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!