Chapter XIX

 The road conditions had not impreved while we tortured out digestive systems. If anything they were worse. I think a mist was rising up off of the Columbia River and treezing on the road. Get the car up to about 45  mph and it would start drifting around on the icy road. One mistake and the truck would be out of control.

I would work the speed up to 45, the tires would start slipping, Liz would start yelling in my ear and I would slow down until the tires stopped spinning. Going up the far side od the bridge each time I slowed down, it would be a couple of miles an hour slower when the tires spun. This kept up on the hill after you got off the bridge. By the time we got to the top of the hill we were down to about 15 miles an hour. Man was I ever glad to see the road level out.

Once you get out of the Columbia River Canyon, the rooad pretty much levels out. Moses Lake, Ritzville, Soap Lake. Wheat fields rolling on oth sides of the road pretty much all the way until right before Spokane, when the trees come back and civilization starts peeking over the horizon. By then we were road tired, but out destination was only about an hour away, so we didn't stop. Although the scenerry had improved, the road had not. It was still white nuckle driving for another hour to get to the property.

It was a great relief to turn into the driveway, past the tattered old barn and milking parlor. and up to the house. So many memmories came flashing through my head, that I had to just sit there for a while. Of course Liz was immediately "Well, you gonna sit here all night, or can we get out? I hope you told the renters we were coming, or you can sleep out in the barn. I am famished, thuy better have something set out for us."

Chapter XVIII

Eating while travelling can be a real adventure. I have come across world class restaurants in the most unlikely places.
The best food I have ever come across on the road  is the Rimrock Restaurant just up the road from Capitol Reef National Park. When I walked it, I expected to find your normal chicken fried steak and mashed, but instead ended up enjoying a cranberry demi-glazed steak done to perfection, with fresh vegetables. It was one of the best meals I have ever eaten.
Not so with the Golden Harvest Cafe in Vantage. It was more like what I expected from a roadside restaurant. A menu heavy on fried foor, biscuits and gravy, coffee that would eat a hole in concrete, and silverware that had long ago lost it's luster. This is something I have never understood. One of the first things a patron sees when he enters your cafe is the silverware. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it should look like it has been taken care of. I guess I know where school cooks go when they retire.
The food is generally bland, so as not to offend. Various condiments are available on the table. The latest trend seems to be putting them in an empty six pack carton from some local brewery.
The double bacon cheese burger with fries would do my cholesterol no good, but wasn't too bad if you managed to scarf it down before the grease congealed. I assume it was hamburger, but the color didn't support the theory that it was anywhere near fresh. The bun was brown, and had started out stale, and wasn't improved by being seared on a dirty grille.
Liz ordered a green salad, and it was no better than my burger. Limp lettuce. Iceberg of course. Everyone pictures iceberg lettuce when you talk about salad, but it is the worst lettuce on the face of the Earth.
You know why it is so prevalent? because when we first became capable of  moving fresh produce over fairly long distances, it was the variety that stood up to transportation the best. Not taste, not texture, not appearance, not dietary reasons. You can throw it in a refrigerated rail car in California and it will still be relatively intact when it gets to Chicago.
On the farm we grew most of our own produce, and I favor Bibb, Looseleaf, or Black seeded Simpson. Anything other than Iceberg. If I was to order a salad in a respectable restaurant, I would want to know what it's made from. A good dash of vinegar/oil/spice dressing and you have a good salad.
The waitress called everyone "Hon" or "Sweetie" looked like she had worked about a twelve hour shift and her feet hurt. But she was prompt and treated us nice, so I left her a nice tip.
Liz surprised me by being silent during lunch. I had figured she would lay into me for stopping to help someone we didn't know anything about, and I had prepped myself with all the possible replies, but she  never brought the subject up.
I now knew she would lie in wait for a moment of weakness, aen pounce on me like a lynx on a rabbit.
So we wished the waitress a good day and climbed into the Power Wagon and got back on the freeway, crossing the Columbia River on the Vantage Bridge.




