Thinking of a friend who got a kick out of this story, I have decided to add it to the blog.
Have I mentioned big-screen bar trivia a time or two already? Pretty sure I have!
To remind you, several friends and I regularly play NTN Buzztime trivia and have been addicted to the games for – oh – twenty years or so. We started when I coached high school speech and the head speech coach, who also coached Academic Challenge, would take that team to the local pub (actually a Damon’s at the time) to practice their general knowledge trivia and their speed punching in an answer. When Damon’s closed, we had to seek alternate locations to play, and that could be quite a challenge.
For awhile the closest venue was a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood bar about ten miles away. The then-owner and full-time cook was a trivia afficionado (played under the screen name Zoom) and hosted the game at his establishment due to that love.
The games feature national contests and track high scores, so they are highly competitive. One pleasant Tuesday evening my friends and I were enjoying a night of trivia. Many of the bar’s patrons were out on the patio, but several folks sat at the indoor bar, and there was a table of ladies having a get-together near our trivia group. All of a sudden, the waitress came running into the bar proper yelling “Paul!” at the top of her lungs. The owner rushed out, and she directed him to the patio where there seemed to be some kind of bruhaha. Soon several patrons entered, escorting a tall young man who was bleeding rather profusely from the face and took him to the restroom to clean up. We looked out the front window and found other patrons detaining a short, stocky, red-faced, rather angry man outside. Paul and the waitress handled the situation; the police came and removed the offender from the premises; we played trivia.
After the melee had died down, the owner approached us with a quizzical look on his face. “I’m surprised to see you still here playing trivia,” he said. “The ladies at the other table cleared out as soon as it started.” I looked at him wide-eyed and replied, “We’re social workers. Was there a problem?” He shook his head and walked away.
Trivia is not a sport for the weak at heart!
Happy Holler…the Dad…
Although Happy Holler is in the southeastern United States, the Happy Holler stories began in California (where the family — dad, mom, and seven kids — had migrated from Colorado). We met them when we had spent a year in California when my human son was a toddler.
This was back in the late 60s/early 70s when society was experiencing the sprouting up of the hippie make-love-not-war culture, a new expressiveness (psychedelic clothing, tie-dye, beads, long-haired men, etc.) We (husband, self, baby), my in-laws who had been in California for years, and the family that would eventually move to Happy Holler) were always in a sort of wavering position between whatever “normal” might have been (working people with kids, I guess) and the Age of Aquarius. And we were all young families, struggling to make ends meet.
So I have to share a couple of snippets about the dad of the to-be-Happy Holler Family because he was a bit of a character. Shall we say that political correctness was pretty much out the window in those days!
The first anecdote involved a shopping expedition to a thrift store which was designated a shop whose proceeds were to benefit retarded children. (Nowadays the terminology would be “developmentally disabled”, but society had not yet evolved to that point.) The dad was looking for work shoes that were comfortable to wear to his then-job in a factory. He was wearing his own black shoes into the store. When he found a pair of white shoes in his size, he tried one on and, lo and behold! It fit. So he left it on and carried the remaining white shoe and his own black shoe to the checkout and put them on the counter. The clerk raised an eyebrow and asked, “Are you sure you want those shoes?” The dad nodded in assent. “But,” the clerk stated, “one shoe is white and the other is black,” to which the dad responded, “Well, this is a retarded store, isn’t it?” (My apologies to anyone who might be offended by this. Actually, I’m pretty sure that most people with developmental disabilities would not have tried to buy that “pair” of shoes.)
