A Drive In the Snow

"It is not going to fucking stop is it?" Eddie asked me.

I shook my head. It was lunch time. We were in the back of his camper van enjoying a glass of vodka with our cheese sandwiches and watching the snow bury the cars around us.

"Going to take us hours to make it home tonight," I said. Everybody in the sawmill was thinking the same thing except for a handful of lifers who have lived near enough to the sawmill to hear it running at night for decades. Back when sawmills ran at night that is.

"If it was not Friday I sleep right here in the van," Eddie told me as if I did not already know.

Eddie and I live where your corn, berries and barn grown marijuana comes from. Snow can mean getting home four, five hours after the last green gold has been sawn for the day.

Back in the mill my foreman told me, "I know you and Eddie are drinking out there at lunch."

"Go fuck yourself," I told him as I got to work. Motherfucker drinks twice as much as I do and fistfucks underage Indian hookers on the weekend is what I hear.

The highway, of course, was as fucked up as Lemmy in '75, '85, '95, 05 or '15. I decided to take my chances on the farmer highways. They were icy and got icier the further I slipped into the sticks. The snow got deeper and deeper until there was no road at all. I knew eventually I would have to climb one of the steep hills from the valley into my buttfuck country city.

I did so with three other brave or just plain dumb drivers. The first one got stuck halfway up the hill. I tried to pass him but got stuck too and had back up behind him. Next up was an RV who tried to pass us both and got stuck in the same place. The three of us sat there wondering what the fuck to do.

Finally the first guy who got stuck (in his rusty old Saturn) tried again and began to make some progress. I followed from a safe distance making the same slow progress. Motherfucker in the RV was probably wondering how the fucking salesman talked him into buying the overpriced, under-engineered piece of Japanese shit he was driving that could not climb a country hill, never mind a mountain like you see such vehicles conquering on tv.

When I got home I poured myself a big glass of cask strength single malt. Got home in just less than two hours. Men do not get to really feel like a man much these days. Today's drive in the snow gave me that feeling. The feeling that nobody fucks with Beer.

Nobody.