Sorry I've been away!
I finally got into Kenosha this past Wednesday. I spent a few days there unloading and organizing stuff. Danae has a pretty demanding school related schedule right now; on Saturday she stole some time to come pick me up, but until then I was having a nice time hanging out with family. I didn't want to deal with writing something lengthy on my tablet, and in fact was mostly away from social media. Then, I spent the last day and a half here doing more organizing and putting away. I'm finally getting settled in, and will be here more consistently in the future. I missed you all!
I want to tell you the whole story of my drive here; it was an adventure! I'm glad I was by myself. If I feel at all responsible for someone else, delays and problems stress me out because of their impact on someone else. When I'm alone, it's all part of the unanticipated. I'm already looking back at it from the future and thinking of the stories I can tell even while I'm in the midst of it.
The night before I left, I was sitting in my underwear on the floor of my mostly empty apartment, removing the wheels from my bikes. A knock came at the door. I got dressed and opened it to find my landlord, who was there to warn me that there would be freezing rain in the morning. He suggested I move the truck to the street, in case the parking lot became so slick that it was impossible to get out. Seeing the wisdom in the suggestion, I did so. It would lengthen my last few trips with stuff, but there wasn't that much left. I finished the work and curled up on my blankets in the corner.
The next morning, the parking lot was basically a sheet of wet ice. So was the street in front of it, which climbs one of the steeper hills in the city of Syracuse. Loading the truck, I discovered that my remaining possessions made for rather more trips than it seemed possible they would the night before. I'd hoped to get on the road shortly after waking up, but it took more than an hour to cart the rest of my stuff over the slippery slopes. I also ended up leaving my chairs and dishes; I meant to get them to a thrift store, but it didn't quite happen. I apologized to my landlord in text. I also left my crockpot by mistake, but that's easy enough to replace.
Driving out of Syracuse and through New York state was slow. I was avoiding toll roads, so I ended up on some really sketchy routes, including a hilly dirt track in the area of Friendship (once known as Bloody Corners, according to Wikipedia). There, I lost momentum halfway up a hill and carefully rolled backward to the bottom in neutral before starting up again. With momentum on my side, I crested the rise and continued. The trip was taking much longer than I expected.
It wasn't too long, as the crow flies, from there to Mount Jewett, Pennsylvania and the Kinzua bridge. As the truck drove, it was a notably longer trip. Roads in the vicinity of Alleghany National Forest were winding paths through mountainous terrain. Plows were actively doing their work as I rolled along them, and I was happy to end up behind one on the occasions that I did. Significant elevation change had me worried that I'd get stuck halfway through an uphill passage again. Instead, I ended up sliding off the road on a pretty level portion of curved road. I was driving pretty cautiously; slow and paying active attention to the feel of the vehicle. So it surprised me when I found myself suddenly sliding gently but inevitably to the right, ending up in most of two feet of snow on the right shoulder. As Super-mechanic Juan put it when I told him the story, it was one of those moments where a calm assessment of the situation only produces the realization that there's nothing to be done, this is simply where your life is going right now.
Rocking back and forth made no progress, so I got out to assess the situation. I was safe and had a warm truck for shelter, but was clearly not going anywhere in the immediate future. I could call a tow truck, but that would cost money I didn't want to spend. The other apparent option was to try to dig myself out. I've often thought, when dealing with stuck cars, that if one were to just remove all the snow causing the issue, getting the vehicle moving again should be straight-forward. So, I started clearing a path in front of the truck. A right triangle, formed by the front of the truck, the side of the road, and the connecting line as the hypotenuse. (Look; I know math words!) I spent some forty-five minutes on that, working with my shoes and a single wool glove whose mate had disappeared some time back. I had maybe a sixth of it done (there was a lot of snow there!) when a helpful man came along in a Jeep and offered to try and pull me out. We got his nylon towing strap attached to the front axle and he gave it some gas. We moved the truck forward a good fifty yards or so, but it wasn't getting any closer to the road; it was just moving along the shoulder. Of greater concern, said shoulder was getting steeper and steeper as we moved. Finally, I waved out the window for him to stop, concerned tipping over. I was actually worried about getting out of the door, with the truck canted over some 25 or 30 degrees, but I disembarked and helped get the towing strap moved to the rear. The Jeep driver pulled me back around where I started, nestled in some disturbingly deep ruts in the snow and dirt, but couldn't make much progress from there. He gave it a couple of moving starts, which was working decently until his heavy nylon towing strop broke.
