I was talking to my friend Cathy last night, reminiscing about the good old days when I tried to be a woodsy outdoorsman. I can hear you all laughing right now.
But back then, I was dating an outdoorsy girl, and I have had a long, well established history of being a relationship chameleon… that’s how I learned to ski, how I went snowmobiling, how I learned to drink beer while I drove, and tried my darndest to believe that rodents could make good pets.
As a budding outdoorsman, I tagged right along with Cathy and her family to their cabin by the lake. We didn’t go in the summer very often. That’s not very Northwest, now is it? No, we went in the dead of winter, when the snow piled high into the sky and you had to park your vehicle in something called a Sno Park.
I knew I was in trouble the first time I went. We had to get to the cabin by snowmobile. Since I had never been on one, I took the chick seat behind Cathy and she did the driving.
The cabin was about a mile or two down the logging road. Well, in the winter it wasn’t a road. It was just snow. It wasn’t until all the snowmobiles went down it that it flattened out and became road-like.
I have roughed it before in a tent. Don’t like it that much. I prefer a real roof and real walls. This cabin thing showed promise. When we got there, I reached for the light switch just inside the door. Nothing came on. I came to find out there’s no lights because there’s no power. This presented a problem because I wasn’t sure how I was going to take a lantern into the bathroom without potentially setting off a gas explosion.
No matter. There wasn’t a bathroom. Well, there was, but it was out back. As in outhouse. Things weren’t looking up for me.
However, I am determined to make the most of it. Thankfully, Cathy had made brownies so I wasn’t going anywhere, at least until the brownies were done.
The next day, it was time to go out and have some “fun.” I’m thinking to myself, how much fun can there be outside when it snowed all night and the temperature was in the 20s? Can’t we just play a board game instead?
But I’m still trying to impress the outdoorsy one. So I fein delight and put on my bib overalls, parka, gloves, scarf and snow boots and head outside. There, waiting for us are six snowmobiles. We’re actually going to take them out onto the “logging roads” and make our way up switchbacks, hairpins and twisties to the top of the mountain.
This did sound like fun. I was given the Yamaha two-seater that Cathy had driven the day before. It was the station wagon of the bunch. Everyone else got the sports cars. After a few brief instructions, off we went. It didn’t take long to hit our first obstacle in the switchback. A small avalanche had blocked the road. We would go over it one at a time. I was told to head up it, gun the engine as I did, and lean into the hillside so that I didn’t go tumbling off the cliff to my untimely death.
I did as I was told. I thought I was going to die. I made it to the other side, where there was another switchback. I plowed straight off the road into a snowdrift in the turn. Cathy’s father grumbled about my lack of experience and how I wasn’t paying attention. He got me out of the drift and explained how to drive this infernal machine again.
I had done exactly what he had told me to do. That’s how I ended up in the snow drift to begin with. But I played along. I learned early on that the best thing to do with her dad was to play city boy, i.e., dumb as a rock.
We headed off again. I still can’t get this damned snowmobile to do anything. I was not having any fun. When we finally made it to the top of the mountain, it was beautiful. Well worth the trip. But I wasn’t looking forward to heading back down again, knowing that I would continue to run into hillsides and get yelled at.
When we finally got back to the cabin, her dad tried to show me how this snowmobiling driving thing should be done. He grabbed the Yahama and headed off onto the path. When he turned, it went straight. He did it again. Same result. He then hopped off, chuckled to himself and said, “This thing couldn’t have turned if you wanted it to. Lucky you didn’t get killed up there.”
That was it. I had taken a broken snowmobile all the way up a mountain and back, risking life and limb, all because I wanted to be Cathy’s dream guy. And I almost died doing it.
Still, I had proven myself with her dad. He was impressed that I hadn’t somehow killed myself with his snowmobile. I later got pretty good at that snowmobiling thing, even doing some stump jumping and cliff climbing on the sporty ones.
But I continued to play the stupid city boy for the next two years up there. It was working so well, and it kept me from having to do any real work, like splitting logs for the fire that kept us from freezing to death in the cabin.
It was the wood splitting that eventually tripped me up. We were looking for kindling to split in the woodshed when Cathy came across a three sided box that had been cut in several places. She tossed it in the “to chop” pile.
“Don’t throw that out,” I said. “It’s a miter box.”
From out of the next shed her father leaps. “Ah-hah!” he proclaims. “I knew you weren’t that stupid. I knew it all the time.”
The jig was up. Or should I say, the miter box. The stupid city boy was actually pretty smart. He knew what a miter box was. Actually, he knew a lot more than that.
But my days of “do nothing at the cabin” were numbered. I guess I wasn’t as smart as I thought. Damned miter box.
Out on the Treasure Coast trying to decide if I should saw logs this afternoon on the couch,
– Robb