Don't ever wanna hear about YOUR potholes!

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A Continuation of Last Week's News:

With half-sincere posthumous apologies to Gustave Doré (whose lithos I have always adored), I could find no more suiting pictorial for ONE of last week's misadventures. This stark image of Dante's Inferno haunted me in consistently humorous fashion from the start of this, my most serious 'bad hair day', last week.
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Mark had wandered up to the mesa top for a meeting with Slim and a rep from one of the big gas field players out here. I had time on my hands. I got restless. This is generally not a good combo.

So, I loaded Brou into my own truck and headed east. Maybe we would check if there were any more renegade cows in our canyon - an event that Brou lives for. Maybe I would just get a wild hair to join Mark and Slim up on top. I would decide as fate presented the options. It sure did ... and fast.

We bumped along the wet Spring-bitten roads, dove into and smeered through a few deep mires of mud along the way. About a mile further out, I ran into the perennially 'iffy' part of the road where the creek gnaws viciously at the 50 foot high banks and the mesa run-off grinds its own determined path over this already skinny road to meet the creek. The erosion of this last unusual year of rain has threatened safe passage but the gas field was already on it as far as repairing the damages of those relentlessly ripping waters. I saw a huge yellow road grader and some other vehicles on that part of the road ahead so rather than disturb the entourage just to turn around on a well site beyond, I decided to unobtrusively back down the road for about an eighth mile to find a good turn-around spot. With my lack of neck and spinal mobility, I don't do reverse well on a good day now but was all sorts of pleased with myself that I managed to stay roughly centered in the road this time. I could see a very promising flat plane of desert intersecting the road coming up ahead, or rather behind in this case, with no severe ditch to drop into. Perfect (or so I thought, sigh).

I jockeyed the Dakota into a good position to address the turn-off and execute an admirable one point turn around. Yes, very nice set-up indeed. I threw it into the big "R" and proceeded backwards. I find myself going through mental steps in anticipation of what will happen next; Okay, we're in "R", the truck will roll backwards, then the little drop into the ditch with a mild roll up backwards, then we shove it into Drive, roll back up forwards and we're on our way. NOPE, not today, kitty boy. That expectation of the roll down into the ditch just kept coming ... and coming ... and coming. I felt like the Captain of the Titanic as the aft of my little red ship dove downwards at an alarming angle, the broad blue sky above suddenly filling the windshield. I took my foot off the accelerator at that point when I realized that something was not completely kosher here - no sense in the front wheels in four-wheel drive further promoting this unexpected disaster. Fortunately, the truck stopped it's descent into this new unknown Hell and I slipped the truck into 'Park' and shut it down. Surprisingly, I was still able to open the door and exit but I left the now utterly befuddled Brou in the back seat to ponder this new and confounding attitude. I am sure he felt like one of the Titanic's mid ship passengers by now as he was now sitting as much on the back of the rear seat as the seat pan.
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Click on the photo for a much larger view.

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Remember my comment in a previous post about how you look around to see if anyone else had seen your most undignified of predicaments? Oh joy of joys ... this time I had a full house audience. Utter mortification set in as the witnesses descended rapidly to confirm what ol' Numb Nuts of the North had just done. I looked around and wondered if I could just drop into the gaping precipice with the truck and completely disappear ... forever, if possible. At that point, I could do nothing more than stand in the middle of the road, fists curled and driven painfully into my sides, and utter a long-winded primal scream that would have made any old merchant mariner proud. I also presumed that the approaching onlookers would not hear it above their own motor noises.

Well, upon their arrival, the first comments offered in unison were "H-o-o-h-L-E-E S- -t .... ohhhh m-a-a-a-n ... N-I-C-E job!" This really didn't dissipate my desire to crawl into that same hole at all. So, what's the first thing real guys do to alleviate the upset of such disasters? Wrong ... likely no matter what you might have been thinking! You have to get out the camera and pictorially document this embarrassment thoroughly. Ahh ... thanks, guys, thanks A LOT. But paybacks are fair enough since I have done my share of teasing and once it was determined that it could have been far worse, we settled into an ongoing laugh fest over the whole matter.

Oh how I love those graders even more now. It wasn't long before the grader was hooked up to the truck with my handy now-defunct tow rope inherited from the field. By the way, Dakotas don't have stunningly obvious tow points up front like the full-sized Rams. It took some conference of the masses to decide which areas could be hooked to without causing new damage. I now regretted that my truck sat nearly at a right angle to the road, fearing that a perpendicular tow out would crush the right side of the body panels in as the truck followed at a diagonal. The grader operator, as promised, put it in 'granny low' and slowly inched east. Three foot into the pull, the Dakota's rear wheels engaged again with terra firma and resumed a more normal stance.

We all circulated around and under the truck to assess damages and the consensus was; "Wow, this thing is undamaged! Would you believe that?" My vicarious pride rose a little as one observer said "Gee, do you think it's too late to order a half ton as my next new field vehicle?" My unspoken thought reply was "Well, only if it is a Dodge perhaps."

But the 'bad kid' fun wasn't over yet, even with the truck now out of peril. One of the operators said "Okay, now I am going to send these photos directly to Mark's e-mail address. So whaddya think of that?" Oh, how we laughed at the prospects. "Whoa ... no, wait a minute, you're right, do that! I won't say a thing about it until he opens his e-mail and I hear a "Holy Moses ... do you mind explaining these photos?!" If he asks what I was doing in his absence this afternoon, I will simply say "Oh, just the usual, dear, you know, a little fussing around in the garden, etc." And we all laughed those rotten kid laughs all over again.

Well, for lack of proper camera patch cords and misspelled e-mail addresses, it took until today for those photos to reach me. In the meantime, I had been on tenterhooks awaiting their arrival. As we sat around at Virgil's farewell luncheon last Friday, Mark brought up the issue of that HUGE hole at the side of the road east of here. It was a good thing that I happened to be standing behind Mark when he said it. Norm nearly blew his last soda gulp out through his nose and I stooped forward in silent laugh convulsions, trying ever so hard not to explode into audible laughter myself or pee my pants. Just wait until he opens his e-mail tonight though!

Today's Update:

Brou has been in very good hands. Had I seen the full extent of the wound that the vet uncovered with his clippers, I don't doubt that I would have wilted away like yesterday's vinaigrette salad. I will give a full report on his progress soon. Just know that he is over the hump on this one, too, even if I won't be with the Nightingale post-op duties necessary.
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