Chapter XVII

     Liz was a study in conflicting emotions. She was so pissed off at me that you could practically see the steam coming out of her ears. At the same time she didn't want to embarrass herself in front of a complete stranger.
She rolled down the window about two and a half inches. The poor guy, out there freezing his butt off had to stand on his tip toes and turn his head sideways to talk through the slit. I barely withheld a chuckle.
"Can we help you?" she mumbles through the crack.
Hi there, my name is Bill, Bill Wright, and I seem to have gotten myself in a little pickle" his booming voice filled the crack. The voice said "Salesman" without him saying anything more. "I was coming down off of the pass and all the sudden the front end started drifting off center. The more I corrected, the worse it got, until I was going down the road facing in the wrong direction, then WHOOSH! off into the bushes. I'm not ready for this stuff, I don't even have a heavy coat or anything, and I'm like to freeze my hiney off here. Is there any way you could help me out here, I got a meeting in Spokane this afternoon at 2 and i really can't be late. There isn't any cell service out here, and I been waiting for a cop to come by or something for a long time now."
All in one sentence, all loudly. No introduction, no small talk to ease into conversation, just there it is, deal with it. He was probably a pretty good salesman, but I was having a hard time feeling to sorry for him.
Liz was not quite cowering by the window, and I imagine if she said anything it would come out as a squeak, so I jumped in when he caught his breath.
"Seen your headlights pointing up the pass, figured you could use a hand."
I could see a couple of tow hooks attached above the front bumper, so I figured this would be an easy rescue.
"Let me get it set up straight ahead and get the winch cable payed out"
He gets a little nervous and kinda dances from foot to foot like a kid that needs to use the facilities. "You know what you're doing? my insurance probably won't pay if you screw up my car yanking it out of the bushes."
I seriously thought about leaving him there and driving off.
"Well, Bill you can either trust me or you can sit here and wait for someone else to stop, makes me no never mind."
So he apologizes profusely so I position the Power Wagon directly in front of him and play out the winch cable, and hook it to the right tow hook on the front of his car.
I told him to get in and start his car, put in four wheel dive and low. When the winch takes up the slack, let out the clutch and gingerly try to get it up on the road.
I set the emergency brake, and take up the slack in the cable. It tightens up til it starts to pull at the Blazer, and the damn fool guns the engine, so his rig jumps up on the shoulder and comes rocketing towards me. I jump out of the way to keep from getting squished between the vehicles and he puts his drivers side headlight right into me bumper. Smashed it pretty good.
Of course the Power Wagon is high off the ground and has heavy duty bumpers, so all it does to me is scratch the paint. Kinda hard to tell, since there are so many scars and colors of paint on it already, but I figure there was a new scratch in there somewhere.
"Look what you did! You should never have pulled so hard with that winch! How am I gong to explain this to my insurance company?"
I quietly went over and disengaged the winch cable and brought it back in, with him jitterbugging alongside chirping the whole time. He's lucky Liz was along or I might have done something I would regret later.
Look here Bill, you better get out of my face or I'll put you right back where I found you, but I'll bust out your other headlight so no one can spot you, and maybe they'll find you next spring when the snow melts. You were obviously not prepared for the driving conditions. You don't know how to drive in this, but you figured your four wheel drive gave you some kind of invulnerability. Guess what? It doesn't, and you can't stop any better with four wheel drive than you can with any other car."
"But my headlight!"
"Consider it a cost of getting rescues. I told you to ease it back on the road, not gun it. You're lucky it wasn't worse. Not to mention the fact that you almost ran me down because of your stupidity." Now I'm climbing in the truck and heading on my way. You keep your speed down, or you'll find yourself in another ditch."
I climbed back in the power wagon, eased it into gear and started on down the road. Liz was sitting there on the other side of the cab looking kinda peaked. She opens her mouth ans starts to say something.
"Don't even get started, Liz, I know what you're going to say before you get started. Just let it rest until we get to LaGrange, then we can sit down to supper and you can have at it."
It was already cold in the cab, but I swear, the air got downright frigid right about then. That's OK, I wasn't much in the mood for conversation.
We were a little past Ellensberg when I saw Bill coming up behind us. His headlights would sort of wobble, than right themselves then wobble again.
He passed up doing about 60, and I thought to myself "That damn fool didn't learn a thing the first time. If he doesn't watch it he's going to end up in the ditch again."
We pulled over at Vantage, where the freeway crosses the Columbia River to get gas and lunch. I had a fair amount of gas still, what with the dual saddle tanks, but given the road conditions I wanted to be a little extra safety margin, and the weight would help steady the truck, especially going over the bridge and up the far side of the canyon. The winds can be fierce. I have seen the wind pick up a camper and dump it over in the next lane. It is an unnerving sight.