The second episode occurred during a trip to the grocery store. The dad and their youngest boy (age 3 at the time), along with my then-husband and my son (age 2), were in the checkout line. Both of the little boys (the hippie thing, remember?) had long hair. My son had straight blond hair approaching his shoulders. The other child had a wonderful, crazy mop of long dark curls. Both boys were dressed in traditional “boy” clothing (jeans, dark shirts, brown “boy” shoes.) And I need to point out that our friend’s son has big brown eyes that would melt one’s heart. An older woman in the line kept talking about those big brown eyes. “Oh, isn’t she pretty! What beautiful hair she has!” Et cetera. The dad kept referring to his son by his boy name and calling him “he”; but the woman persisted in referring to him as a cute little girl. Eventually, the dad picked up the child, placed him on the checkout counter, and pulled down the boy’s pants. Jaws dropped. Mouths hung agape! The red-faced woman left the store. And I’m not sure if they were ever allowed back in that particular grocery.
Laundromats in Sturgis and other stories…
As the 80th year of the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally rapidly approaches, my thoughts go back to our very first trip to South Dakota on the 50th anniversary of the event. My son was racing dirt track professionally, and Sturgis was the place to go for a week of racing events, including a Grand National half mile in Rapid City.
Back in those early days on the circuit we had to economize on travel. And, due to the fact that the 50th anniversary of the Sturgis Bike Week was a HUGE event, accommodations were scarce to none. So, a fellow who worked with my husband informed us that he would be employed as security for a rancher who was renting out his property just outside of Sturgis as a campground for the week. Hey, we had a tent! And we had camped a number of times before at the KOA in Bulow when we went to Daytona Bike Week, so – a resounding yes!!! We will camp there. Suffice it to say…we had not given this adventure much forethought.
After driving pretty much forever (South Dakota is a long way from the Midwest), we finally arrived in the Rapid City area and headed north from Rapid City toward Sturgis. Motorcycles everywhere! Everywhere! We got to downtown Sturgis and found it extremely difficult to wend our way through the streets due to the thick crowds of street vendors, bikes, and bikers. The layout was not conducive to navigation in a maxi-van. But we finally made it through the tiny town…after about an hour…and headed for the ranch. Did I mention bikes were everywhere? Everywhere! We, who had failed to correctly assess the situation before we left home, came to realize that the town of Sturgis normally had a population of 5,000. This particular week, however, they were hosting 400,000. Four hundred thousand!
We arrived at the ranch and found — guess what! — motorcycles everywhere. Lots of tents, a few rudimentary camping trailers. No motor homes. And not much available space. Luckily, our friend the security guard ushered us into an enclosed area near the farmhouse where we were to pitch our 8×10 cabin tent. The ranch was at the foot of Bear Butte, a huge mesa, and the ground was covered with shale…which made for some interesting sleeping for folks who brought sleeping bags but no air mattresses. Because I had some personal health issues that required the use of actual bathroom facilities, we were privileged to have access to the farmhouse bathroom for emergencies, although I felt like an intruder entering the home of people to whom we had barely been introduced. (It should be noted that the facilities available to the general camping population consisted of a row of outhouses that we learned were already close to overflowing.)
Bikes everywhere! Bikers everywhere! I can’t remember how many gangs were represented on the ranch that year, but fortunately they were largely…hmmm…not friendly, exactly…but…well, no, not exactly cordial…but…at least tolerant of one another. (Well, there was one gang in particular that tended to behave rudely and audaciously; but security kept them contained for the most part. I could name that gang, but I won’t because I really wouldn’t want to irritate them. And I have to admit that, even though we are normally nice people and rather accepting, we did do a lot of smirking in regard to that particular group.)
Speaking of gangs, while inside the farmhouse bathroom one night, I overheard the conversation from the kitchen table. The security folk were noting that one of the gangs had posted armed sentries at the foot of the hill, just in case their foes should try to descend upon them in the middle of the night. Rather disquieting news for a non-camper Midwest mom who already wasn’t sleeping well on a bed of shale.
