While my mom was rearranging items in her car trunk, I noticed a hand saw at the bottom of the pile. “Do you always keep a saw in your trunk?” “Yeah.” “Do you ever use it?” “Sometimes.”
Months later, the two of us were on an adventure drive. She was driving; I was navigating. I directed her onto a back road, and my route quickly stopped matching the picture on the map. It didn’t help that some of the intersections didn’t have street signs, and some of the lines on the map weren’t labeled. As we headed deeper into the forest, the road turned from gravel to dirt to mud, until we were on essentially a logging road. Suddenly, my mom stopped the car. A tree had fallen across the road and both shoulders; there was no way around it. By this point, we were probably 10 to 20 minutes in. Neither of us wanted to turn back.
Thankfully, we were in her car. We both thought of the saw in her trunk.
The tree was thin enough that we were able to saw its trunk into a few pieces and drag it off the road. [I say “we,” but about 90% of the sawing was done by my mom.]
We got back in the car and drove on. At some point, we came upon an older man walking with a cane and a Sheltie he called “Nickels.” My mom couldn’t stand the thought of an old man walking for miles alone in the middle of nowhere, so she pulled up beside him and asked if he wanted a ride. He got in, but we left his dog outside because her legs and the hair on her entire underbelly were covered in mud.
At first, the dog ran alongside of the car as we crawled through the mud, but soon we sped up to 20 or 30 miles per hour, and the dog shrank into a spot in the rearview mirror enthusiastically bounding toward us at full speed. Every now and then, the man would call “Nickles!” out the window, as if the dog needed encouragement. I was thinking, Dude, the dog is going to die if you make it run any faster.
We dropped the man off at a house along that forsaken road. He yelled out “Nickels!” for good measure as he exited the car. We may have waited a minute to make sure the dog wasn’t going to keel over from exertion, then headed toward paved roads and civilization.
Nowadays, if a road starts off gravel, the two of us hold out for the next turn.
Photo: Robert Scruggs House, Cowpens National Battlefield, SC