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Publication Date 2-25-10 The day started with a leaky roof. That was a bother. We've had about fifty-four feet of snow this year, quite a bit of it coming horizontally, and when we put a new basement under the old house and forced the two porches into alignment (after a hundred years or so of floating up and down on the dirt), a few cracks and crevices opened up that won't really be fixed until the next time we shingle. Not a big deal – we put out pans to catch the snow melting out of an inaccessible attic and I crawled around on the roof to shovel off some of the larger drifts. Our daughter was scheduled to stop at our place on her way home from the Twin Cities. I was a little concerned about her being on the road with her baby in bad weather, but she needed to get back to work and the road reports she'd seen looked good. In Minnesota, if your plan is to wait for perfect weather before you travel, be prepared to buy a lot of groceries, because you'll be home for about six months at a time. I didn't have any control over the condition of the roads she'd be driving on, but I wanted make sure she could make it down our driveway, so I decided to go out and blow snow. I started up the tractor and broke the clutch. Not the whole clutch, just a little cable that activated an interlock mechanism that activated the clutch. Once I figured out what I'd done, I was able to reach down between my knees and pull the cable end with one hand and a pair of pliers. I needed another hand to run the snow blower controls and one more to steer. Oh… that's why I had so much trouble. I was short one hand. Once I got the yard more or less snow free, I decided to quit for the day. I was a little tired from shoveling off the roof and a little frazzled from the broken clutch cable. The good news was that our daughter called and she was only about ten miles away. The bad news? She was stuck in a snow drift. The day was wearing on and the wind was coming up again, so we piled into the truck and headed off into the storm. We found her, along with a nice guy in a big pickup, who was trying to dig her out. He didn't speak much English, but when I showed him my log chain he figured out the plan right away. I crawled under her car and tried to find a place to hook a chain. The trouble with cars these days is that you're not supposed to get stuck with them. When I was a kid you could hook a log chain on the radio antenna and it would be sturdy enough to pull you out of a mud hole. Now cars are made of plastic and tin foil and the bumpers break off in a strong breeze. - I chiseled through the snow on the bottom of the car, found something that looked solid and hooked up. The Good Samaritan already had the other end hooked to his pickup and I crossed my fingers and gave him the thumbs up. One quick jerk, the car was free and we were all on our way. Sorta. We'd broken through some substantial snow drifts to get to her, but the wind was now approaching Warp 7 and all trace of our previous passage was gone. I was in a four wheel drive pickup, but her car had about 3 inches of clearance, so even though I was breaking trail I had to stop and pull her out of a couple more drifts. By this time, the baby had been in the car for about four hours and she was getting a little bit testy. The rest of us were worse. We were within a half mile of home when her car hit the last drift, spun in a circle and stopped sideways in the middle of the road. I sighed deeply, backed the truck up and went to hook the chain on one more time. I don't know what, exactly, I did, but this time the chain slipped and hooked itself on a cooling line from the transmission. I trudged back to take a look. A spreading pool of red fluid stained the snow. It looked like someone had shot the car, and truthfully, that didn't seem like a bad idea. Oh well. We finally got everyone home safe and sound. The next day the wind stopped blowing, the car went to the shop and spring is on the way. Really. It is. Copyright 2010 Brent Olson Brent Olson |
