It's depressing getting your plow truck stuck, especially when you live in the middle of nowhere.
Luckily for me I have my neighbor down the road, Rollie. Rollie is a true Mainer. Born and raised here, and most likely, hasn't been anywhere other than here. He tells me he's been plowing snow every year since he was about 10. He takes care of all the roads here in the rural development where we live, so anytime I get in a jam, Rollie bails me out. I remember one time we had a big dump of about 2 feet of snow, and I got my truck so buried I didn't think I'd ever get it out. I spent about 2 hours digging and finally crawled back to the house and called Rollie and told him I was stuck. Well he showed up with his old reliable plow truck, took one look at my predicament and says to me "Dave, you ain't stuck, you just ain't goin nowhere". he walked around my truck, thought for a minute, hooked up a tow chain to his truck, told me to turn my wheels and put my truck in neutral and in about 10 seconds I was 'goin somewhere'. Now Rollie is no young fella, he's about 83 or so now, but I also remember one nasty, cold and windy winter day stopping by his house and there he was outside under his truck pulling an axle. It's just what you do if you're a Mainer.
Another joyous winter event I recall was during a sleet storm I was backing my van out of our driveway, which goes up hill, and I could not get any traction, But I kept trying, a little faster and a little further up each time. On about my fifth try the van slid off the driveway on to the edge of a steep embankment. Now I was definitely "Not going nowhere". I was in the driver's seat on the uphill side, but what I didn't realize was that I was the ballast that was holding the van in place. So, when I crawled out of the van, in slow motion, the van rolled down the hill onto it's roof! Meanwhile, DeeDee was watching the entire event form the bedroom window! Good thing there was no 'YouTube'! Rollie couldn't help me that time, that was a 2 tow truck project!
Our next winter activity was "Extreme Sledding" I'm not sure how we got started, but we had these cheap plastic Walmart sleds that we would use in the back yard and the hills at the end of the road. Then we started dragging them up hiking trails. The next thing we knew we blasting down 3 mile runs from the top of mountains. We started customizing our sleds and trying to figure out braking systems. With our friends Nancy, Rick, Lucas and Liz we did some harrowing descents on those crazy little plastic sleds.
One problem with New England winters is that it's not always cold and snow. Almost every winter we get at least one rain storm, that ruins the snow and wreaks havoc with driveways, roofs, gutters and everything. Because after the rain comes down, everything freezes, rock solid! One such event was the ice storm of 1998. A real strange weather pattern cause a catastrophic ice event in most of the Northeast. At our house at the end of the road we were without electricity for 23 days! It took me a day to clear enough trees to get out. Luckily we had a wood stove in the basement for heat and a generator. Another rain event happened in 2004. We had had a lot of snow, so our snow banks we really high, a torrential rain came down flooding our garage and basement. We were up to our knees in water and slush trying to trench the water away. Almost every winter I would be up on the roof shovelling snow. We had a repeat rain event several years later, got my plow truck stuck a few more times, slid into a tree and mashed in the whole right side, lost power at least once a winter. Had several chimney fires, fell on my ass on the ice multiple times...
It was about this time when winter stopped being so much fun.. Oh but then there was 'Mud Season" still to come. That's when it warms up, rains and floods everything, washes out your driveway, fills up youe basement and makes things just miserable.
Then I discovered Mexico
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