A Productive Day

February 18, 2013 - 11:35 PM

I woke up early today, 6:00! That's a lot earlier than most days lately, since I don't have to worry about work anymore, but I knew I had a lot to do today.

The plan today was to get everything ready to make a trip to Phillips tomorrow. Robin & Rachel have a huge stash of food that they've been saving up for the last year, and a whole bunch of food that they got from David McHolland.

I swapped the Vue for Keith's (Robin's dad's) Ford F-250 last weekend so I could bring a big load back to Phillips, where Keith and Patty (Robin's mom) will send the food to us in resupply boxes while we're on the trail.

I took the truck and ran all my errands: fuel up, buy binders, buy an mp3 player, get a haircut.

I went to Appleton and loaded up the truck with all of the food bins - about ten big Rubbermaid tubs in all. The girls even had labels on some of them: 199 instant meals, 110 mashed potato packs, etc. I headed back to Oshkosh to fill up the rest of the truck. I managed to fit in a dresser, Robin's cabinet with all her stickers on it, and a few other bins. I was pretty impressed with how much fit into the bed and the cab!

I decided to go to Phillips a day early, since I was so far ahead. I could still make it to Phillips during daylight, and besides, Mom has cable and I could spend a whole day in Phillips just chilling out. I checked the weather report and saw no warnings of precipitation!

I stopped at Festival on my way out of town to pick up my favorite salsa, Tostitos Cantina Style Chipotle. Can't get it at Pick & Save and certainly can't get it in Phillips.

Headed out for Phillips at 3:30. According to my Navigation App, I would arrive in Phillips at 6:45. I called Dad, as he was heading back to Phillips from Medford.

"Adam, is it snowing where you are?"

"Nope, not yet. I didn't know there was supposed to be snow." We talked about Packers and Final Fantasy XIII and eventually one of us ran out of cell coverage.

I got through Stevens Point and I noticed there was some snow starting up. I called up Dad, to ask if it was still snowing in Phillips. I thought maybe if it was a small storm, it would blow through soon, since it had been in Phillips an hour ago.

Unfortunately, it was still snowing in Phillips. I checked the temperature: 37. OK no problem. Half an hour later I was in Wausau: 36. Snow coming down some, but not bad.

I got to Merrill: 32. OK, that's a bad temp. At 32, snow melts and freezes and thaws out and refreezes and you've got a nice, slick road surface. The road temp is generally a degree or two higher than the air, so I watched the spray coming off the tires of other cars. Still spraying like mad. No problem.

I was driving 65. Usually in the Vue I drive quite a bit slower than most traffic in poor weather. It's made of plastic and has very little weight, therefore it has less grip on the road. I was going a little faster than some of the traffic, they were driving at maybe 60.

I had a lot of thoughts, the same thoughts I have every time I drive in bad weather. I've driven in a lot of bad weather, often when driving even bigger trucks. I thought about a rollover. What would that be like? I'd recently seen a trailer for Cloud Atlas, where it shows Halle Berry inside a car that was flipping over and heading into the water. Probably like that, I thought.

I got to the Tomahawk area, and I thought I felt the slightest wobble from the back end of the truck. Or was it my imagination? OK, time to slow it down. Stay off the brake. I turned off the cruise control and slowed it down to 60, the same speed of the three cars I'd just passed.

I felt comfortable at that speed. When I feel comfortable at a speed, it's probably safe. I've made truck driving trainers NUTS because I refuse to drive over the speed limit and I also refuse to drive at a speed faster than I feel comfortable with in bad weather. Big pickup, plenty of weight, same speed as the other cars on the highway. No problem.

About one minute later, over the span of one second, the truck turned sideways, passenger side first, and started heading for the left shoulder.

I've fishtailed and skidded before. I knew even before the truck was perpendicular to the flow of traffic that I had no chance of getting out of this skid. It happened so fast I wouldn't have had time to react anyway. Skidding sideways, I had a surprisingly dull realization of the danger ahead of me in the next few seconds. I was afraid, of course, but I knew there was nothing I could do now. Nothing I could do to help my mortal body or change the fate of my eternal soul. It's too late now.

Famous last words: Oh...

...

...shoot.

I'm not kidding. Those were my exact words.

This could be it. I might die now. I didn't think, "I might get injured," or "I might get paralyzed." I might die now.

