Me and Charlie and the Amishman

Me and Charlie and the Amishman As told by Grandpa Bauer

"One day me and Charlie and the Amishman was working in the forest along the dirt road cleaning the culverts and ditches. Well we came up to this one culvert and we seen that a groundhog had run into the pipe. Charlie said, 'Lets see if we can catch him.' So we decide that we would have the Amishman stand on the lower end of the culvert with a bag and we would pour some gasoline in the other and light it. We thought for sure that the groundhog would run into the bag and we would have him.

Well I poured some gasoline on the one end and the Amish man stood on the other with the bag and Charlie threw a match into the end with the gasoline. Well you should have seen it! There was a big explosion and the whole culvert lifted about 6" in the air. The dust flew everywhere and sure enough the groundhog came out the other end. His hair was on fire and he was traveling so fast that he ran between the Amishman's legs and knocked him over and kept on going down through the woods. It's a wonder that he didn't set the leaves on fire. All we could do was laugh.

Well just a little bit later the boss come along and said, 'What all that dust and smoke about? What are you fellas doing? We knowd that we would would catch it if we said what we did. But Charlie spoke up. Him been a fast talker and said, 'There was a nest of bees in the culvert and we burned them out'. Well that satisfied the boss and we didn't get in trouble that time.

If someone had got hurt or we'd set the woods on fire we really would have catched it for sure."