An Old Adventure: In Which There is a Farmer, a Lot of Snow, and Some Crappy Pie

I realize it's been a while since this blog was active, but I miss it, so I thought I'd get it back in gear. Bess and I can post old and new adventures, I figure, and thus both enliven your existence and give us something to do with our day.

This tale both begins and ends with a Flogging Molly song. The song is Between a Man and a Woman, off the album Float. Now, I was walking around today, listening to Float, when I realized I always skip over that song. I wondered why. The song, for some reason, made me feel vaguely embarrassed. Could it be the heteronormative nature of the title and lyrics? No, that wasn't it. The fact that although a fairly decent song it's not the best one on the album by a long shot? No, that wasn't it either. And then it came to me. This story will take us back to Wisconsin, and to the year 2008.

Bess and I had decided that, for spring break 2008, we would go up to my grandparents' cottage in rural Wisconsin. The reason that my grandparents have a cottage in rural Wisconsin is that they are Czech, and Czechs love two things almost as much as they love beer: having a cottage by a lake, which they equate with having basically all you want in life, and forests of pine trees planted in straight rows. I can't explain that second part, but Czechs can't get enough of those, and Wisconsin has tons. Anyway, I know spring break in a cottage sounds debauched and potentially MTVish, but that wasn't the plan. The plan was for us to lock ourselves up and write. And drink too much, and watch Doctor Who. So basically exactly what we were doing while in school, but with less internet access. We accomplished all the goals admirably.

(We actually got a lot of good work done. An odd side effect of the no-internet thing, though, was that when I, as I habitually do, awoke one to two hours before Bess, instead of going online, I would go out into the kitchen, sit by the window, and read a book. For some reason, I was reading Fanny Hill, just so I could say I had. This meant that most mornings Bess would lurch out of her room to find me sitting at the kitchen table, book open in front of me, whereupon I would greet her by saying "you will not believe how the narrator just described a penis. It's goddamn ridiculous." I can think of worse ways to wake up, but not more surreal ones. Yeah, that was our spring break. What was yours like?)

It was all going pretty well. We actually had a number of adventures in Wisconsin, but I'm only going to tell you about one right now. Anyway, we had driven into town one gray Sunday. I don't know why. Probably to buy food or liquor. Sadly, nothing was open. Feeling defeated, we headed home. As we were driving back along the snowy roads, the Flogging Molly album Float, which had been a source of much inspiration for us that Spring Break Week, was playing on the stereo. I went to round a corner.

I should stress here that I was not drunk. I am stressing this, not because I EVER drive drunk (I do not) but because I think it made me exceptional as far as Wisconsin drivers are concerned. A few nights earlier we had been in a bar, and when I turned down an offer of a second beer since I was driving us home, the entire bar stopped talking and just STARED at us like we were insane. It was just like a movie; the music on the jukebox even came to a comical, screeching-record halt mid verse.

The guy who'd offered the drink said "So? There are no cops out there."

"No..." I said. "But neither are there streetlights. And there are trees. And deer. And ice on the roads." He was not convinced, and he drove home after about 12 beers and as many shots of Dr. McGillicuttys. (I probably misspelled that, but I sure as hell am not looking it up. I ain't gettin' paid for this.)

So yeah, the point is, I was not drunk. Alcohol was in no way involved in this event. But my general poor driving skills, and the state of the Wisconsin roads on an April morning were involved. I turned insufficiently hard left, and ended up sending us skidding off the road into a snowbank.

In times of danger, one's life is said to flash before one's eyes. I don't recall a life, just an oncoming snowbank. And I remember thinking "well, fuck." Bess says that she was trying to figure out what the deploying airbag was going to do to her lip piercing. Fortunately, the airbags didn't deploy, and when the car came to a stop in the snowbank, we weren't dead. We were, however, in a snowbank.

Having assessed the situation, the first thing I did was turn off the music. And that's the connection to the Flogging Molly song. The entire crash happened with Between a Man and a Woman playing in the background. And of course, like all dramatic moments, the crash happened in slow motion, so we probably heard, like, half the song. So that's it. I hope you weren't hoping for something cooler or more dramatic. If all you cared about was why I don't listen to that song, stop reading now, but then you'll miss the part about the pie. Anyway, all our efforts to get the car back on the road failed, so we did the logical thing and started walking up the driveway to the farm across the street.

