JANUARY 4, 2023 – Mylène got her wish: being snowed in at the cabin as the world around us turned into a winter wonderland.
While for several days we’d enjoyed the gorgeous winter scenery outside, and inside, played cards and Scrabble and kept the wood-burning stove loaded with oak, the window was closing on our escape. Casually, at one time or another, we’d eyed the forecast—“snow”—but we’d failed to read the fine print or, as it turned out, the not-so-fine-print. At about 3:00 Tuesday afternoon, while Mylène attended to work matters, Beth, Byron and I piled into my car and proceeded down our drive. Our objective was the windfall of Norway pines at the end of Yopps Road, three-quarters of a mile away. Beth planned to take a snow hike from there while Byron and I took a chain saw, bow saw and pruning shears to the downed pines—for gnome home materials and to rescue a pine that had survived the pre-Christmas storm but was bent to ground by the snapped trunk of an adjacent victim.
At the base of the steep incline at the end of our drive, I made two mistakes: 1. I shifted into low gear; and 2. I failed to accelerate on the run-up to the base of the hill. These pilot errors were the equivalent of having the flaps of an aircraft at the wrong setting for take-off and pulling back on engine power instead of increasing it. Halfway up the hill, we lost momentum, and on the icy surface under an inch of new snow, the vehicle slid backward . . . and off the runway.
For the next hour, we shoveled and used the age-old tricks of jamming planks and stuffing twigs under the tires, but as darkness lurked in the woods on each side of the drive, we knew we were in a fix. Time to call our neighbor, Grizzly John, who has a stable of tractors and vehicles for heavy duty operations.
As if he’d been waiting for our distress call, he was on the scene within minutes. An hour later, however, John’s tractor of choice—a John Deere—was stuck fast just ahead of our car. After shutting off the machine, John slid down from the seat and said without complaint that he’d “deal with it in the morning.” I noticed that he was whistling.
By this time, I was growling. We’d planned to leave the next morning for the cities. We still had Beth’s car back at the cabin, but given that two vehicles—my car and John’s tractor—blocked the hill, her car would have no pathway. Plus, now the plowman’s way down the hill was blocked.
The weather forecast was turning uglier by the hour. We considered all the possibilities, one of which involved shoveling out a rarely used spur that connects our drive with Grizzly John’s properties. If we could use that spur, we could wend our way around a few tight corners behind John’s cabins and out-buildings and find our way out a back way, circumventing the troublesome hill at the end of our drive. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
