The neighbor’s drive in drier times.
Some call it a gentle rain, that steady drizzle that began, it seems, a year back. Others, myself included, prefer the more precise poetical phrase, That goddamn rain, again! A drizzle that has now notched up close to 70 inches in this valley in 2018 and that shows no sign of abating anytime before the first of January.
Sunshine has become that rarest of commodities this December. The ground is a slurry from doorstep to barn. The gravel on the drive floats and shifts like a suspension bridge. So, it was not a surprise that I received a call on Thursday from my neighbor. In what must be the more convenient of First World problems, he called from the cab of his truck, in his front yard, where his vehicle was mired above the hubcaps in the rose bushes. Driver’s side firmly wedged against a tree, a daughter with disabilities in the passenger seat, he was unequivocally trapped.
“Brian, can you do me a favor?” he said when I answered the phone. “Sure, see you in 10 minutes.”
The rain now a heavy drizzle, the air hovering at 40 degrees, I stepped off the porch … where I immediately began skating on mud, fell, and then mucked on out to the tractor, stopping off at the barn for a logging chain. The tractor warmed up, exhaust pipe sputtering and steaming, I drove the quarter-mile down to his drive and backtracked up to his yard. Long before I got to his cabin, the story was written and read in tire marks: his slide off the drive, the futile struggle to correct the course, the slow, uncontrollable skid to the truck’s inevitable resting place in the bushes.
I stopped the tractor and slogged over to the truck window, where we conferred on a plan. Simple enough in execution, really. A loop of chain around the yard box on the tractor, a loop around his rear bumper’s towing hitch, a wave through the now heavy rain, and off we went, towing him backwards toward the drive. “Just get me headed downhill. I can do the rest,” he said. Which I did and was shortly watching his tail lights disappear as he continued on his way.
I wrapped the chain in big loops and stored it on the tractor. Then I turned the wheels and began the return trek home, thinking as I drove, This is why I love the rural life. Being called upon to help, knowing you can, and knowing you too will need, at some juncture, to ask for help. Not keeping track of the “debts”… unless you are one of those sad men who only need assistance. It’s a vestigial remnant of a world of mutual aid that surely, hopefully, provides the muscle memory of community….
Parking the tractor in the shed, I walked back out into the rain just in time for an overfull, clogged gutter to dump a gallon of water down my jacket collar. Contemplation over, I shook myself off and headed to the house.
……………………………………………………………
Reading this weekend: In the Land of White Death (Albanov): a classic survival story of Arctic exploration.
A great story. Everyone should have something like this to share.
From a drought in ’17 to nearly 70″ in 2018 – enough to keep a person on their toes. Imagine the hundred year old white oak, standing in the very spot of its ‘birth’; witness to droughts and floods of all sort over the expanse of time. No log chain or tractor, and no need of such. Evolution is pretty powerful stuff. And with good neighbors, we too can be pretty powerful stuff.
Have a great holiday season sir. Catch you on the other side of the New Year.
2017 was above average, the big drought was in 2016. As to your mention of the white oak, a tree is such a great stand-in as witness to changes, isn’t it? I used to maintain that we needed community approval to chop down any tree older than ourselves. Not realistic, but a useful guide to remind ourselves that another living being has “seen” much more than we ever will in our short lives.
Yes; and I think Joyce Kilmer nailed it. To be a poet at his level would be quite an accomplishment. I have to content myself with being somewhat agrarian in the soybean department. I suppose there is worse.