The driver was concerned about leaving me alone, but I assured him I'd be ok and he went on his way. I went back to clearing snow away when another man came along and offered his help. This guy was driving a pickup truck, and had not a nylon strap, but a heavy chain. We got it wrapped around the front axle and I once again gave the truck some gas and tried to aim it up the hill. It was to no avail, and soon I was at the worrisome portion of shoulder again. I'm not sure why they both wanted to go forward; the ground was flatter in general to the rear, and the shoulder less intimidating. On my suggestion, we decided to go the other way, but when I got under the truck to remove the chain, I couldn't. The force of the pulling had wedged the chain between the axle and some other piece of hardware; maybe a sway bar attachment. The helpful guy got under with a hammer (he had an amazing variety of tools in his truck!) and knocked the chain loose. Wrapping it around the metal step on the back, he used his truck to pull and yank me back down the road from whence I'd came. After some engine-revving, wheel-spinning, and rubber burning on both of our parts, I was back on the road! I effusively thanked the driver and lamented that I didn't have any cash on me to give him some pizza or beer money. One of the drawbacks of living a mostly cashless life these days.
Between the morning packing, the dangerous roads, the snowstorms, the slow-moving plows, and spending an hour and a half or so on the side of the road, I was about five hours behind schedule when I finally arrived at the Kinzua bridge. It was kind of a ridiculous destination to drive to in a loaded moving truck, but I have no regrets; I'd do it again in a minute. (Though I'm glad I spend the extra $200 on insurance, and that I wasn't pulling a trailer on those roads.) I drove past the entrance the first time and had to turn around. I don't know why; somehow it was in my head that the bridge was on the other side of the road, so I ignored the sign for Kinzua Bridge State Park and continued on to Mount Jewett, three miles down the road, before turning around. Once I got back to the park, I decided the parking lot was snowy enough to be a bad idea, so I parked on the side of the road with my blinkers on and jumped out with my camera bag. I didn't bother with my jacket. Another visitor to the bridge asked me what the secret was to staying warm in just a t-shirt as I walked out on the bridge in the chill wind hundreds of feet above the valley floor. I said that riding in a hot truck for twelve hours or so did the trick for me.
It's difficult to describe the bridge, and I don't have my camera card reader here so I'll have to post pictures after my next trip to Kenosha and back. It's one of those things whose scale just seems too large to contextualize it as a human-made object. It's a relic from the age of steam whose like will not be created again. It was a memorable, amazing thing to see and I'll write more about it when I have some pictures to share.
From there, I decided it was time to head straight for my destination. The weather had cleared up for my bridge excursion, but once I was on the road the snow and rain returned. Somewhere in Ohio, things were bad enough that there were brief spans where I couldn't even see motion of the road ahead of me for the snow. I crawled off onto the shoulder with my hazards on, made a social media update, and napped. I slept later that night too, finding a space in a Wal-Mart parking lot in eastern Indiana in the wee-hours of the morning. I slept until the truck got cold enough to wake me. I started the engine and slept long enough for the heat to wake me, then turned the truck off. I repeated that cycle for four hours or so, waking up with a much clearer head and a headache to accompany it. A couple of Aspirin took the edge off and I continued on to Illinois, finally arriving in Evanston around 7 or 8 if memory serves. I juggled Danae's car and my truck to make room to park it, snuggled my partner who I was giddy with joy to see again, and fell asleep.
I'm getting settled in here, though there's still a lot of organizing to do. And getting rid of crap. I have *so* much stuff and I need to cut down. But more on that later.
It's good to back here. I've missed you!
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