I wasn't worried about all of the bins crushing me, the dresser splintering and stabbing me, or the cute chair sitting upside down on the passenger seat smashing into my body. My only concern was the roof coming down (up) on my head when it hit the ground.

Maybe...just maybe...it won't roll over. By some strange miracle.

The back wheels won the race to the north and the front wheels won the race to the shoulder. I shut my eyes. The back end swung around behind me, and I lost track of what was happening to the truck.

Some small object hit the top of my head. Nothing bad, but enough to make me realize things were loose - or falling sideways. Something hit the side of my face. I knew I was rolling over. I let go of the wheel and covered my head with my hands.

Then everything was still. If I'd rolled, then I'd only rolled once. The truck was...upright? I did a quick "systems check" and decided that the right side of my jaw hurt a little, but not bad. I was...OK?

Really?

The truck was still running, and it was in between the northbound and southbound lanes, right in the middle of a deep ditch with at least twenty feet of space on either side. A dance version of Forever Young (yes, really, I went back and checked the playlist) was still playing through the radio from my phone. I shut the truck off and looked for the phone. There, under the passenger seat.

It didn't react. Uh-oh. The cover was a little off, maybe it can't sense my touch. I pulled the Ballistic case off and tried. Worked perfectly. $40 well spent on Ballistic.

Dial 911. Wait, where am I? Tomahawk. My Navigator app was still running. 6.8 miles to highway 8.

Dial 911. Ring. Try the door. Ring. Stuck? Ring. Push harder. Door opened. An answer from dispatch.

I'd like to hear the recording to see if I sounded as cool and collected as I thought I was.

"I've been involved in an accident on the highway, I think I rolled over. I'm seven miles south of highway 8."

As it turned out, four other cars had rolled over in the last five minutes. So dispatch had to confirm my location a couple more times to make sure. She asked if I was OK. "I think so. I don't think I was hurt bad. I should be fine."

As I was talking, I got out of the truck. Dispatch is sending someone to me.

No sign of the three cars I knew had been right behind me.

OK. I'm fine. No problem. I'm going to live. I'm not seriously hurt.

Right?

OK, I might be in shock. Look at my body. Nothing out of the ordinary. No blood. OK. Probably fine.

Somebody pulled up in a pickup with flashing yellow lights. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I think so. I just called 911 and they're on their way. I think I rolled it."

"Yeah, you did, the roof is dented. Will you be OK?"

"Oh yeah, I was hauling food, I'm good for days." That was an exaggeration. I had enough food that I could have survived for two months just mixing snow with potato flakes.

I finally turned to see the damage to the truck.

Realization. Deflation.

KEITH'S truck. Oh, no...

The truck itself didn't look too bad, considering. The roof wasn't dented real bad, but the back window was blown out by one of the bins in the back seat, and the truck bed...

Oh yeah...the food.

Sealed packages of tuna and salmon. Meat sticks. 199 instant meals. Eight BILLION packages of instant oatmeal. Food that was meant to be spread out over 2,650 miles, now spread out over a fifteen foot radius around the truck.

I called Keith. "I've got bad news, Keith. I rolled your truck. It doesn't look too bad, but the roof is dented, it might be totaled."

"Never mind about that, are you OK?"

Oh yeah. Oops...

Keith said he and Patty would come and pick me up. So it was a matter of waiting. And the world's coldest and weirdest game of 52 pick-up.

I walked around to the other side of the truck to see if I could open the passenger door. I got it open, and my grocery bag fell out. Potato chips, check. Tostitos, check. Salsa...what? Salsa...where? Something had hit me in the head while I was in zero-G. No...

I went back around and checked behind the driver seat. A pair of sunglasses. Wait...these are mine. But they were in the closed center console...inside a carrying case. And now they're under the back seat? Wait, where are my glasses? I'm not wearing my glasses! I got my backpack out and found a spare pair. Whew...this was going to be fun enough WITH vision.

I started picking up what I could of the non-paper (a.k.a. oatmeal) packages. A lady in a car stopped on her way past to check if I was ok. I said I was fine, I have people on the way, and thanked her for stopping.

Robin's movable closet with all her stickers on it was reduced to boards. I slowly, carefully placed one of the boards in the truck bed. Then I laughed at myself and carelessly threw the next five pieces in.

