Choose Your Abode Wisely!

Driveway of Doom

November 24th, 2009

I had put my car in park, leaned back in my seat, and finished listening to Dream Weaver on the radio before I had to take the long walk up our steep driveway to the house. My sports car wasn’t able to make it up the steep incline due to how low it was to the ground, making it necessary to park at the foot of the driveway. My wife had an SUV, and of course she didn’t have much of an issue, rarely did she have to practice her mountaineering skills. Every time I exited my car, I’d look up the drive way and wonder what the original owners must have been drinking to build a house on the side of a cliff; then, I would realize I must have been drinking the same concoction when I signed the lease. Anyway, we were moving from Arizona to Massachusetts in late summer and we failed to fully consider the hill with snow and ice on it. My daily commute to and from work, carrying the groceries to the house, and just trying to do nice things for our children were made much more difficult because we rented the house on the hill.

Serving in the Navy, I wore a uniform and a pair of hard soled, patent leather shoes to work. The shoes were ok for walking around office spaces, but didn’t offer much traction or stability when traversing the great outdoors. I normally left for work early in the morning, it was always dark, and occasionally the morning frost would make the pavement slick. During the months we lived in the house, I fell to the ground more times than I can count tearing holes in at least a dozen pairs of pants. Heck, one fall morning, I slipped to the ground and dropped my cell phone. I could hear the phone skip down the driveway, across the road, and into the deep brush. Not a great way to start the day.

One snowy afternoon, my wife and sons returned from a trip to the grocery store. Her SUV was unable to climb the snow covered rise on this day making it necessary to hand carry everything up the hill. I was in the house and received a phone call from her to come and assist in the transportation of the newly bought vittles to the house. I walked out the front door and looked down the hill to see my family looking back up at me. Between us was the hill covered with a foot of snow that had fallen the night before, but what I didn’t know about the terrain before me would provide for a family story, which even to this day, brings wide smiles, well, for everyone but me that is. During the time my family had been at the store, the temperature warmed just enough to melt the surface of the snow, and then quickly froze again producing a dangerous coating of ice. The first couple of steps I took should have been a warning. When I walked, my feet would break through the icy layer with a crunch indicative of a frosty, potentially hazardous surface. The layer of ice became thicker the further I moved away from the ambient heat produced by the house. I stopped walking when I realized my steps no longer penetrated the ice layer. I am now to the crest of the decline and I am standing on the ice. My feet slowly start to move without any prodding from me. I was starting to fall. I reached for the decorative railing that lined the driveway only to find it too had been coated with ice. As you may be aware, ice does not a good handle make. I hit the ground, the small of my back landing on a 4”x4” piece of wood. I screamed out in pain. I could hear my wife yell up to me, “You alright?” I groaned, “We had cans of tuna; you could have waited until tomorrow!” I could hear my boys laughing. Bill Cosby had it right, if you bring them into this world you should be able to take them out… Anyway, I worked myself back up and with each step, stomped the ground to break the ice to make me a foothold, I repeated that until about half way down the hill, and it was then I hit a piece of ice that would not give. My foot flew outward, followed quickly by the rest of my body. When my upper-back hit the ice-covered snow, it made an indentation large enough for my body to lay without sliding further down the hill. The next thing I remember was looking up into the sky and hearing my kids laughing. I slowly and carefully stood up; I was in pain from head to toe. I looked to my wife for moral support only to find her working very hard at holding back tears, those tears would have been a comfort to me had they not been motivated by the shear pleasure of my discomfort. I muttered to myself, “Dang it.” Then I yelled for all to hear, “I hate this hill!” As before, I attempted to stomp the ground to create a foothold. For some reason, as my body was making its way back to the ground, I recalled something Einstein had said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” This time I hit the ground with enough force to knock my breath away, but not hard enough to break through the ice. My body started to slide the rest of the way down the hill. I was heading right for my wife’s SUV and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Thank goodness I had picked up enough speed to hit the SUV with enough force to make a resounding “thud” that knocked off some of the remaining snow from the roof and made me cry out like a woman in labor; otherwise, I don’t think my wife and kids would have got so much enjoyment from the whole episode.

Our sons have always had a great relationship with their grandparents; as a matter of fact, each summer they would spend a majority of their vacation time visiting them. During one summer they were away, my wife and I decided to buy a car for one of them. We shopped around and located an older four-wheel drive truck. The truck required a lot of engine work, but I had the time, tools, and the knowledge so we made the purchase. I drove the truck to our house and up the steep driveway, all the while heavy smoke bellowing from the hood with the distinct smell of oil burning. Backed the truck into the garage and got straight to work; I had three weeks to get the job done. If I wasn’t at work, I was spending the time completely rebuilding the engine, and two days before my sons were to return home I completed the job. We took the truck for a test drive and all went well. The look on my son’s face when I handed him the keys made all the hard work worth it. We piled into the truck and he drove us around town. After driving around for a while, we returned home and we parked the truck at the top of the driveway. I stood near the front of the truck with my son beside me. My son looked at me, and I could see he was trying to formulate the right words to express his gratitude for the unexpected gift when we both heard a “POP” followed by a clicking noise. The truck was starting to slowly move down the driveway. “Click, click, click.” It was starting to pick up some speed. I jumped for the passenger-side door and open it. With all my might, I was trying to hold the truck back from careening down the driveway. My son ran to the rear of the vehicle and started to push, but gravity would prove to be to powerful a force. I told my son to get away from the truck, he argued. I insisted. Once he was safely away and with no other options, I let the truck go. It was just a handful of seconds that had passed from when my son was attempting to express his thankfulness to the destruction of his new, prized possession. By the time the truck had reached the largest tree at the bottom of the hill it must have reached a speed of nearly 40 miles per hour because when it hit, the roof crumpled, all the windows blew out and the driver’s side seat actually broke away from the tracks it was secured on. Needless to say, my son was just as crushed as the truck.

That driveway, we in the family refer to as the cliff, provided us with, now that most of the wounds are healed, many humorous stories regaled at just about every get-together. At the time, I truly hated living there because of the inconvenience it caused me. But, even with all the physical pain the hill inflicted on me, I now look back on it with a certain amount of fondness because it has provided family stories I am sure my great great grandchildren will hear.

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