Road Tripped
- Date: 2007-06-20 - Word Count: 1356
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I spent yesterday mostly on the road, beside the road and beside myself. Somewhere in there, I rescued my umpteenth snapping turtle, had my car re-aligned, gave up on listening to CDs in the car, and realized that Geekdaddy is getting hard of hearing deafer deaf as a post. Oh yes, and I also managed to vote.
I drive a 2001 Dodge Durango. And before I start getting hate mail from environmentalists, let me tell you that it's not a toy. It's a workhorse. The road I live on, which has been discontinued by the town (smart town), is merely a suggestion in the summer and fall. In winter and mud season, every trip in and out becomes an exercise in probability theory.
Will we make it to the bottom without sliding across the main road and into the pond? Did Geekdaddy's plow truck break down and are he and it entombed under one of the 9 ft by 4 ft snow drifts that blow in from the fields? What happens if I get down to 4WD low and need a lower gear to get up the steep hill that's a sheet of ice? Can I whip the car around in a half circle and use reverse? And in mud season, will I have to use that snorkel I put in the backseat and is there any such thing as "quickmud"? Believe me, this isn't Prius country.
So Daughter and I were tooling along in the Durango, listening to Gypsy Jazz, on our way to vote, when the CD player started skipping. Gypsy Jazz is a little eccentric its own self, never mind when it starts leaving out parts of the pieces, so I took the CD out and put in an old Roger Miller CD. It skipped too. Then it dawned on me: It wasn't my CD player, it was the road that was causing the skipping.
We were hitting potholes right and left, because there were potholes right, left and center. To vary the monotony, there were also frost heaves which had been tarred by the state "patch" crew, but cold patching is one of those things that makes people feel that someone is doing something while not amounting to a whole lot. They fill in the crack that the rising and falling of the concrete makes and two days later, it's back and sinking into an even deeper rut than it was before they fixed it. You hit one of those things and your car "jitters" all over the road.
Maybe this is why, later that day, I had an appointment to have my car aligned for the third time this year. It may also account for the phone call I got from the geek right after my CD player went wonky. He called to tell me that someone at work had noticed that his car was missing a muffler, so he'd be getting it replaced on the way home.
"But didn't you notice that the car was a little loud?" I asked him, as if the last 28 years haven't taught me not to ask him obvious questions like that.
"No," he said, "I had talk radio on and there was this guy telling us how to insulate our attics and I just kept turning it up. I thought it was the guy next to me. I remember that it started when I hit a bump on that corner near where the old chestnut tree used to be, right next to that white house that those people from Russia lived in. You know, on the corner where those geese used to come out and run at our cars before the new people moved in and started raising horses instead?
You know, where the old brown gambrel used to be? The one with the yellow shutters where that woman used to give ceramic lessons in her garage until it burned down when the kiln overheated? Next to where we used to buy eggs until the guy moved to Florida and now the people from Massachusetts that bought it are building a big pool?"
Although I knew where he meant, as I hung up, I wondered how Geekdaddy had gotten into the Maine habit of describing current places by way of the past. Why didn't he just say, "It happened near the intersection of Rt 128 and Mail Rd? Or, "It was right near that duplex they just built near the propane business." Why is it that, in Maine, everyone gives you directions based on what used to be there. What if you didn't live here when the geese flew at cars or the chestnut tree flourished or the Russian people were in residence?
We approached a small bridge and there in the road ahead of us was a large snapping turtle. I pulled the car off the road as far as I could, flipped on the flashers, leapt from the car, grabbed the snow shovel, scooped up the turtle and put it over on the side it was heading toward, ran back to the car and took off, just as two cars approached, one from each direction.
I had to wait until first one passed me and then the other, because this road, like most Maine roads, has no shoulder. There was a mere two feet of pavement to serve as breakdown lane. Fine if you break down in a pedicab or small motorcycle or bicycle, but not if you're one of those eccentrics who drives a car on the road. I have never figured out the logic behind this Maine foible.
Maine roads are built as if nothing is ever going to happen except that people are going to drive from Point A to Point B without incident. If there is an incident, as we so often read in the newspaper, it's reported that the vehicle strayed out of the travel lane and into the breakdown lane (yeah, all two feet of it), the driver overcorrected (i.e. tried to keep from overturning his vehicle as a result of having his right side wheels drop suddenly about eight inches onto loose gravel) and the vehicle spun out of control. The results are often fatal and to add insult to injury, the newspaper account often makes it sound like the driver was a nincompoop, instead of yet another victim of poor road layout.
We arrived at the meetinghouse where our town votes just before ten o'clock and I was the first one to vote. I was also the only one there. Daughter was fascinated by the whole process (unschooling civics) and wanted to know why I didn't just go to multiple polling places and vote, since you don't need an ID in Maine. It took the ride to get the car aligned to explain the ethics of that one. Even so, she thought that it would have been justified in the last presidential election. Smart kid.
With our car freshly aligned, we returned to Chez Hawkins to find the geek sitting rapt in front of the radio. He had it tuned to his talk station, where they were reporting that it looked like both bond bills were going to pass. I was really happy about this, because the second bond bill was the one that is supposed to clean up our water and finance municipal sewage treatment plants. We need them in Maine.
And the first bond issue was one that I feel really strongly about. It's the bill to improve our highways, bridges and roads. It won't do anything for my private laneway. We'll still get stuck behind drifts and have to spend days waiting for our neighbor's bucket loader to get us out. But this shoulder business and the potholes that make me want to get stock in tire companies, this has to improve. I was jubilant when I heard that the bond issue had passed. But then I started thinking. This is Maine. How do I know that there's any provision in there to take care of the things that I think are important? Hmm, maybe I'd better call my congress critters yet again and make sure that they know what one very vocal constituent wants.
