“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.
