I’d battle Everest for Captain Crunch

“Because it’s there” always seemed to me a stupid reason to climb a mountain. A burning house may “be there” too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to walk into one. If I see a large pile of collie droppings at the park, I don’t feel compelled to step in them simply because of their proximity and physical reality.

Some things are meant to be avoided. Like mountains.

Yet sometimes, life forces us to step in that poo, walk into that burning building. Climb that mountain.

Such was the case for me yesterday.

As I mentioned last week, I broke my leg recently while trying to remove fallen branches from the roof. They were numerous, since my little house is surrounded by large, evergreen-type trees, each more malicious than that apple tree that waylaid Dorothy during her trek to Oz.

The doctor at the emergency room ordered me to keep the leg elevated for a week or two. At first blush, this sounds like advice I would be happy to hear. I mean, feet up, TV remote and a couple good books close at hand, maybe a bottle of wine to augment the pain meds … I could spend a week like that.

The reality turned out to be somewhat less festive.

Living alone, as I do, means just that: I’m alone. It didn’t take me long to realize that every trip to the kitchen for a glass of water, every meal prepared or dish washed equates to about 20 minutes of pain from a leg that’s supposed to be resting quietly on a pillow.

It got old fast. But the worst of it (so far) was that after a few days, I ran out of food. I was down to nuking the last few permafrost-encrusted bowls of leftover chicken soup I’d squirreled away in the freezer last March.

My mind kept straying to the car, buried somewhere beneath a foot of ice and snow at the at the top of the driveway. The snow in the driveway – the long, curvy, incredibly-unsafe-for-human-use driveway – also was about a foot deep.

But at the bottom lay the open road that leads to the grocery store, where they sell chicken pot pies and sausages and Captain Crunch and potatoes and beer; all the things I had run out of days earlier.

Eventually, the allure of food free of freezer burn won out.

The prep work I put into my expedition would have impressed Sir Edmund Hillary. I covered my cast with plastic to keep the water and snow out; I attached metal ice-gripper things to the bottom of my left shoe; I bundled as if the top of Everest really were my destination.

It took me 10 minutes to hobble down the steps to the “staging area” at the top of my ludicrous rollercoaster of a driveway, another 15 to clear away the ice and snow that had accumulated on the car. By this time my broken leg was singing “Ave Maria” in a very high key.

It took some rocking back and forth, but I got the car rolling. Due to the steep incline, the car eventually lurched forward.

Home free. So I thought, until I came around the last bend and saw what the snowplow guys had left me. Now, no one appreciates clear roads more than I do, and I know all that snow has got to go somewhere. I’m just not sure why that “somewhere” has to be the foot of my long and already-perilous driveway.

But there it was. A wall that would repel more illegal immigrants than anything Trump might have in mind.

It was too late. I couldn’t go back. Using my left foot to work the pedals, I attempted to perform a maneuver I once saw on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

This story might have ended with me dead in the front seat, frozen or starved to death. Instead, my wonderful neighbors who live in the corner house arrived with shovels and, more importantly, youth, to help dig me out.

I assisted as I could, which basically entailed slipping on the ice and landing on the leg I had broken only days earlier. Also, I had to WALK back up the looooong drive to fetch a bag of driveway salt. And then down again.

By the time the car was returned to solid pavement, my leg had abandoned “Ave Maria” and had moved on to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a key even higher than the one Freddy Mercury sang it in.

Home from the grocery, I parked out back, at the bottom of the snow-covered, trackless hill. I managed to make it from the car to the house without the help of a Sherpa, rope or regularly-spaced pitons, but it took a while.

So if you’re walking around the lake this summer and happen to see an old guy sitting at the top of a very tall hill sipping a margarita and enjoying the sun on his face, just know this: I earned it, baby.

I earned it.

Breaking branches and bones

Two-hundred-six.

That’s how many bones there are in the adult human body. That leaves me with 204 I have yet to break.

Like most everyone else in town, last week’s climatological fun and games left me with no power, no warm water and – by far the most serious crisis – no Wi-Fi. I lasted a day before I made arrangements to stay elsewhere for a while. I do not come from hardy pioneer stock.

When the twister had passed and Auntie Em again poked her head up from the root cellar, I returned home. But instead of finding the real-life counterparts of the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow, I found trees. Lots and lots of trees, all scattered across the roof of my little lake house.

On the bright side, my furnace and water heater were back in business. The pump that carries water away from the house (there’s a name for the thing, but I don’t know what it is) was kaput. Fortunately, workers from Greenville’s excellent Water Department not only know what that pump is called, but they showed up an hour or so after I reported the problem. They fixed it.

For all intents and purposes, I had rejoined civilization. I tried the internet and it was still there, exactly as I remembered it from four days earlier. My streaming TV services were intact, though the programming had not improved. Still no free “X-files” reruns.

Despite the limited television offerings, I was glad to have things back to normal.

I charged my Kindles, my phone, my watch, my iPad, my laptop; all the things which, before the power outage, I had taken for granted. I threw out the food that might have gone bad from spending four days in a room temperature refrigerator and replaced it with new food from the grocery.

I opened a bottle of pinot noir, put on fuzzy pants and prepared to settle in for the night, comfortable and secure in my little lakeside paradise. The wind outside howled, but I was cozy and warm.

I tried to ignore the sounds coming from the roof, the scraping and rumbling of branches scudding against tiles and vinyl siding. I tried to relax.

But as I sat there on the sofa, trying to get into a book my daughter recommended, I started thinking about those branches. Some of them were big, maybe eight inches around, 10 to 15-feet long.

I lack any sort of forestry experience, but my guess was some of the branches were pretty darn heavy. And like I said, there were a lot of them up there.

Snow was falling, steadily adding to the weight. The creaking sounds I heard, as of ceiling joists slowly buckling beneath great pressure, may have been only my imagination. Then again, maybe not.

I did not rest easy that first night back, though the pinot helped.

The next day I decided to be proactive, something I rarely do unless there’s a good chance 15,000 pounds of lumber are going to fall through the roof and kill me in my sleep.

I got up early (which, in these post-retirement days means noon), bundled up in a half-dozen layers of winter-resistant fabric, and headed out back armed with a shovel, a small electric chainsaw and a ladder. Now, anyone who has read this column before is already aware those tools are, for me, the trifecta of death. In a perfect world, it would be against the law for me to own any tool more dangerous than a corkscrew.

I placed the ladder against the side of the house, plugged in the chainsaw, secured the small snow shovel to my belt with a carabiner – so I’d only have to make one trip up the ladder – and proceeded to climb.

One rung, two rungs … there was no third rung. None that my foot made contact with, at any rate. The snapping sound I heard when I hit the ground was all too familiar. My right leg this time.

A 200-foot, hilly crawl through drifting snow got me to my car, which got me to the Spectrum emergency room, which got me to a doctor, who fixed my leg (or at least set it on the path to healing).

Linda, one of my neighbors from the other side of the lake, put me in touch with a guy who knows how to operate ladders, shovels and chainsaws without breaking any bones. The branches will soon be gone. And in four-to-five weeks, my leg will again be fully functional.

While I wait, I’ll use the internet to discover new and exciting bits of knowledge. Like how many bones there are in the adult human body.