I drive a 2001 Dodge Durango. And before I start getting hate mail from environmentalists, let me tell you that it's not a toy. It's a workhorse. The road I live on, which has been discontinued by the town (smart town), is merely a suggestion in the summer and fall. In winter and mud season, every trip in and out becomes an exercise in probability theory.
Will we make it to the bottom without sliding across the main road and into the pond? Did Geekdaddy's plow truck break down and are he and it entombed under one of the 9 ft by 4 ft snow drifts that blow in from the fields? What happens if I get down to 4WD low and need a lower gear to get up the steep hill that's a sheet of ice? Can I whip the car around in a half circle and use reverse? And in mud season, will I have to use that snorkel I put in the backseat and is there any such thing as "quickmud"? Believe me, this isn't Prius country.
So Daughter and I were tooling along in the Durango, listening to Gypsy Jazz, on our way to vote, when the CD player started skipping. Gypsy Jazz is a little eccentric its own self, never mind when it starts leaving out parts of the pieces, so I took the CD out and put in an old Roger Miller CD. It skipped too. Then it dawned on me: It wasn't my CD player, it was the road that was causing the skipping.
We were hitting potholes right and left, because there were potholes right, left and center. To vary the monotony, there were also frost heaves which had been tarred by the state "patch" crew, but cold patching is one of those things that makes people feel that someone is doing something while not amounting to a whole lot. They fill in the crack that the rising and falling of the concrete makes and two days later, it's back and sinking into an even deeper rut than it was before they fixed it. You hit one of those things and your car "jitters" all over the road.
Maybe this is why, later that day, I had an appointment to have my car aligned for the third time this year. It may also account for the phone call I got from the geek right after my CD player went wonky. He called to tell me that someone at work had noticed that his car was missing a muffler, so he'd be getting it replaced on the way home.
"But didn't you notice that the car was a little loud?" I asked him, as if the last 28 years haven't taught me not to ask him obvious questions like that.
"No," he said, "I had talk radio on and there was this guy telling us how to insulate our attics and I just kept turning it up. I thought it was the guy next to me. I remember that it started when I hit a bump on that corner near where the old chestnut tree used to be, right next to that white house that those people from Russia lived in. You know, on the corner where those geese used to come out and run at our cars before the new people moved in and started raising horses instead?
You know, where the old brown gambrel used to be? The one with the yellow shutters where that woman used to give ceramic lessons in her garage until it burned down when the kiln overheated? Next to where we used to buy eggs until the guy moved to Florida and now the people from Massachusetts that bought it are building a big pool?"
Although I knew where he meant, as I hung up, I wondered how Geekdaddy had gotten into the Maine habit of describing current places by way of the past. Why didn't he just say, "It happened near the intersection of Rt 128 and Mail Rd? Or, "It was right near that duplex they just built near the propane business." Why is it that, in Maine, everyone gives you directions based on what used to be there. What if you didn't live here when the geese flew at cars or the chestnut tree flourished or the Russian people were in residence?
We approached a small bridge and there in the road ahead of us was a large snapping turtle. I pulled the car off the road as far as I could, flipped on the flashers, leapt from the car, grabbed the snow shovel, scooped up the turtle and put it over on the side it was heading toward, ran back to the car and took off, just as two cars approached, one from each direction.
I had to wait until first one passed me and then the other, because this road, like most Maine roads, has no shoulder. There was a mere two feet of pavement to serve as breakdown lane. Fine if you break down in a pedicab or small motorcycle or bicycle, but not if you're one of those eccentrics who drives a car on the road. I have never figured out the logic behind this Maine foible.
Maine roads are built as if nothing is ever going to happen except that people are going to drive from Point A to Point B without incident. If there is an incident, as we so often read in the newspaper, it's reported that the vehicle strayed out of the travel lane and into the breakdown lane (yeah, all two feet of it), the driver overcorrected (i.e. tried to keep from overturning his vehicle as a result of having his right side wheels drop suddenly about eight inches onto loose gravel) and the vehicle spun out of control. The results are often fatal and to add insult to injury, the newspaper account often makes it sound like the driver was a nincompoop, instead of yet another victim of poor road layout.
We arrived at the meetinghouse where our town votes just before ten o'clock and I was the first one to vote. I was also the only one there. Daughter was fascinated by the whole process (unschooling civics) and wanted to know why I didn't just go to multiple polling places and vote, since you don't need an ID in Maine. It took the ride to get the car aligned to explain the ethics of that one. Even so, she thought that it would have been justified in the last presidential election. Smart kid.
With our car freshly aligned, we returned to Chez Hawkins to find the geek sitting rapt in front of the radio. He had it tuned to his talk station, where they were reporting that it looked like both bond bills were going to pass. I was really happy about this, because the second bond bill was the one that is supposed to clean up our water and finance municipal sewage treatment plants. We need them in Maine.
And the first bond issue was one that I feel really strongly about. It's the bill to improve our highways, bridges and roads. It won't do anything for my private laneway. We'll still get stuck behind drifts and have to spend days waiting for our neighbor's bucket loader to get us out. But this shoulder business and the potholes that make me want to get stock in tire companies, this has to improve. I was jubilant when I heard that the bond issue had passed. But then I started thinking. This is Maine. How do I know that there's any provision in there to take care of the things that I think are important? Hmm, maybe I'd better call my congress critters yet again and make sure that they know what one very vocal constituent wants.
Related Tags: humor, maine, voting, family life
Lill Hawkins lives in Maine and writes about family life, home education and being a WAHM at hawkhillacres.blogspot.com. Get the News From Hawkhill Acres: A mostly humorous look at home schooling, writing and being a WAHM, whose mantra is "I'm a willow; I can bend." Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles
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