Between Some Rocks and a Yard Space

Some days you’re the windshield, some days you’re the bug, and some days, you’re a backwoods past-her-prime school teacher in a Tahoe crushed under a flatbed truck hauling tons of freshly-harvested rock.

Thank goodness the last one did not come to fruition! The Pony and I met that flatbed truck down on the flat section of our gravel road yesterday afternoon. I was able to pull way over by the creek and let him pass. Another few yards, and we would have been pinned by a telephone pole, and a few more past that was the Great Chasm hill-curve, with nowhere to go but backwards for a quarter mile. Val is not good at backing. Have you heard? T-Hoe’s backup beeper is kaput.

Between the telephone pole and the Great Chasm, we passed a truck pulling a trailer loaded with a Bobcat. The mini bulldozer machine, not the animal. I scrunched T-Hoe off the roadside, up under some tree limbs and let it go by.

From the top of Great Chasm Hill, I spied a white truck cab through the woods, up by the neighbors’ barn. No way was I going to attempt Barn Hill with a flatbed truck loaded with tons of rock coming at me. That Barn Hill is as twisty-turny as a pig’s tail, and has ruts from running water three feet deep at alternate sides. Plus a big tree two feet off the road near the top.

“Pony. There’s another truck coming. I’m going to get over here out of his way and let him pass.” I turned onto our homestead road, backed up, and sat facing where that white truck would come out. And waited. And waited.

“Mom. There’s nothing coming.”

“It’s there! I saw it. He might be waiting for me to come up.”

“No. I didn’t see a truck.”

“Go look.”

“You want me to get out and go look?”

“Yes. You don’t have to climb up the hill, but go over to Great Chasm Hill, and look up through those trees.” The Pony trotted over. Looked. Ran up Great Chasm Hill. I assume he looked again. He was out of sight. Shortly, he returned.

“I see that truck. It’s stopped. I think he’s waiting for you.”

“Okay. We’ll try it. But I can’t back down this hill if he starts toward me.”

Up we went. There was the white truck cab hooked to a flatbed semi loaded with rock. It was parked at the top of the Barn Hill, on the wrong side of the road, by the tree. I had to drive on the neighbors’ yard to get around it.

Let the record show that no driver was in the truck. I could have waited an eternity for him to come down that hill. Hick reported that it was there when he came home at 5:00, and there were three guys working on it. He stopped to ask, and they said the brakes were locked up. Doesn’t make me any more confident about encountering them on the downhill.

“We’re leaving school later tomorrow, Pony, so we don’t run into this again. They must quit at 4:00 and haul out their spoils.”

I KNEW this was going to happen. Fie on the people who sell rocks off their land! Wait. That’s us. But not on the road we live on!