I got almost all the non-oatmeal back into the truck and an ambulance slowly crept up from the south. I decided to walk up because I figured they were stopping for me. An EMT got out and asked if I was OK. I guessed that it had been about fifteen minutes since the wreck, and I thought I probably wasn't in shock anymore, but I'd better have him check me out. By the time he reached me I had my jacket off.

He checked the top of my head first, asked me to move my tongue and pressed me in places that I suppose might have been sore after a crash. He said I was fine. My right elbow was puffed out farther than normal on the inside and I started to worry. He said it was probably a bruise. Then I realized that I had been picking up fairly heavy objects for the last fifteen minutes, so yeah it was probably just a bruise.

He said, "So you were coming from the south?" and pointed north. Uh oh.

"Wait, THAT way is south?" The whole world rotated 180 degrees. Ah, that explains the tire tracks coming from THAT side of the highway. I did a mental facepalm while the EMTs were amused but gracious about it.

The police showed up and that's when I'd found out I was the fourth rollover in five minutes. I guess it came on fast.

They called a wrecker and got the truck towed out from the ditch. I waited in the police car until the flatbed came by. I started talking and wouldn't stop. I realized I must be coming down from something. Finally the truck was up on the flatbed and I got the ride to the shop.

I was able to think about the ramifications of the accident. Keith & Patty probably need to get a new truck. It probably won't impact Disco Pickle too much. Beyond that...well, I probably can't get a truck driving job for over a year now. Oh well. An hour earlier I was surprised just to be alive and mobile.

Keith and Patty were there waiting for me at the shop. Keith came over and I went to shake his hand, but he gave me a hug, which I didn't realize I needed until then. We checked out the inside of the truck and pulled out as much as we could to put in Keith & Patty's little SUV.

Keith was over on the passenger side, looking for things to take back to Phillips. "Hey, Adam..."

"Yeah?"

He held up an uninjured jar of delicious salsa...

Current books:

Star Wars: Slave Ship

Christian: Mere Christianity

Non-fiction: Tom Brown's Field Guide: Wilderness Survival (the Attitude chapter came in handy today)

Fiction: Undecided

The Pickle Jar

Disco Pickle - Know My Role

Well, first and foremost I'm running vehicle support for Robin and Rachel. Basically, I am going to try to make their zero and nearo days as easy as possible for them, so they can do whatever they want off the trail. This includes shuttling, doing laundry, picking up and delivering resupply, and scouting hotels/restaurants. I want them to feel like they have little responsibility once I pick them up.

Also, I will be attempting to help other hikers as I can, mostly in the form of trail angeling along the PCT. I'm thinking I'd like to stop at road crossings and provide fruit, hot food, beer, music, entertainment, conversation, etc. I'll definitely be giving hikers rides to towns within a few miles, but I am on a limited budget and can't go too far.

Best Laid Plans

As you can tell, I'm probably going to have a lot of spare time this year. I have some ambitious goals that I am going to try for during Disco Pickle.

Hiking: I might as well. I'll try for four to five days every week, between three and ten miles a day.

Reading: They say you can lose twenty I.Q. points on a three month vacation. I'm going to see if I can increase mine over the next eight months. I usually switch between three or four different books while reading, so at the end of my blog entries, I'll have the books that I'm currently working on. I will be going through four different types of books - Star Wars, Christian (self-help and religious study), non-fiction, and fiction. I'm particularly looking forward to the fiction books, because I am going to try to read a few that I really should have gotten to before I turned 34. This includes The Da Vinci Code, The Grapes of Wrath, and Great Expectations. I'm providing the names of my current reads as conversation pieces, so hopefully I can discuss the books with my blog readers.

Church: I'm going to try to attend a lot of different churches; if I can, I'd like to participate. I have quite a bit of experience singing both classical and contemporary, and I think I could add to a service with minimal rehearsal time. I'm curious to see all the differences between the churches.

If you have any trail, book, or church suggestions for me, please let me know!

Current Books:

Star Wars: Slave Ship (K.W. Jeter) (queued)

Christian: Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis)

Non-fiction: Tom Brown's Field Guide: Wilderness Survival

Fiction: undecided

Bad Movie Night

One thing I will miss about the “old life” is Bad Movie Night.