Bear Butte, we learned, was a sacred site for Native Americans. According to farmhouse lore, one year during the Sturgis rally, a group of badly behaved bikers had been camping there and had been quite disrespectful and had proceeded to try to climb the butte. They were informed that the great spirit protected Bear Butte, but they scoffed at that. So at night, a nasty little windstorm came down the butte and blew their tents over. They reportedly packed up and left. Good riddance! Oh, and did I mention that Bear Butte is also protected by rattlesnakes who have made it their habitat. Fortunately, we only encountered one of those when it slithered across the road as my son was bump-starting his race bike to check it out. And the snake promptly hid because it apparently was not fond of the noise and chaos of the camper/biker crowd.
Due to the density of the camping population on the ranch, the porta-johns quickly came to overflowing (and no one seemed available to come and empty them). And the line of makeshift shower stalls in a barn yielded only a trickle of water. So in order to get clean, we took advantage of interstate rest areas between Sturgis and Rapid City for the purposes of washing up. Fortunately, we found a road through some sort of national cemetery we could use to bypass downtown Sturgis so we could get to the race tracks on time. Bike traffic on that road was slim to none because the road was thick gravel and dust — not so bike-friendly but quite amenable to vans. For bathing, we also had an offer from a racing friend from our home state to use his hotel room — an 80-mile round trip — to shower. We accepted, and it was great! (Although the evil-looking black spider in the corner of the tub was a bit off-putting.) And we went to the water slides one day! Clean at last!!
To get our clothes clean, we located a laundromat in a little town a bit out of the way from Sturgis proper. It had a little restaurant attached, so we could put in our laundry and then hang out next door to wait. At that point, the owner of the place let us know that the highway patrol had been informing businesses in the area that one particular biker gang had visited the K-Mart in Sioux Falls and bought out all the knives, guns, and baseball bats on their way to Sturgis. We hoped they weren’t camping at our place.
Another laundromat story I want to mention was from a later year. We had (wisely) stayed in Rapid City that year so went to do our laundry and spent a couple of very pleasant hours chatting with Andy Tresser, a rider from California. Tresser, unfortunately, later lost his life at the Rapid City track during a crash. God speed, Andy. A really nice guy.
Returning to thoughts of keeping clean in Sturgis, the Jackpine Gypsies club sponsored a series of short track and half mile races during bike week. Because the short track consisted of red dust, they would oil the track to hold the dust down. Otherwise, there would be zero visibility. At our first race there, I kept teasing my son and husband about the reddish-black dirt they were covered in. Haha! I would boast that I had brought along a container of wipes and thus, using them regularly all evening, stayed fresh and clean. Haha! So…after the race, we went to a restaurant and, seeking facilities other than a porta-pot, I headed for the restroom. Imagine my surprise when I looked in the mirror and realized I had a reddish-black outline of my face, my nose, etc. (I had missed a few spots with my handy-dandy wipes. Oops!)
Over the years we collected more Sturgis stories involving the races, Mount Rushmore (all I can say is “Amazing!”), Crazy Horse (also amazing!), panning for gold in Keystone, pyrite and pink tourmaline, the mammoth excavation site, Wall Drug, the Badlands, buffalo, and the trip there and back. But, alas! Those are stories for another time.
The Munky Stories (not to be confused with The Monkey Stories)…
Stories from the deck:
Good things: Since he has been unable to get rid of me (surveillance and staring me down don’t work), Chippy has decided to befriend me. He now visits me on the deck, and I think he is interested in negotiation for shared occupancy…perhaps with a shared meal or two in the mix. Chipette, of course, is avoiding me as she is wimpy (and may still be miffed about my making fun of her a couple of years ago when she kept running up the pole to the bird feeder and repeatedly bonking her little noggin on the preventive inverted pie tin halfway up).Chipmunks can be rabid. Don’t get too close. If they approach you rather than run away from you, it could be problematic.Okay, I am already really old; there’s a deadly virus lurking; there is horrendous social and political unrest all around; and now I’ve gotta worry about an otherwise friendly but potentially rabid chipmunk???!!!
Hmmmm…he has approached me for a couple of days now with no incident (ran under my chair once)., sooo….
