No, not the college basketball thing, although it does bring me no small amount of mirth listening to the herd of teenage boys that constantly surround me lament some of their bracket choices. What I am talking about is MUD SEASON.
Every March (and sometimes April), North Idaho goes through Break Up. After a long winter full of freezing temperatures and snow cover, our ground has to release the frost and moisture it accumulated over the winter. It's lots of fun.
You see the signs everywhere. On the highways red flags are hung on the speed limit signs which means that you will get to see people losing their minds. The red flags herald break up limits which means that all large trucks have to drive a blistering 30 miles per hour.
I feel for the truck drivers during this time. Me, I just leave an extra 20 minutes or so early when I have to go somewhere. And I am not going to say that I don't ever feel a twinge of annoyance when I get stuck behind a truck that has to go 30 in a 60, but it's part of living here in our beautiful North Idaho, and really, it only lasts for about two weeks or so.
However, I really don't know if having the trucks drive slower helps protect the road or not as things break up, because our roads are a train wreck after every winter. Big hooves erupt, axle-breaking asphalt craters depress, and there are impatient people trying to paint the roadway with their vehicle parts and their own biological matter when they try to pass thirteen cars and a truck going thirty only to get stuck behind another truck going thirty.
Anyway....mud season also has implications of inconvenience closer to home.
My road is a dirt road. Well, the previous owners dumped tailings on it for twenty years, but as I am in what was probably an eddy during Glacial Lake Missoula, my property has no rocks. What I do have is between 4-6 feet of silt. It's just plain awesome during breakup to drive on my driveway.
Now, I have a couple of glorious neighbors who live on the acreages adjacent to mine, and we have all gone through a mud season or two, so we have the drill down pat. We go out in the morning when the mud is still frozen, don't make a zillion trips to town, and tend to have text message fests about which parts of the road are the worse.
However, this year we have a new addition to our neighborhood. He's from the state that shall not be named. Me, I don't care where people are from or how often they move. It is their manners and behavior towards others that I am interested in. This new neighbor bought the five acres adjacent to my next door neighbor a few years ago. We had him over to dinner at my other neighbor's house because it's cool to introduce yourself to your neighbors. At least I think so.
During the Taco Introductory Dinner, we discovered that the guy was a tech dude form So Cal and he wanted to do the whole homestead in the country thing. That was a cool sentiment, but as he was wearing moccasins in March and thought he could just pull into people's yards with his motorhome and hook up to their frost free water hydrants without asking, well, I knew we were in for a good time with this particular guy.
Over the past few years my instinct has proven sound, he has been a source of entertainment (and sometimes exasperation) with his antics. But, as he didn't live here yet, it wasn't that big of a deal.
Well, the WunderCali finally moved up here this winter (A terrible time to move here unless you can't help it), he has a well, but no power, a motorhome, but no septic, and oh ya, he has a dirt trail not a driveway.
The ingress to his place looks about like you would expect it too, a mud pit that people with Jeeps and UTV's would salivate over upon setting their eyes upon it. The ruts into his property are at least knee high, and he keeps driving his old Ford F250 on it, making at least 42 trips to town a day.
The problem is, his road (mess) joins with my road and his 42 trips a day isn't helping matters at all. The goal during mud season is to let the road do its settling thing so it gets all solid faster. We all get it, we've lived through it for years. I try to limit driving my truck (big vehicles=bigger ruts), the tractor gets a well deserved vacation, and my poor little car looks like I use it as a mud bogging vehicle for a couple weeks.
Well, the other day, after no less than six UPS trucks hot rodded up my driveway, tearing the stuffing out of it, I started feeling this feeling that's uncommon in my diminutive form. Annoyance.
"Doesn't he see how bad the road is?" I grumbled to myself, wondering why Wundercali getting so many deliveries.
The other problem is that he doesn't have his road marked well with a street number, so the UPS trucks were coming up to my house and my neighbor's house, causing even more un-neccesary damage.
Finally, this past Wednesday, yet another big truck was rodding up my road. I was out raking winter's bounty of pinecones when I tossed my rake on the ground and walked toward the very confused looking UPS driver.
She was barely old enough to be licensed, and I felt for her, because it was obvious by her pale visage and heightened respiratory rate that she was not used to Mud Season roads.
"Are you looking for Wundercali?" I called to her kindly, I felt for the poor girl.
"Um, I'm looking for (she rattled off his street address)." she replied, her voice shaking like a newborn calf's raspy moo.
"Well, that's that nightmare of mud right over there," I replied congenially, pointing to the trail of no return.
She went on to tell me that the box that said deliveries at the start of his driveway had an arrow pointing to that house there. The arrow pointing house was my neighbor's abode.
The poor kid looked so distressed that I offered to walk over and see if we could just leave the package with my neighbor. She didn't answer when I knocked but I told the driver to just leave the box on the porch and I would go get my phone and text my neighbor, because my she knew how to get ahold of Wundercali.
The girl thanked me profusely and I told her once again how sorry I was that she had to endure our road. She smiled and turned around, in the process she created a spectacular new rut next to my equipment shed. I sighed and started toward the house to get my phone.
Before I had gone ten steps my neighbor hailed me, she was home! She had also hailed Wundercali. I told her I was going to go trench some of the ruts so the water would drain, and she walked with me over to see the damage where Wundercali's driveway merged with ours.
We both sat there and commiserated like those who are experiencing discomfort from the mystifying actions of others do when Wundercali came out of the woods and towards us.
My neighbor started in on him, saying that the delivery trucks were tearing up the road and his street cardboard deliver here sign wasn't working. Was there anyway he could put up a better sign for deliveries?
Me, I was smiling like an insolent corgi. I did pipe up and let him know that the hubs and I had trenched the worst spots in the road so they could drain, but all that was in vain if several heavy vehicles a day were going to be lumbering down the road.
Wundercali replied, "Is it always like this? I don't remember it being like this last year."
To which my neighbor, in her very blunt older woman way snapped, "You weren't here during breakup last year!"
In order to diffuse the situation, I jumped in, "Yep, it's like this every year for a couple of weeks."
It was then that Wundercali dropped a statement bomb of the I'm still scratching my head in amused wonderment kind on us,
I instantly bit down on my cheeks. My friends, it took all my will power to not start guffawing like a drunken donkey. Did Wundercali just say he was thinking about shop vacuuming the water out of the road ruts?
"Wundercali!" I exclaimed in a valiant attempt to retain my adult decorum, "that would be a ton of work!"
"Everything's a lot of work!" he retorted.
I couldn't help it, by then my smart donkey mirth smile had reached Defcon 5, I had to walk away before I got myself into to trouble. The thought, You're 10-ply, bud caressed my lips, desiring to be set free into the aether.
Well, I've got trenching to do and a yard to rake, you both have a nice day!" I bleated and stalked off to get things draining. I don't know if Wundercali saw my shoulders shaking because the farther away I got, the more I exploded into laughter.
That poor guy has a long road ahead of him. Then again, maybe he can just get out the shopvac....
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's probably in more possession of common sense than some poor unfortunate urban transplants, iPhone.
