Summer vacation time meant one thing on a our small irrigated Montana farm. No it wasn’t all fun and games because school was out. It meant carrying sprinkler pipe. If you were ever fortunate enough to carry sprinkler pipe you know what great fun this isn’t.. You might get to lie around for four hours between sets. Then all you have to do is slog through mud while carrying forty foot sections of five inch pipe that drips mud and water down your pants for an hour. Then you might get to lie around for another four hours. Easy work except you also get to enjoy hoards of hungry mosquitoes and wet grain slapping you in the face. You might even get to do this round the clock which means cooking in the midday sun and freezing in the early morning just before sunrise.
Believe me, after a few weeks of this you start appreciating any little distraction. This is where the Meteor comes in. My brother and I were enjoying yet another day changing sprinkler pipe. It was late afternoon so the mosquitoes were mostly resting up for their evening attack. That’s when I happened to look up at the south east horizon and spotted a speck of fire in the sky. I kept looking as that speck kept getting bigger and brighter and closer. My brother spotted it by now and we just stood there wondering what the heck was coming.
As that object got closer we could see it was leaving a wide smoky contrail like a monster jet airplane. It got closer. Now I could see what looked like a huge flaming boulder streaking right at us. I never saw a meteor up close like this before but there was no doubt that’s what it was and it was heading right at us.
Wow! Imagine that. We thought we were about to get clobbered by a giant meteor. We did the only sensible thing. We stood there and watched it. This was too exciting to do anything else. Besides, I doubt if a person can outrun a flaming meteor, especially if he is wearing hip boots and running through ankle deep mud. By now the meteor looked as big as a house and I could see it outlined by red flames and of course that contrail it was leaving was like about two hundred jet engines spewing black diesel smoke.
It got close enough so that we could tell it wasn’t going to hit us; maybe just graze over our heads. I secretly hoped it would wipe out the irrigation pump that was up on the ditch bank about a half mile in back of us. That would certainly put an end to our irrigation pipe carrying job.
The meteor did in fact miss us otherwise I guess I wouldn’t be writing this story. It missed the irrigation pump too. Dog gone it. It streaked over us so low that I even ducked down a little bit. It was like watching a big airplane land. You know how those airplanes just seem to be barely moving as they go over on final approach to the landing strip. This huge ball of fire just sort of floated over us and headed over the horizon. We expected it to crash into the ground at any time but it didn’t. That big smoky contrail lingered in the sky for a long time. I never thought about it at the time but I don’t remember hearing any sound as it went over us. I guess that should have tipped us off that this meteor was way higher up in the sky than it appeared to be.
Later on that night we heard on the radio that a small meteor hit way up northwest of us in Canada. I suspect that was our meteor. It must have burned up considerable after passing over us. I was real disappointed because I sure wanted to see a big meteor crater like the one in Arizona. Now if we had one of those craters in our grain field I betcha we never would have to carry sprinkler pipe there again. I bet it would have kilt all those mosquitoes too.
Of course this is all completely true. Haven’t you ever seen a meteor fly-by?