Good things: a cool morning on the deck. A handsome cardinal has joined the group of onlookers. Chipette and Chippy are scurrying about on the hill attending to some important munky-business or other. There are other things I should be doing, but hete I am… (Actually, I seem to recall it was Albert Ellis who thought we did not need shoulds and oughts. I second that!)
Just spotted Quirrely who apparently snagged a treat from somewhere and ducked into a patch of weeds to enjoy it privately.Good things: Two — yes, two! — visits from the shy little Chipette. Chippy must have given me a positive review. Wow!!Good things: lunch on the little deck. (Lately have been adding aji amarillos (yellow chilies) to sandwiches. Does a good job of mitigating allergies and stuffiness! And quite yummy.
Am wondering, however, how it is that a chipmunk can covet food from a distance if someone else is eating it….but can’t seem to find food put out in plain sight specifically for her? Although this is Chipette to whom I refer. And, as I mentioned previously, she is the one who used to regularly bonk her little noggin on the upside-down pie plate on the bird feeder pole as she’d repeatedly try running up the pole to get food (the whole run up-bonk!-run down-repeat cycle). Not sure if she was always this ditzy or just since the closed-head traumas. So far she has zoomed right by her proffered meal twice! ?Woohoo!! Chipette finally claimed her peanuts and strawberry tops!! We are forging a relationship (although she did wait until I was napping).
Good things: Chipette ? is sitting in the vegetation by the little deck trying to muster the courage to come to the wall for her peanuts. (I told her she only gets 4 because I have heard that squirrel kin have a tendency to overeat, and I don’t want to give her a tummy ache.) But wait!! Said chipmunk moved a bit further away and proceeded to do some scratching (apparently had an itch) which provided a brief profile view which leads me to suspect that today’s visit is actually from Chippy. (Thought “she” looked bigger than I remembered. Hmmm….) Actually, now that I look closer, I can see that the eyes are bigger and rounder than Chipette’s. So maybe Chippy doesn’t know where to look for the peanuts. It took awhile for his girlfriend (wife?) to figure it out. Thought it was just her personal ditziness, but maybe a characteristic of chipmunkness..Well, Chippy never found his peanuts, so Chipette has out-munked him. Sbe apparently overcame her shyness, and he in turn backed off his bravado.Good things: cooler on the deck than indoors after power out all night — again. A couple of nigjts ago it was out due to a car hitting a pole. This one was caused by a tree that came down. It would really nice to have a longer break between stressful events. Chipette did visit briefly this morning. She waited for awhile for me to go in quest of peanuts, but I guess she got tired of waiting. Haven’t seen her since I came back out.
Well, the wildlife seems to be harboring a bit of a mean streak today. There’s a feisty mosquito trying to work its way around the peppermint oil mist to take a nip at me. There’s a kamikazi fly. And Chippy and Chipette have engaged in some kind of tiff in the yard. (I think she won.) I am beginning to suspect a foot fetish with Chippy who occasionally attempts to sneak close to mine. Once-shy Chipette, however, has come to enjoy posing on the tie wall.
Sadly, my breakfast deck party with Chipette and Chippy is rained out today. However, my sunflower is getting a drink!
Good things: learned something new from the auto mechanic. Apparently mice like to ear the wiring on vehicles because the wiring has a yummy soy-based protective coating. Who knew?! (And apparently Irish Spring soap shavings sprinkled throughout the engine block will ward them off!)
Good things: a quiet morning on the deck so far. Damn Groundhog has not shown up; one chipmunk (not sure which) skulking in and peeking through the shrubbery; a minor squirrel tiff.
Chipette is a bit lighter in hue, has smaller narrower eyes and a scrawnier tail, and lacks some baggage that Chippy seems to boast.
Chippy has rounder eyes, darker more reddish coloring, a bushier tail, and some additional accouturements which Chipette seems to lack.
Apparently chipmunks will engage in fisticuffs over a juicy strawberry. Pretty sure it was Chipette that won the skirmish.
