Blakesmaster
Addicted to ArboristSite
XIII
The back roads of Sonoma Valley, between the mountains and the coast, pass through miles of undulating grapevines and groves of towering firs and redwoods. Open pasture lands are dotted with massive California live oaks and pungent bay trees. It is some of the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen, and if I were given the chance to enter a time machine and go to a place and time of my choosing, it would be this land before the Europeans arrived with their religions and diseases.
The country here had been first settled by Spanish ranchers in the early eighteenth century. In the second half of the 1800s the loggers came, followed much later by wine makers and their vineyards. Dotted among these vineyards are roadside mom-and-pop taverns that sometimes have to be entered through a small grocery store selling olive oil, pastas, and a variety of Mexican food stuffs. The interiors of these taverns are quite often decorated in an Old West--Gold Rush motif, with replicas of antique rifles, wanted posters, and photos of old wineries and horse and buggies littering the walls. It was in just such a place that Geena, Guido, and Fred, the crane operator, had retired to after finishing the job up at the Geyers.
Guido and Geena sat shoulder to shoulder, drinking Rainiers Ale and chasing it with shots of JD, while Fred stuck to his Coors. They all sat at the bar which consisted of a twenty foot long, three foot wide slab of Douglas fir. And as they lubricated their throats and tongues, the outlandishness of their stories became directly proportional to their alcoholic consumption. It was as if they were contestants in a game show where the winner would be decided by who could tell a lie so outrageous that it had to be true. Geena won, and here is her tale:
A group of Russian veterans from the Afghan War decided one day to go into the cattle business. They lived in the southern Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. During the ‘80s they had all been crew members on large transport planes carrying troops and supplies into Bagram Airbase north of Kabul, Afghanistan.
Fast forward to 1996. Their leader, Viktor, was still a pilot. He and the other men now worked for a government-owned transport company that flew throughout eastern Asia. They hadn’t been paid in several months, so in the midst of a three-day drinking party Viktor and his drunken comrades decided to become independent entrepreneurs. The Japanese government had leased a giant cargo jet from the company the men worked for, and the vets were assigned to fly an AN-124 Condor to Japan.
For a quarter century the AN-124 was the largest transport plane ever built. With an overhead door and retractable loading ramp mounted in its tail section, it could transport a downed American fighter jet or a Russian space orbiter. In their inebriated states of mind, Viktor and his seven compatriots reasoned it would be unconscionable to let all of the Condor’s 1,028 cubic meters of cargo space go to waste on its journey to Yokohama, especially knowing the cost of a sirloin dinner in a Tokyo restaurant. They converted kilograms of beef into square meters of floor space, and yen into rubles, determining the precise number of cattle needed to buy a vacation home near the Black Sea. The next day the veterans began their preparations.
North of the Sayan Mountains which span the central Mongolian border, and to the east of the Yenisey River, lie lush grasslands where once Soviet agricultural production cooperatives raised cattle in order to supply beef to workers and passengers of the Trans-Siberian Railway. These farms were now manned by unpaid cowboys. Over the course of a few months, an outbreak of cow thievery commenced on the poorly guarded cooperatives that would have been the envy of any cattle rustler who ever rode the Chisolm Trail. Using motorcycles and trucks, the young cowboys herded and transported cattle to a makeshift corral in a wooded area a few hundred meters southeast of a landing strip. The strip had been built to accommodate jumbo transport planes like the AN-124s which had serviced nuclear weapon and defense plants at two ultra-secret cities of the Soviet era.
On a raw September evening, 225 cows crowded a barbed wire pen. Riding horses and motorcycles, the Russian cowboys herded the cattle through a copse of aspen trees toward the end of a runway where the yawning rear of an AN-124 lay open like the arched entryway to a tunnel. The steel ramp rattled with nine hundred hooves as cattle jostled into the plane’s belly. Once the hydraulic ramp had been retracted and the cargo door closed, the eight-man crew prepared for takeoff. Air-traffic control and security at the understaffed airport had all received the appropriate bribes commensurate with their status. It was all systems go for Viktor and his airborne cowboys. Everything was smooth flying until the 124 hit turbulence over the Sea of Japan. The cattle spooked and broke down the barrier separating the crew from the cows. The co-pilot immediately opened the rear door and the cows stampeded toward the daylight.
Thirty thousand feet below, Japanese fishermen in commercial fishing boats watched as cattle fell from the sky into the aqua blue sea surrounding their boats. It brought a whole new meaning to the term "sea cows."
What...the...all right, boss, you're kinda losin' me here. It is still entertaining though.