Chapter XVI

We get settled in the Power Wagon, down off the hill, through the Mount Baker Tunnel and and across the floating bridge.
The Floating bridge has always amused me. There is something anti-logical about a major highway being supported by floating boxes made out of concrete. It has mostly worked well, except for the time they were working on it and left some of the doors to the pontoons open when a storm blew in. Major portions of the bridge are now a fish sanctuary. Of course they replaced the sunken portions, but the concept amuses me. Mostly.
Out through Issaquah where the forest meets the city. The weather was typical Pugetopolis in November. Gray skies and something between a mist and drizzle dropping on us. At about the Denny Creek exit, the fog/mist/drizzle became freezing fog, and the wiper blades had all they could do to keep the stuff off of the windshield.
The last couple of miles up Snoqualmie Pass were a pain in the butt, but as often happens, once we got over the top the skies cleared up, which I was glad to see. What I was not happy to see was the road covered in black ice.
For those of you not familiar with the concept, let me diverge for a second. Black ice is insidious, because you are not sure it is there until you hit it, and then it is generally too late to do anything about it. A thin layer of water on the road froze on the road, When you see it, it just looks like the road is wet, and you can continue to travel on it as long as you do not accelerate, decelerate touch the brake or gas pedal or attempt to turn even slightly, at which time you will begin to lose control of your vehicle. What usually happens is the back end of the vehicle begins to travel in a very slightly different direction than the front end. You MUST not do anything sudden like step on the brake. Hopefully you will have enough maneuvering room to SLOWLY AND GENTLY encourage the front of the car to realign itself with the back. If you don't panic or over react, that is all you need to do. What usually happens is you over correct which swings the front end of the car too far over and you begin to travel down the road sideways. So you over correct in the other direction, and at that point you spin in circles while going forwards. At this point there is not much you can do but take your foot off of the accelerator and let the vehicle have its way. Hopefully it will travel in a more or less straight line down the road until it comes to rest. Then you will sit there with your hands shaking and in a state of shock for about 20 minutes, until you came to the conclusion that you and your vehicle and fellow travelers are intact. Then you SLOWLY get the vehicle underway and up to some careful speed.
With the Power Wagon, this speed is 45 miles an hour. Up to 45 the truck will handle OK. 46 miles an hour and you can feel the back end start to move around.
When we hit the top of the pass, it was black ice as far as the eye could see. We found this out by losing control and ending up sideways on the edge of the road, with Liz doing her "Oh My God I'm Going to Die" scream in my right ear. When I am doing my best to get a sticky situation under control, screaming in my ear is not at all helpful.
When we got stopped she was saying "I think we should just turn around and go home. This is obviously way too dangerous. No sense in risking life and limb."
Seeing as she had just maligned my ability to handle the weather and road conditions, I commenced to get pissed off. I told her "You can get out here if you want, but the truck and I are going to go on, so unless you want to walk I suggest you buckle up you seat belt and hang on."
Once I knew we were on black ice, I just put it in four wheel drive and dropped down a gear, and everything went OK. More or less.
We had gone as far a Lake Easton when I saw blinking tail lights on the side of the road and a guy in a business suit frantically waving on the side of the road. I have gotten myself stuck a few times and someone always came along and lent me a hand, so I felt obligated to stop. Of course this was over the objections of Sis "You don't know who this person is, they might be an axe-murderer!" "That's why you get to talk to him. I'm going to pull along side, you roll down your window."

Chapter XV

The first decision was which vehicle to drive. As I said, I have several, and enjoy each of them in a different setting. If it was high summer and the weather was decent, I would break out the 1960 Jag Mark IX and float down the freeway in style, But seeing as it was November, and the weather was due to be crappy, I had to forgo that particular choice.
The choice was coming down to a couple of alternatives.
The Blazer S10 4X4 was pretty good all around in all kind of weather. It had taken me into and out of a lot of places. But the forecast was questionable and road conditions were expected to be icy. The Blazer was a little light for the trip. So I opted for the big Dodge Power Wagon.
It was heavy enough that nothing was going to slow it down, and it was geared so that in the lowest of lows it could practically climb a tree. With the winch I could get out of just about anything. It wasn't fast and it wasn't pretty, but it would get you wherever you wanted to go, and back again. If you had to ask about gas mileage, you shouldn't own it.
And besides. my sister hated it. That was always a plus to my way of thinking. Although I was reasonable environmentally conscious, my sis was a fanatic, and it would bug her all the way to Idaho to be in a huge gas guzzling fire breathing exhaust belching behemoth. And besides that it wasn't pretty. It had done honorable battle with brush and trees and ditches and mud and water and snow and sand. The two tone blue and white paint was several different additional colors. Rust and primer of several shades as well as mud and muck.
Liz Lived in an upscale area of Queen Anne Hill. I could feel her cringe as I pulled up, hoping none of the snobs in the neighborhood saw her getting into the truck. Al least she was only carting a couple of carry-on bags. I don't understand the impulse that drives women to pack everything AND their good shoes when they are going to some place like La Grange. There is no high class accommodation. The local restaurant and taverns would be a waste. She knew I would never put up with her usual six bags. Besides, if she brought them, they would go in the bed of the truck, since there wasn't that much room in the cab of the truck. Her expensive shoes would be ruined by the time we got there. I packed a single gym bag, and figured I had everything I needed and then some.