Okay, who invited the Damn Groundhog? Apparently I do discriminate as I do not welcome him. Perhaps I am stereotyping, but he or his kin were responsible for digging a hole under my son’s deck once upon a time which partially collapsed it and required expensive repairs. And it was a hole into which my then-three-year-old grandson almost fell and got lost!! So I attribute bad manners at the least and destructiveness at most on the groundhog ilk. And this particular groundhog has made no effort to learn English — specifically the key phrase “go away”. My biases are fairly obvious as evidenced by his given name, Damn Groundhog.
Good things: brunch and a bit of napping on the deck till the heat bullied me back indoors. Chippy and Chipette decided to visit simultaneously and had a small spat over who got to be on their favorite spot on the tie wall. They trounced one another briefly and then both took off in different directions. Interesting. Despite their kerfuffles, I am thinking they have better manners and social skills than many of the (alleged) humans I’ve witnessed lately. (Not referencing my friends and family, of course).
Good things: when I came out to the deck today, Chippy came barreling down the yard to greet me…and skidded right past his fruit snacks I had provided. I had thought Chipette was the ditzy one, but I am leaning toward the theory that ditziness and chipmunkness are synonymous. Actually, I am beginning to wonder if Chippy might be on uppers as he is prone to zooming around a lot and is rather twitchy. Hmmmm..
Damn Groundhog is back and has apparently decided the birdfeeder seed is his…which is frustrating the squirrels and chipmunks who know it’s theirs (even though the birds keep eternally hoping the term “bird” feeder actually means something).
The squirrels are a feisty lot, however, and may band together to protect their turf. Heck, they’ll rumble over an acorn! And I wouldn’t discount my dainty little Chipette’s ability to give ol’ DG a quick nip in the nuggies to drive him off (the aforementioned Rhonda Rousey syndrome).
Hmmm….just had a brief visit from a squirrel who happened by the deck. It was a comparatively smallish one, so not Burly Quirrely or Quirrelette. Rather bold, though. (Actually, it appeared to have some sort of bluish chip stuck to its nose on one side, so maybe it came to take issue with the distribution of Irish Spring shavings in the engine block.)
Been out here for awhile now and nary a chipmunk. Quirrely and his gang have disappeared, too, but high, high above, I have seen the broad wingspan of what is likely the evil redtail hawk… Well, no sooner than I noted his absence, Chippy paid a brief visit. He did skulk about very tentatively and close to the tiewall, though. Safety first!
Things (not necessarily good); DG (Damn Groundhog) sighted hanging out under the bird feeder, gleaning. Am pretty sure he was the bigfoot responsible for dislodging a wood block from the tiewall by the little deck (since it would have taken multiple little chipmunk and squirrel legs in a flurry of improbable team effort to accomplish same). Grrrr…..
And so, the inaugural collection of the Munky Stories (not to be confused with the Monkey Stories)….
Stinky Story #2: the belch
Having been genetically engineered by his father, Chickie, who made a mule look compliant, and his mother, double dense Ginger, Stinky managed to get “the best of both worlds” and was both stubborn and stupid. Oh, and not to mention his distinctive and persistent puppy-pee odor.
To preface, you may recall the previous blog about the infamous expressway incident. And you may also recall that my human child raced motorcycles from the age of 7 on.
A refresher, just in case: Stinky, one of the puppies my son brought home in his ongoing quest to populate our house with otherwise rejected animals, was a hound dog, blond, freckled, and, as referenced above, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And, to further set the stage, this event occurred back in the days before leash-laws, when kids and dogs ran free.