I don't remember why we didn't just walk home and try to call a tow truck. Maybe Bess does. Probably it was because there wasn't internet in the house and the phonebook was from 1979. And we couldn't call from where we were, because cell phone reception was so nonexistent in Wisconsin we left our phones in the house. So we were pretty stuck, and the farm seemed like a good place to start; it was certainly closer than our cell phones.

We noticed as we approached the farmhouse that this place had a lot of dogs. Also cows, but the dogs were really making their presence known. There was a wide range of dogs, too, from tiny little comical purse dogs, running around up to their chins in snow to Labradors and some sort of dalmatian mix. The one that was grabbing our attention was a German shepherd. It had that way of barking that German shepherds have of saying "this is not a bark. A bark is a friendly, happy noise, such as might be made by a collie before it catches a frisbee and rescues a small child from a well. This is the noise I make before I rip your throat out and chew off your face. Because I hate you." It's a bark to be respected. Also there were these dips in the driveway that were covered with thin sheets of ice that sometimes you could walk on, sometimes you couldn't, and we kept tripping when they broke and slipping when they didn't. It sucked. Neither of us had shoes for dealing with snow and ice, because our plan had been to park in a parking lot, go into a store, and buy beans or something, not get caught in a snowbank. We kind of skirted the fenced in part of the yard, calling "hello? Is anyone who is not a cow or a scary dog home?"

A guy came outside. He was very nice, and drove us back to the street in his pickup truck to take a look at what could be done about the car. We asked him about calling a tow truck, but he pointed out that it was Easter Sunday, and we were in Ruralland, so that probably wasn't going to work. Fortunately, this guy was a badass. He lay down under the car, despite the snow and him having an artificial hip, and an artificial knee, and concluded that nothing important was broken, though a big, vaguely important-looking piece of plastic did, in fact, come off in his hand. Then he went to get some chains from his truck.

First, though, there was something he wanted to clear up. "I used to be a cop," he said. "So I need to know; are you on drugs?" We assured him that we were not. "And you have a license?" he asked next. I assured him that I did, and that Bess, who wasn't the one driving, would get one as soon as possible. He nodded. "Just have to make sure before I can help you," he said. The questions really were not unkindly meant, he just needed to ask them. He dragged our car out of the snow, and we were on our way.

Thing is, no one could call me and Bess ungrateful. We wanted to do something nice for him to show that we appreciated him pulling us out of the snow. We had offered awkwardly to pay him for his time, and, you know, lying down on the snow with an artificial hip and knee, but he said no, so we figured we'd do something else. We'd get him something! Something nice, and full of gratitude. The next day, or rather, Tuesday, since it turns out Easter Monday is a holiday too, we went into town and started trying to find something.

We were at a loss. The only thing open in town was the grocery store. We considered a bottle of wine, but not everyone drinks wine, and people in Wisconsin who do tend to drink way, way too much of it. We thought about some...what do you get people? Flowers? There were no flowers. Uh...we had no idea. Eventually we went to the bakery section and bought a pie. I think it was apple. It cost 4.50. We were ashamed of our pie, but it was the best we could do. We got a card, too. We drove back to the farm house.

The saga of getting to the door was just as fun the second time around. The scary dog didn't like us any more now that we were bearing a shitty grocery store pie, although the hyper little dog seemed just as enthusiastic. Eventually the guy came to the door, and we said, and I quote "hi, sorry to disturb you again. Thank you for getting us out of the snow! We got you a pie. Happy Easter!" Then we went home and tried to forget all about it. We are really not very good at expressing gratitude in baked good form.

So that's why I've been skipping that song. Because it reminded me of how dumb I was getting stuck in the snowbank, and of how lame the pie was that we bought to thank the guy who got us out. But that's a silly reason, so I'll probably start listening to the song. Except it's not a great song, and it's right before From the Back of a Broken Dream, which is a great song, so who knows? I'm just glad I didn't crash during a song I really liked. That would be sad.

More past-adventures to be written up soon! Tell your friends. Tell the world.