Chapter XIV

All this flashed through my mind between the crackle and hiss of the bacon frying in the morning. It was kind like dream time. When you are in dream time it seems like hours have gone by, but when you check the clock, it has just been a couple of minutes.

This whole trip down memory lane had been precipitated by an offer on the Home Place from the power company. A mile or so up the road from our place, the road took a little joggle and when it recovered it's senses it was eighty feet to the West of where it had been.

Snuggled right up in that joggle was a power station. Been there forever. Also seemed that someone was always going straight instead of joggling and taking down the power lines. Didn't do a heck of a lot of good for the driver either.

So a couple of things were going to happen sort of all at once. The State Department of Highways wanted to straighten out the road for a couple of reasons. Back at the turn of the century when they were logging off the old growth, they would hold the logs in a holding pond up the stream from where we were located, and when the Spring flood came they would release the logs to ride the flood down to the lake. That made the stream a navigable waterway. Most of the summer you could not even "navigate" an air mattress down the stream without a lot of portaging.

The highway crossed a gully right where the main stream intersected the little rivulet from our property, and the road occasionally washed out. But because it was a navigable waterway, the DOH could not impeded or otherwise interfere with its natural flow. By moving the road eighty feet East they would eliminate that whole problem. But that meant that the Substation needed to go. It also meant that the main house, the barn, chicken coupe, hog pen and milking parlor had to go. The proposal was that the State of Pandemonium would condemn the buildings and buy the westernmost five acres of land, and then the Power Company would buy the rest of the section, put the new and improved power station on the South west corner and leave the rest as nature preserve to get green credits to offset whatever nasty shit they were pulling somewhere else.

I was all in favor of taking the offer, but Sis was having a considerable trouble turning loose.

It was HOME, it was the FAMILY CASTLE, it was our LEGACY, wrote all large on the Earth. But neither of us was going to drop our lives out here on the coast and move back there to manage the place. As far as the State seizing the property, there was nothing that could be done. The property was going to be condemned in the interest of "The greater Good". That's a term the Government uses when they are about to screw you. Just relax and think of the greater good while we screw you. There was enough of the hard headed Irishman in me to want to bow my neck and dig in my feet, futile as that might be. But I was reminded of the cartoon I saw of the little mouse standing there giving the owl the finger right before he became a former mouse.

The letter from out Attorney had come in the mail the day before. laying out all the details. It all looked all legal and proper. I couldn't see any reason in delaying the inevitable, so I called my sister to set up the trip.

"Oh Pat, I can't see how you can be all so calm and unemotional. This is THE HOME PLACE". the way she said it, it sounded all in capital letters, too.

"Lizzard Breath, we've been over this a bunch of times, so drop the hystreonics. It's business and we don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. I'll pick you up in the morning about 8:00"

"EIGHT? That's like the middle of the night I don't even get up that early when I go to work."

"Well. that's the time your transportation leaves, and if you don't want to walk, take the bus or charter a small plane, you had best be ready. And dress warm. Probably nothing will go wrong, but it's best to be prepared."

Chapter XIII

Sunday found me out at Sea-Tac doing the hurry-up-and-wait routine. There were four of us on the survey crew, the Senior Lead, an Engineer, a Manufacturing Engineer, and me, the Mechanic.

I figure that sitting right there in the lobby of the Airport was more experience at building and repairing Aircraft than anywhere else in the world. Our Senior Lead, Ernie was amazing. Here was a guy that had done it all, been everywhere. If in real life you wanted to do a "Flight of the Phoenix", Ernie was the guy you would want in charge.

He could figure out a way to do just about anything with a basic set of tools. If you couldn’t get something you needed, chances were that he could MAKE one out of sheet metal using nothing more than a torch and a ball peen hammer.