My son was probably about eleven or twelve at the time. We were going about our usual daily activities when suddenly we heard loud and frantic yipping and yiping outdoors. In through the open door came Stinky, wide-eyed, panicked, and rolling around on the carpet. What the heck?! What could have happened? Had he been hit by a car? (His father Chickie had a bad habit of chasing cars from the front, and Stinky did seem to inherit the negative traits.) Stinky seemed to be moving with too much agility to have broken bones. Maybe he got knicked by a car and was being a drama queen? But, no, he seemed genuinely distressed. Finally, my son was able to grab the dog and pick him up, carrying him to try to comfort him. Stinky continued to wriggle and yap while my son patted him gently on the back. And then….BELCH!!! A huge burp emanated from the small dog. And then…a new smell. Not puppy pee. Gasoline!!! What the heck?! “Where could Stinky have gotten into gas?” I asked. “Oh, no!” exclaimed my boy, “I was soaking my chain.” (In reference to the motorcycle chain.) We ran outside and, sure enough, the chain was lying in the otherwise very empty flat pan by the back porch. Stinky had drunk the gasoline. Every drop. Didn’t spill a bit.
Not knowing quite what to do, and, at that point of my life, not having funds for a vet visit, we did the next best thing. We sequestered Stinky in the kitchen with newspapers covering the floor and fed him water and milk, hoping to somehow dilute and neutralize the gas. And somehow it worked. Stinky peed a lot (which for the moment at least yielded an explanation for his characteristic odor), and he was ultimately okay.
After the expressway incident and the belch, I am amazed and happy to report that Stinky managed, from that point, to lead a relatively uneventful — albeit stinky — life.
Stinky Story #1…You never know when you’re gonna make the evening news…
To preface: my human son used to bring home pets. Many pets. Unusual pets. At times, challenging pets. Stinky was just such a pet. Stinky was a little blond (in both the physical and stereotypical sense), freckled, floppy-eared hound puppy. He was fathered by our little crooked-nosed stub-tailed beagle, Chico (aka Chickie-Poo) and inherited his daddy’s amazingly stubborn gene. Stinky was the result of Chickie’s dalliance with Ginger and, except for his gender, was pretty much a clone of his mommy…who was not particularly bright. (Okay, she was really, really NOT bright.) And we named him Stinky because, well, he was a bit pungent. Always smelled faintly of puppy pee.
One hot summer afternoon we decided to drive about an hour to check out an exposition by the Hudson-Essex-Terraplane club. My former in-laws had driven their Essex from California to the Midwest for the show, and this was an opportunity for a visit while they were in the general area.. So…my good friend and I packed up my human kid, her kids, maybe another stray neighborhood kid (not sure, as we were like a little commune at times kid-wise), and…yep!…Stinky. And off we went.
The show was great, featuring a fascinating array of antique vehicles. The visit was enjoyable. The return trip, however, went a bit less smoothly. I was driving my little Datsun F10 wagon with the back seat folded down so the kiddos and the puppy could stretch out in the back. (Seat belt laws were not a “thing” back in those days.) Zooming down the expressway just past the central interchange, I felt Stinky trying to nudge his way to the front, specifically onto the gear shift. I bopped his nose slightly, reprimanded him, and sent him back with a warning to the kids to keep him on the leash so as not to cause an accident. Very shortly thereafter I heard a yip and assumed my son must have disciplined Stinky for some minor infraction…until I looked at my rearview mirror and saw the puppy skidding across two lanes of the expressway behind us. Apparently he had leaned out the window, and his floppy ears took flight!
Yikes!!! What to do??? I could see in the mirror that all lanes of traffic were screeching to a halt (lots of traffic as it was rush hour on a Friday), and Stinky had scudded to a stop under one of the vehicles. So, thinking quick — or maybe not thinking, I pulled onto the left berm by the guardrail and began to back up to attempt to retrieve him. At this point my friend (who was in the passenger seat on the side of the car that would be threated by traffic if they started up again) was freaking out and yelling at me for this brilliant maneuver. But I was on a mission so we were going backward as fast as possible until we reached the line of stopped traffic. Lo and behold, they all started to move again. Where, oh where, was the dog?
