"On the Road Again"

[Spent the afternoon at my parents' house with them, my sister and her family. So nice to all be together and to watch the kids open Christmas gifts. It's not often that I feel paternal urges but it happens every so often when I am around my nephews and neice. They really are a hoot, especially the twins, Luke and John. Dad played Santa and handed out gifts to everyone and they kids had a blast ripping open presents and playing with their new toys. It's always nice to see my sister Julie and her husband Wesley. They are really good people and I like being around them. Was also nice to see my mother surrounded by her grandkids and playing with their toys with them. They are such a source of happiness to her. Dad looked and sounded good excpet his face is still broken out with the rash. I don't know why bad things happen to good people. It doesn't seem fair but there's no sense in dwelling on the whys I guess. My Dad has never done anything to hurt anyone in his entire life. He's a great man, greater than I will probably ever be. I admire him so much. It's crazy how much I used to hate him when I was a teenager. God I was such a brat. Some of it was just your everyday run of the mill teenage crap but a lot of it was due to the disease of alcoholism. For most of my life I considered myself before everyone else. I was self-centered in the extreme. I wasn't always this way though. It took time to develop. By all accounts I was a very good child, sensitive, polite, kind, playful, good-natured. I'm not exactly sure what happened but my Mom has said that it seemed like one day I went off to school and another kid came home. This would have been when I was around 12 or 13. Perhaps not coincidentally this was around the same time I got drunk for the first time and started being sexually active with girls.

At one point during the day my Dad went outside to smoke and I followed him. Suffering from lung cancer and still smoking I know but what are you gonna do? We stood next to the garage out of sight of the kids and talked in the cold beneath bright blue skies and trees stripped of leaves. Their branches skeletal and shifting in the winter breeze. Dad said he'd been thinking about the farm and came up with an idea last night. He ran it by me to see what I thought. His idea is to buy a mobile home and put it in the upper field, a place where I'd told him years ago I wanted to build a house. Instead of trying to remake the cabin into something it was never intended to be he thought it more effecient to just put a pre-made structure up on the mountainside, put in a septic tank, central heating and air, pump water up from the spring box or dig a well. He'd make the investment and I could pay him rent to recoup the costs. I could live there while I'm starting my new life and building a real house. He's so much more realistic than me about things. I've always been a risk-taker and not afraid to just put myself out there on a limb, let the challenges come and I'll deal with them at that time, cross that bridge when I come to it kind of attitude. Often it's been burn that bridge when I come to it actually! He's wise. For years I thought I was smarter than him. He still tells me I am but I know I'm not. As far as I've come I know life has so much more to teach me. There is no substitute for time and experience. I've done a lot of living in my 37 years but he's done more in his 66 for sure.

Dad hasn't mentioned this little plan to my Mom yet and asked me to keep it quiet for now, to just think it over. It's a sound idea, more sound and plausible than trying to retrofit a one room summer cabin into a year round residence. It's 10 degrees at the farm today with a wind chill dipping down below zero. I check the weather up there everyday on weather.com to see what it's like up there. I've been up there in those conditions before, living in the cabin.]

CDTM:

When I was 23 years old I moved to the farm and made it 9 months. Come January a giant snowstorm blew in and dumped 40 inches of snow. It was so beautiful and surreal. The cabin sits in a valley a few hundred yards from the Bluestone River. The gravel and dirt road that serves as the driveway through our farm is steep and rutted. With 40" of snow laying on it we needed a bulldozer to get it clear. We got two separate 4 wheel drive pickup trucks with snowplows on the front stuck trying to push the snow away. Mammoth banks of snow piled up in just a few feet of scraping. It was crazy. For heat I had a wood-burning stove inserted into the fireplace and kept it going around the clock. In addition I turned on the electric heat registers. With the wood burning and the electric heat going I was able to get the inside temperature to a balmy 50-60 degrees. considering it was below zero outside with 40 inches of snow that wasn't half bad! Before the storm I had wisely parked my truck at the top of our road. I had chains which I used to make it into town and back so I wasn't stranded but in order to even get to my truck I had to hike a mile up our road through the snow drifts. I was 23 years old. I didn't care. It was an adventure. I had 3 quart mason jars filled with sticky, bright green buds of marijuana and an old refrigerator outside under the woodshed stocked full of homemade beer. Let it snow. I stayed stoned for weeks with my dog, my cat and my hillbilly neighbors. We played cards and darts, smoked joint after joint and drank up all my beer. I wasn't working at the time and once supplies started running low I decided it was time to leave. I packed a bag, locked up the cabin, put the cat inside my coat and climbed into the back of a friends 4 wheel drive. My dog jumped up beside me and we rode in the bed of the truck up the steep pass to my truck which waited at the top of the long hillside. Snow was still falling and the cat was kind of freaking out wondering what the hell was going on. I could see her little head inside my coat and flakes falling onto her whiskers. She was meowing and carrying on like the world was coming to end. Jack, my dog, didn't care. Hell, he was up for anything. Aslong as I was by his side he'd follow me into the gates of hell without hesitation. Mercifully we made it to the top of the hill and I loaded my little furry family into my truck, bid the neighbors adieu and drove the truck along the snowpacked two-lane state highway towards the interstate on ramp at Camp Creek. I stopped at the little general store where I had worked during the previous Spring and Summer and took the chains off the tires in preparation for the interstate 77, the road that originally took me and my family to South Carolina from West Virginia and would again this day. Jack lay curled up beside me on the truck's bench seat and the cat was still freaking out so I had to make a jerry-rigged pet carrier out of a cardboard beer box and stuff her in there. She still wailed and moaned but I just turned up the radio and drowned her out. The song was Willie Nelson belting out "On the Road Again." On the road again indeed but I had no idea how long that road would be at the time. I had no idea where it would take me. I just looked out the window and kept my eye fixed on the highway ahead.