There is something about getting together with friends to share something so bad that it’s good. It’s a unique bond, a brotherhood that ties you together using poor screenwriting, plot holes, and awful delivery. It’s not “misery loves company”. It’s more like Jeff Foxworthy saying, “Have you ever seen people so ugly that you had to get someone else to verify it?”

Back in my college days my favorite movie was Army of Darkness (NOT a bad movie). Every year on Ash Wednesday (and on other dates) I would host an “Ash” Wednesday party and watch Army of Darkness. I remember playing “Who Wants To Win A Bucket Of Evil Cookies?” prior to a viewing, in which players answered increasingly difficult questions about the movie, some of which I’d picked out watching the movie frame by frame. Every question was correctly answered.

One afternoon before an Ash Wednesday party, Chris came over to watch Evil Dead, a movie that I’d seen before and didn’t like because Ash was such a whiny baby until the very end. Watching it with a friend proved to be a completely different experience! We laughed about the overly amorous tree, the bad acting, and the utter lack of horror.

Five years later, I was truck driving over the road for Schneider. It was exhausting work, officially taking twelve to fourteen hours a day, but with paperwork and trip planning, often spilling over into sixteen to eighteen hour days. Any spare time was precious, and occasionally I even had enough time to watch a video. With so little entertainment, I was very easily entertained. I saw Taxi starring Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah and thought it was a comedic masterpiece. Every movie I watched was GREAT. Except for one.

The two prominent cyborgs on the
cover are NOT in this movie.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Future War was quite possibly the best bad movie anyone has ever seen. Starring Daniel Bernhardt (a.k.a. Jean-Claude Van Dang), the story itself is so laughable one wonders how it ever became a movie. A runaway slave from the future (who was abducted from earth’s past) arrives in “present-day” California with obese cyborgs and velociraptor-sized T-Rexes chasing him down. He takes refuge in a halfway house and befriends a nun-in-training. Beyond this, people are trying to survive attacks from dinosaurs and cyborgs, but it’s impossible to make sense of why anybody does anything else in this movie.

The DVD was made in 2004. The movie was shot in 1994, and released in 1997 - though some sources say 1996. It looks like the film quality is from 1972, the actors are from 1989, and the wardrobe was provided by Mick Foley. They must have only had one video camera to use to film the movie, as the cameraman character in the movie had to settle for using a cardboard box with a camera taped to it.

Many of the movies I watched at this time were bad, but not this bad. I gave several DVDs away at white elephant gift exchanges after returning to Oshkosh, but I could not let go of Future War. I told people that I’d seen the worst movie ever made. Surprisingly, nobody wanted to watch it with me.

Finally, I found three people that were willing to try. I went with Andy and Eric to Ken’s house for “Bad Sci-Fi Movie Night”. On the marquee: Future War and Zardoz. Unfortunately, Netflix dropped the ball on Zardoz and we ended up watching Logan’s Run (NOT a bad movie). But Future War was shared, and a tradition was born.

Anonymous #2 displaying proper technique for
surviving bad movie night.

Future War inspired a bad movie night every few months, and even a bad movie club. A few months later we had Bad Star Wars Movie Night at Jason’s house. Apparently Ken was upset with me for making him watch Future War, because he had us watch the Star Wars Holiday Special, featuring elderly Wookiees watching soft porn, among other disturbing images. Ken was smart. He had “prior engagements” and didn’t show up until the movie was over. Had he been there for it, we may have encased him in carbonite.*

Several bad movie nights followed, but we started having most of them either at Ken’s new (brew) house, or at my place, where we preceded Bad Movie Night with wine "tasting". So it’s a bit of a blur, but over the last few years we managed to stomach Howard the Duck, Zardoz, Aliens vs. Avatars, Mega Python vs. Gatoroid (from 2011, starring Tiffany and Deborah Gibson), The Room, and Titanic II.

Perhaps someone will hate themselves enough to carry on the tradition of bad movies in the Fox Valley. If not, I still have fond memories of eight to twelve people stuffed into a room, laughing and sharing something they (unfortunately) will never forget.

Please share your bad movie night memories below! DON’T pause the movie to do so.

*Just a note for those who would follow in my footsteps: Star Wars Holiday Special is NOT bad movie night fodder. It is more something you would have someone watch if you wanted to damage them psychologically, like if you wanted to re-enact Clockwork Orange.