We started moving forward again, carefully merging into traffic, puzzled by Stinky’s sudden disappearance. Then one of the kids yelled, “Over there!”; and, sure enough, there was Stinky, being held by a driver to our right. We beeped the horn and gestured — “Our dog!”, and we followed the other driver off a ramp to the right to retrieve the errant mutt.
Stinky just stared. Vacantly (although that was not a particularly new phenomenon). Non-responsively. “Hey, Stinky!” Not so much as a blink. “Yo, Stinky!” Not a flinch. Staring. Vacantly. All the way back to my friend’s house where we got out of the car and she checked him over and saw that he appeared to be bleeding from the posterior. Panicked, I ran into her house to phone the vet. As the phone was ringing, my son came in and announced that Stinky was interacting and playing with my friend’s dog. Stinky had apparently been in shock until his Pomeranian buddy wanted to play. Whew!! The blood on his bottom, it turns out, was road rash from skidding across two lanes of traffic at 50 mph. Again, whew!!
The next day, Saturday, when we were at the motorcycle races in a town between home and the location of the Hudson-Essex-Terraplane Club show (my human son raced dirt bikes; my monkey kids never did), I was sharing the events of the dog falling/jumping out the window with the wife of the referee who began to laugh. “Oh, my gosh!” she exclaimed. “We heard that on the news! They reported traffic was backed up for five miles at the central interchange, but when the police got there, they couldn’t find the dog!”
And that, my friends, is the first of the Stinky stories!
Virus Blues Haiku
Odd, yes, in this world
that the scamper of a chipmunk
just might save a life?
The Yellow Mutant and the Box Truck…a race travel adventure
Once upon a time….when my 30-year old grandson was 5….we were loading up to leave for the nationals in Sacramento and Las Vegas (the motorcycle dirt track racing circuit, for anyone who has not read the preceding race-focused blog entries). My grandson, who had to stay home for kindergarten that September, revealed to me his anxiety about our trip due to a dream he had had. He explained that we should not go to California because his dream had involved going to the races in the box truck, something bad, and “something like a yellow mutant”. I heard him out and assured him that we would be fine, and that dreams are just stories we tell ourselves to entertain us while we sleep. To begin with, we were not even taking the box truck. We were loading up the extended maxivan with the two Harley 750 flat trackers, the tool boxes, and two minibikes because my son and his mechanic planned to get in some trail riding along with using them in the pits.
And off we went! We took the northern route, route 80, through Wyoming. As usual, I got to drive the overnight shift (3 am-ish). It was September, so I somehow drove right past a billboard with a yellow-light marquis suggesting that people exit I-80. The sign was non-specific enough that I didn’t, in my 3 am brain, consider it an important directive. (We live; we learn.)
So up the mountain we went. The only other real traffic at that time of night was the occasional semi lugging its heavy load up and up and up. At one point, my blurry eyes realized that the road seemed to be covered with brown dirt, and I couldn’t figure out why. (Duh…city girl from the midwest here.) So, feeling a bit of consternation, I woke the guys up, and together we figured out that the dirt on the road had been placed there by the highway department to help minimize the danger of the solid sheet of ice (we could see it glistening) on the mountain highway. Yiiiiiiikes!!! As there was no place to pull over, I had to keep on driving, so I figured out that, if I followed a semi, I would at least have something sturdy that I could run into if I had to try to stop us from going over an edge. Probably a defective theory, but it eased my panic ever so slightly. We white-knuckled it through the mountains until daybreak when we were finally down to more level ground. (Prayers offered and answered!)
As a bit of an aside, this trip taught me that antelope are apparently considerably smarter than deer. Back in the midwest, one sees numerous deer carcasses along the roads as evidence of unfortunate interactions with vehicles. In Wyoming, herds of antelope run without fences, but there seem to be no — zero — carcasses along the road. Smarter, methinks!