In between making phone calls to Star’s mom’s answering machine, I asked what was going on.

"Took one out body surfing" said Ernie. "They landed it in a thunderstorm, and didn’t bother to stop at the end of the runway, so it’s out there in the water. Took the front landing gear off, but the mains are supposed to be OK. It’s a fairly recent 757, so parts shouldn’t be a problem. The good news is that the gear didn’t wipe out the e/e bay. The bad news is it’s under water."

Most everyone knows that electronics and salt water don’t get along very well. The black boxes down there are not cheap, running from $25,000.00 on up. Everything down there shorted out, so the repair was going to be a couple of million dollars, double that if the engines were wasted, which was probable.

I called for Star again, and got her mom.

I have never gotten along with her mom. Delia figured Star could do better than a glorified knuckle dragging jet jockey.

She reluctantly turned the Phone over to Star.

"How you hanging in there, Star? How’s your dad?"

"Not so good Pat. They still have him in Intensive care. He is getting a little better, but not as fast as they would like. It is still touch and go, but the odds makers think he will make it. The prognosis is a long recovery, and he may not ever come back all the way".

"I’ll pretty much be out of touch for a couple of days. I’m at the Airport on my way to Grand Cayman to check out a bird out in the water. I’ll try to get through to you whenever I can, but I can’t promise much. We pretty much work 12 hours a day seven days a week when we have a repair going on. It’ll take a couple of days for us to do the damage survey, and then we’ll be back here to put together the repair kits, then back on the road as soon as we get the OK from the Insurance Carrier to proceed with repairs. Then it will be back to Cayman and probably a month or so on site to do the repairs. I’ll be in touch."

No lovey-dovey stuff. There was more in that conversation that was there and went unsaid than was spoken right out loud. It left so many questions unanswered and unasked. I figured that time would bring up anything that needed to be dealt with.

It has always been my way to work around the edges of things rather than hit them head on. Saves a lot of bruises on the head.

So off I went to Grand Cayman. Not a lot to talk about there. We did our repair estimate. I got into a big argument with the lead engineer. I thought that the structural stuff in the e/e bay should be replaced. He said that since it hadn’t suffered any structural damage it would be OK. I thought to myself "Salt water, aluminum and electricity. Doesn’t sound like a good combination to me. Once you set up electrolysis in aluminum, there’s no stopping it.

When we were on site, the Engineer told us to wipe down the shelves and racks with denatured alcohol to remove the salt. But like I figured, when we came in the next day, everything was covered with a gray fuzz.

Repeated cleanings did no good, and eventually we had to replace the structural stuff. I felt vindicated, but I also resisted the impulse to rub his nose in it.

I managed to call Star a couple of times. It was difficult getting through. If her mom answered the phone, she was never there, and she didn’t know when she would be back.

A couple of times Star answered herself. Her dad was going to live, but probably wouldn’t be able to work for a long time, if ever. I felt sorry for the guy. He lived for his business, and it was about the only thing he had to keep him going. If he couldn’t go to work it could literally kill him.

By the time I got back, Star had quit her job and moved back home to help take care of her dad. I called her now and then, but it was a busy time for me. There seemed to be a series of accidents one after the other for about six months. By the time the spate of accidents was over, I had pretty much lost contact with Star. She was still in La Grange living with her mom and dad, taking care of her dad, who had never really recovered from his heart attack.

Star was a pretty effective business manager, so the Pharmacy has been turned over to her. She hired a new Pharmacist to replace her dad, and kept the books with a little assistance from a part-time book keeper. The business could almost run on automatic pilot, because there was no competition, and the demographics of the area would support one Pharmacy very nicely.

I missed Star, but our relationship had not really gone anywhere. It was right there hanging on the edge of something, but we let it pull back because of the circumstances.

Sometimes I lay awake at night and wondered what might have been if her old man hadn’t had a heart attack at exactly the time he did.

So I slipped back into my regular life. I was going to say normal, but normal isn’t really a word that applies to the way I live. Long hours of hard work under brutal conditions. Typically 72 hour weeks, with maybe a couple of months without a day off. Usually around 1,000 hours of overtime a year.

It lets me play as hard as I work, and I don’t hurt for the comforts or playtoys.

Yeah, the rent on my flat is probably more than your house payment, but I have a couple of playtoys stashed away in a garage downtown that would bring tears to the eyes of a motorhead.

And when I take the Jag out on a fine fall morning on the back roads, things will be temporarily as good as it gets, if I only had someone to share it with.