I travel on a pretty straight path right now with no side trips. There is this unasked for thing on my phone that tracks every trip and I can look at any day and see where I went. In recent months, I am creating a rut on the map between the two farms. Back and forth and back and forth. It even keeps track of when I go to my house and for how long. So I know I have been indoors hiding from the heat for 36 minutes now. Might as well do something semi-productive while I am staying cool.
I am thinking about vehicles and transportation and motion, and how we get from here to there.
The other day the battery on Jon's golf cart fell through the rusty box that holds it, and he needed a tow back to the barn for repairs. I was going by on my golf cart (it has its own problems, maybe needs a new spark plug) and he asked if I could try to pull him up the hill. I was a little dubious, but we hooked the chain between the two carts and we started to move slowly up the driveway. By about the halfway point, where it seems the most steep, he got off and started to run along next to it. We made it to the top. Then he hopped back on and and I put my foot down harder on the gas pedal to get some momentum up. We were really zooming by the time we got to the last corner and Jon started to yell, "not so fast, not so fast!" because his golf cart really doesn't have much in the way of brakes. Now I find that I am glad Lilah isn't reading this. As I got to the front of the barn, he passed me on the left looking a little alarmed, but the chain was still attached and he stopped before he went crashing through the pile of detritus that always grows there. And I thought to myself, we have been doing things like this for years and years. I asked him if he was breathing so hard because he had to run up the hill, and he said, no, it was that last part without the brakes.
A few winters ago, Jon got obsessed with getting a lot of fallen oak trees off a slope down in the woods, across the creek. He spent some time building primitive bridges so he could get the loader across the stream. I kept telling him it wasn't worth it. He was working so hard to get firewood off a hillside, probably expending much more energy than he was going to generate with the wood. Of course that was an exaggeration, but I told him not to call me if he got stuck. Naturally he did get stuck and he had to call for help. So I had to get the 880 (a 60 year old tricycle tractor, quite tall, really tall tires) and a chain and wriggle across that mucky area, back up to the loader which was buried up to its belly and find an angle that could get it to move. We were making such a mess down there in that protected stream valley. All the stream valleys are designated as "environmental quality corridors" and you aren't supposed to disturb them. It took a few different tries, pulling uphill, rearranging, pulling a different direction, rearranging, but finally we got that machine unstuck and dragged it back out of the mud. I told him he had to stop doing that, that's enough. He is incorrigible when it comes to collecting up firewood.
In the old days, we never assumed that a vehicle would work reliably. They just didn't. But now, with the new regime of preemptive maintenance (whoever heard of such a thing), we barely ever have to tow a vehicle home after breaking down. But because Jon was here way back then, he still thinks of that as a reasonable solution when things go wrong. I am no longer interested in side-of-the-road rescue adventures. There are way too many people on the road. Now I just vote to spend the money and call a tow truck, as painful as that may be. Since we travel up and down the same roads all the time, we both have memories of the breakdowns that have happened. By the Popeye's in Sterling, that's where the power steering in the white minivan went out. Right across from the 7-11 at Countryside, that's where the timing belt in the red Subaru broke. Oh yeah, right past that overpass at Rt 15, that's where Lani and I left the baler with a flat tire on the shoulder. That's the stone wall just as you are leaving Leesburg that Dad clipped with the right tire of the baler. Not good. And just at the bottom of the hill where the Rt 28 overpass is, that's where I dropped a bale off a trailer and got a warning for not having my load secured.
These are not memorable events, they just rattle around in our brains and pop up whenever a button gets pushed. The generation before ours had much bigger adventures because they did not have preemptive maintenance, only reactive. But that generation helped to create the assumption that roadside rescues were normal. To this day, we have never belonged to AAA.
I just got a text from Eric Cox, with a picture of him standing in front of a rusty dump truck, with the bed tipped up. He said, "The truck is like me...it still kind of works! I think of your dad when I'm using it, we drove to Pennsylvania when it was one year old, that was only 40 years ago!" Eric has the White Dump that Dad bought new in 1979, and Eric is still making memories with it. We are not the only ones.
Every day that goes smoothly, without a vehicle incident, is a day that I notice and feel glad about. Most people don't live with such an awareness of impending disaster. I always tell my kids to take shoes whenever they drive anywhere because they never know when they will need to walk home. But I forget that cell phones have made shoes unnecessary.
Even if you can call from the side of the road, you should still have your shoes. The tow truck drivers will take you much more seriously. (Sounds like a fortune cookie.)
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