We got to Sacramento and had a reasonably good race — a beautiful smooth mile horse track. (I actually don’t recall the details of that particular race, although I do remember we made the main event and did well in the Las Vegas half mile the following week.)
The next legs of our journey were to go to southern California to visit family and then on to the Las Vegas half mile. As we headed south from Sacramento, my son decided he wanted to show me the giant redwoods as a bit of a side trip. So off we went, east up into the mountains on a winding 2-lane road with a straight-up rock wall on one side and a straight-down drop off on the other. Climbing, climbing, climbing..,,and I am not fond of heights, by the way. About halfway up the mountain, the overloaded and overworked van decided to stop…rather suddenly…and we were stranded on the drop-off side of the road. This was in the day before cell phones, by the way, although proximity to a tower was unlikely, anyway. So we tried to flag down traffic. And tried. And tried. But no one going up the steep hill would stop and take a chance on losing their upward momentum. And no one going down the hill wanted to risk stressing their brakes. And it was starting to get dark. Not happy, I was. And I was becoming quite vocally not happy. Finally! Help arrived…sort of. A park ranger saw us and stopped for us. Hearing our plight, he radioed for a tow truck and promptly left us to go back down to the mountain to assist with some other rangerly problem. I had expressed to him my concern about wild animals after dark. He tried to reassure me by stating that, yes, there were some mountain lions and bears but they were up at the top. (I was not reassured as I figured those lions and bears walk and could probably find us, a ready meal stranded alongside the road.) Well, eventually (an hour or so later), the tow truck arrived — a smallish, dilapidated truck with a driver who very much resembled Santa Claus (but in a flannel shirt and jeans). The guys immediately volunteered me to ride in the tow truck (as there was only so much of my panicking they could endure). So I got in. The driver explained that his larger truck was in for repairs but that the small one was sturdy and reliable. Somehow we got the van up about another hundred feet where there was enough of a turn-out on the road to allow us to get it turned around and facing downhill. The agreement was that the van would follow the tow-truck down the mountain. And down we went. Down, down, down….until we realized that smoke (or steam?) was coming out from under the van making it appear to be on fire. One more yiiiiiikes!!! Fortunately, we managed to be near a small store and inn that was in an alcove off the road, and we pulled in to inspect the problem. The stressed brakes were burning up! Yay! (But at least it wasn’t a blown motor.) So, when it cooled down, we started slowly down the mountain with the van using the tow truck as a brake (front bumper of van resting against rear bumper of truck). Maybe my logic about following the semi in Wyoming wasn’t as far off as I thought!
On the trip down the mountain, I was alleviating my anxiety by telling the story of my grandson’s dream premonition to the tow truck driver. And I told him about the ranger’s report that the lions and bears would only be at the top of the mountain. The driver responded by informing me that the mountain lions and bears probably would not have given us a problem. Wild boars, he said, were what one has to watch out for. Yay! And I thought to myself…oh, my gosh!!! What, in the mind of a five-year old, would a wild boar resemble? Something like a yellow mutant!! (And I quickly reconsidered my thoughts about dreams just being stories.)
We got down the mountain, thankfully. Once the stress of climbing the mountain and descending the mountain was removed, the van decided to behave okay and got us safely to our relative’s home. Whew!
Interestingly, on television that week there were three programs about wild boars. They are indeed mean. And they can climb straight up a rock wall!
Word of the Day…wibble
wibble — [Thelmese] a weak wobble, such as the hobble an old person must do to get around after injuring a calf muscle; not to be confused with weeble, an old toy (a la 1970s) that rocks and was advertised as “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”.
The Twisted Tongue…which tangler wins the challenge?
As kids (oh, about 7th grade or so) we were all amused by tongue twisters. “She sells sea shells down by the seashore” and the like. Which one tripped you up the most?
Here are some of my favorites from years gone by:
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Big black bugs spit big black blood on the barn floor.
If a sheet slitter slits sheets, how many sheets can a sheet slitter slit?
Give ’em a try. Whaddaya think?