before the incoming tide completely drowned it.  My dad was not a swearing man but I can still see the disgusted look on his face, as he knew what was cut out for him for the next few hours.

He worked the rest of that day until water was spraying in the air from the fan when he finally shut her down and let the salt chuck win.  I can still see the water slowly creep over and pour into all the openings in the engine as it rose higher and higher and finally covered the poor cat.  As soon as the tide went out the next day dad was out there unscrewing every plug he could find on the old RD8 to drain as much of the salt water out that he could.  After refilling everything with new oil we began our work again hoping to beat the next days incoming tide.  We were fortunate to just beat the incoming tide, as a few years earlier the neighbors across the island had their cat covered probably a half dozen times, before they finally got it free of the mud, and out on dry ground.

A lesson learned?  Not so well as a little while later when using our smaller D4 to haul logs to the same bay we went through the same scenario but this time we beat the tide.