September Sweeps - Day 582

I stayed another day at the cabin, but not to get work done.  Mostly, it was time spent with the family, and that's fine, but it wasn't a trip to accomplish much.  My brother wasn't here, at least, so we weren't given chores to do.

Today was the day--first time this year--that my nephews and I went looking for frogs and salamanders, something we tend to do every year.  There are tiny little chirping frogs up here by the lake, and they are impossible to keep alive (mostly due to their size and fragility), but there are good-sized salamanders, which are bigger, but still hard to feed.

We caught a bunch of the tiny frogs, which I told my nephew he could use to feed his two remaining big green frogs, but which he was too soft-hearted to do.  We didn't see a single salamander, and I'm not sure that was the case this year.

At one point, while walking through the woods, we saw a huge fallen tree that had landed on--and knocked over--two smaller trees, and was wedged partway up on two other large trees.  I didn't describe it so well, but I took a couple of pictures, and made my nephews climb on top of it (the thirteen year old was worried his weight would make it fall, and I explained that it weighed over a thousand pounds, and his weight wasn't going to make a difference).  

Then, I climbed up myself, and thought it would be fun to walk up it as high as I dared.  But as high as I dared turned out to be about ten feet, as a lot of the bark had fallen off and it was slippery to walk on, and I was afraid of falling off.  Trees are fun, though.* 

As far as writing goes, I didn't even try to match yesterday's productivity, and I don't know that I'd want to.  A guy I know told me that it's good to take a break when you do anything creative, so you can start generating excitement and new ideas again, instead of what I'm currently doing, which is shoveling coal into a train's engine without ever stopping to refill the coal bin.

I'm now, if I had to guess, at about 97% finished with my book.  Maybe only 95, but that's it, the last lap, the home stretch, the final inning, the ultimate sports metaphor.

Sit-up today: 144
Sit-ups In September: 655

At one point, my brother-in-law's older brother came to the cabin with two of his kids and a new daughter-in-law, and my sister realized we didn't have enough food to feed them all (my uncle and his family was also coming up today), so she said she was going to drive down the canyon to the little town to pick up some more food.

We didn't remember it was Sunday, though, and the only grocery store within thirty miles of here is closed on Sundays.  We did find a dollar store in the next town over, though, and loaded up on an unbelievable amount of junk food and candy.

When we were driving back, we had to stop in the middle of the canyon, because a long line of cars were stopped ahead of us.  No vehicles were coming down the opposite way either.  After a couple of minutes, we killed the engine, and noticed that people ahead of us were getting out of their cars and walking around, to stretch their legs, or to go up the hill to see if they could find out what was going on.

About ten or fifteen minutes after that--we hadn't moved an inch, but there was a breeze blowing and Classic Rock on the radio--an ambulance came up the road behind us, followed by a sheriff's truck, both with their lights flashing.  The ambulance drove down soon after.

For more than a half hour the traffic was stopped in both directions, and then the police had each lane take turns going around the wrecked truck and camper that were still blocking one of the lanes.  I didn't believe there were fatalities--the damage to the truck didn't look that terrible to me--but a crash is a crash.  As we were driving away, we could see a red helicopter approaching in the sky, and I assume it came from the hospital.

Push-ups Today: 111
Push-ups In September: 607

In the book I've been writing, I've had in mind that one of the characters gets in a car accident, driving their vehicle off the very road we were stuck on (up ahead, various cars and trucks did three point turns and made their way back down the mountain, deciding to go somewhere else, or maybe make the hour long detour to get up the mountain without going up that particular canyon road).  While I THINK I've described it in this blog, there's a long winding road I take each time I go to the family cabin, and the road is narrow and remarkably close to the edge of a sheer cliff in many places.  

I have often noticed how there's no guardrail, and how easy it would be to simply plunge over the side, and wondered how many accidents there are on it every year (I'd have said fewer than one, since I never saw any in the years I've been coming here--though unless there were skidmarks, it's totally possible a car could drive off the edge, and not be discovered for hours or days [or longer]).

It was disturbingly ironic that today was the day I wrote about that car accident in my book, and it was the first time I'd actually seen an accident on that road (though I did see a vehicle off the side of the road, having just hit a deer just two or three weeks ago).

I've only ever been on the edge of the canyon road once, so I have no pictures (besides this one) of how steep it is.

Later, though, I thought about it, and wondered why they needed a life flight helicopter, when the road allowed an ambulance to go up and down.  And I put the pieces together: why the helicopter, and why there was only one crashed vehicle on the road when we finally drove past.  If they had somehow towed the second vehicle away, or it had driven down on its own . . . that wouldn't explain the helicopter.  No, the most likely thing is that there was only one crashed truck on the road because the other one wasn't on the road at all anymore.  Very dark.

Words Today: 739
Words In September: 6575

*There are uncountable trees up here in the woods, but a great many of them--maybe one in twenty, maybe one in a dozen--are dead.  And when it rains, or the wind blows hard, and especially when it snows--I'll bet--some of those dead trees fall over.  My brother wants to chainsaw a couple more before the season is over, but have me hold onto them or yank them with a rope so they fall someplace safely, instead of across the road or onto the cabin or the shed.  Apparently, chainsaws are fun too.