A Short Anecdote from a Ditchfinder, 1 of 4 (and Counting)

Prologue:
As has been noted elsewhere, wintertime access to Cooter Hollow is only via snowshoes, quadriceps, and determination, supplemented by a modicum of whining. During these months, The Jeep is parked at the bottom of our Class 4 Road, about a kilometer down the hill from camp, where I’ll bet it’s lonesome.

By definition, class 4 Roads are unmaintained around here, and the dead-end public road to which it connects is on an incline just as steep. This means just as painful for the plow truck. Which means the roadside’s ditches are depositories for the massive hoards of snow that I’m convinced serve as the storage center for all the snow dumped in the entire country. They also seem to be depositories for our Jeep, these ditches.

Prefatory Note: Given the state of our Jeep (a condition best described as “poor,” and more accurately thought of as “working, for the most part, if one holds one’s breath and wishes HARD before attempting to start it), we have taken to backing it onto the Class 4, so that if it doesn’t start by conventional means, it can, if one possesses a certain amount of red to one’s neck, be “rolled” to a start. Ostensibly.

Scene: I’m behind the wheel, having no business being there at this particular time, for reasons I’ll leave for your surmise, and am attempting to back in to the Class 4 for reasons without surmisatory need (as I’ve just disclosed them)

Anecdote: Fact is, I missed the Class 4 when backing up. Missed it by a distance of about ten feet.

This landed the Jeep’s rear wheels squarely into the ditch. Well, not squarely, because these things happen too violently to make right angles. So the rear wheels are lodged several feet down into the snow and the front wheels are up, the whole thing at a sixty degree angle front-to-back. We’re stuck. Firmly so.

But he wasn’t convinced, or so I thought in my (surmisery) state, and ordered me out of the Jeep with the intention of fixing things. I climbed out into the snowstorm (for this is clearly not one of the two weeks a year where we’re not ensconced in snowstorm [ed: hyperbolics intentional]) and watched as he not only DIDN’T magically levitate the Jeep back up and safely onto the road, but instead slammed the thing into reverse and brought the entire vehicle way down in the hole.

Apparently I’m not yet a natural at the ways of northern life. I saw our Jeep surely meeting its doom at his bad decision, a Jeep drowning in snow such that only one door was now operational, a Darwin-award-worthy death for a Jeep that’s beaten cancer AND the clap.

And evidently my vocalized summary of these thoughts when he found that one operational door and mountaineered through was not an expression of gratitude at his relative health and ingenuity. Apparently what I said instead, in the spirit of indignation and misplaced blame, was : “Baby, Look What You Did!”

Denouement: Apparently, this was not the reception he’d been hoping for. It seems he’d intentionally put the Jeep down into the ditch, to remove it from the road and allow for the plowtruck to pass in the next few hours, knowing we’d need a tow anyway, and concluding that this would allow us at least to hike up the hill and get some sleep and allow it to become the next morning’s problem. I was a little slow picking up on this. But so, words were exchanged, sleep was had, and a tow provided to curb the next morning’s headaches.

Epilogue: The first Cooter Hollow contest! The incident anecdoted above happened on Saturday, the 15th January. Since then, the Jeep has been snowbound and towed from ditches on three additional occasions. The first commenter to correctly predict how many times we’ll need to be towed from the ditch before the winter’s end will receive his or her choice of a jar of Cooter Hollow pickles from 2010, or a metric ton of snow (delivery not included on the snow, but I’ll pay shipping on the pickles).

If you’ve lost count, we’re at 4 so far. Happy guessing– the pickles are a fine batch this year.

N.B.: I have been advised to addend this and assure all contest participants that our continued brushes with The Ditch do not require the enlistment of towing companies or the Triple-A. We rely on the kindness of neighbors and passers-by for ditch extraction, and offer the same on those instances where we’re the ones on the road. In other words, he wants you to know, we’re no pussies.

(to all appearances my list of complaint about the snow is endless, so here’s some photographic evidence that there’s at least one good thing to come from all this:)