Paper, Scissors, Rock…
I find aging a phenomenon that allows one to laugh more and more at oneself as one tries to maneuver life while letting go any sense of the illusions our heads are filled with when young, like…you know…things matter?
I blogged earlier about how this winter was tough on my car as I kept taking out mailboxes trying to live on a gravel road in a brutal winter. Cracked bumper from hitting my own mailbox, and scratches and crease dents from hitting one of my neighbors mailboxes..
Well, the last several weeks, I was in southern Illinois doing business-related research throughout the southern 25+ counties. Unfortunately, I happened to schedule the trip at the same time the area was beginning the dance with an unfolding natural disaster – 13” of rain in 36 hours.
This rainfall shattered old records by 6-7” – i.e., a doubling of the old record rainfall. Record rainfall leads to record floods. I happened to get there about 24 hours after the rain had stopped. This means, the research, which involves interviewing people and being ‘on the ground’ talking with businesses, farms, churches, and mayors and city clerks, was happening in the midst of roads closed in every possible direction.
Now…near the motel I was in…I watched water fall 15 feet during the time I was there. Problem was that thunderstorms kept rolling across the area. So it would go down a few feet, back up a few feet. It was a mess. And try to navigate an area you know nothing about when flooding is busting through the record books. You keep coming up to “Road Closed Due To High Water” signs and you have no idea if there are shortcuts, or if you have to go allllllll the way back around in some convoluted fashion which will add a good 45 minutes to an hour to get to the town 5 minutes across the water. Best bet? Use the map.
With such heavy rains, comes mud slides. Okay…hill slides. This is Shawnee National Forest area, so one minute you’re driving in flat Illinois farm ground and then you’re in limestone hills and ravines, not real big usually, but steep in many ravines…and the hills simply gave way…trees and all. In other words, the area was a mess, and under a lot of stress.
So first evening there, I am driving around trying to learn my way to towns where I need to do some interviewing, and I come around this corner on a small hill and a tree is blocking the road that has slid into the ditch from up the hill. Not a real big tree…maybe 20-25 ft tall, maple, with root-ball in the ditch and canopy laying across the road. In other words, I needed to turn around…probably.
But it was getting to be dusk. I was less than a mile from my destination. I could see the water tower of the town easily. I looked at the map, and it would have required a very substantive back track to get to this town from another direction. I looked at the tree. The dusk. The map. The tree. If I backtrack, I can only pray that I don’t come on another closed road as the effort to get back to here would be different than the path that got me here now. Tree. Map. Dusk. Size of tree. Size of branches in canopy. Map. Dusk.
Now, I’m thinking,...branches are wood and they bend and break. The car is metal. Metal takes more to bend than tree branches take to break, right? And…it takes a lot less to get through the canopy than to drag the car out of a swollen creek or river I didn’t know about until I ran right into it. And I don’t know that taking the roads on the map will still get me here because who knows how many of those roads are blocked.
That’s right. I drove gingerly through the canopy.
I have a ’98 Nissan Altima that a friend sold to me when she moved to Europe. It’s simply a car to me, a thing in which to get around. I have no major connection to it. I got it cheap and it was in good running order. Now I have almost 180K miles on it, and it’s having issues.
Like…scratches across the hood and roof and trunk from my underestimating just how much damage wood can do to metal! Not just scratches in the hood, but crease dents with those scratches. Like… a big dent in the passenger window front doorpost. The dent in the window-post means my car likes to whistle now because the dent mal-aligned the post and the molding.
It took me a couple days to understand just how much I damaged my car. And all I could do was laugh. No one’s fault but my own. Thought metal beat wood. What else can one do but laugh?
But I mean…don’t scissors beat paper?
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| Rock, Scissors, Paper...Right? |
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