Will kickoff happen?
The ground had been frozen solid for months. Warm days did come leading up to the end of March, but the few/far between ones that gifted us 37°F temps just contributed to melting the surface of the ice. Made the road even slicker.
Couldn't be sure the van, now pimped out and loaded up, would get down the driveway without crashing*. In my head the failed kickoff event played out as the slowest, saddest, molasses crash, going less than 0mph but still fishtailing. And we're all also stuck in slomo, reaching desperate hands out to it, begging in warped voices at it like we're on drugs. Nooooo
ooooooooo.
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| Spoiler alert: we made it! |
How did we do it?
- Get a grip. We PB-blasted two of the rustiest tire chains in America that Dan had excavated from a random ice pile on the property to get them in shape for the treacherous decent. With only two chains, we had to be judicious. Slapped them on: one on the front passenger tire and one on the back driver's side.
- Break it up. Having never before seen a winter north of NYC, Dan mentioned his time in the Adirondacks had given him a new awareness: there isn't just one type of ice. There's dead-of-winter ice, the kid of ice that welcomes SUVs towing fishing shantys onto lakes no problem; there's ice that falls out of the sky. Then there's springtime ice which has melted from underneath a little so as to make it brittle and crunchy, stompable ice. This was the kind of ice we were dealing with a few days before kickoff. With chains on the ATV and the Subaru, we drove up and down the driveway, Shiloh and her waggling tongue casing after us, breaking up the ice so that the van could later get a grip.
- Commit. If we went ahead with kickoff and started to take the van down the hill, that was going to be it. No place on the road to turn around, no telling if it could power back up it if we could. If we get the van all the way down to the meadow in one piece, there is no going back to the workshop either. Everything had to be done, all the fix-its. We would be leaving the nest for good**.
The sun comes out. A strong gust of wind dries parting tears for leaving my parents, beckons us forward. -Delilah
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| First night in the van! |
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| Parked at a friend's farm in Ithaca, New York. |
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| Tired in the bones from the last three months. |
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| Hunted pallets down to build a humanure composter for a friend's new Tiny House. |
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| Pushy cat gets famous. |
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| Making friends on the sky deck. |
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| The composter. |
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| Traded northern New York ice for central New York mud. |
*The quarter-mile gravel road to the mountain home was so steep and icy no delivery trucks would chance it. (It was a familiar process to beg, several times a week, with UPS and FedEx to drop our packages--parts for the project--at the post office, even though they have express orders never to deliver to P.O. Boxes--yet, would not deliver to our actual address.) Some of those FedEx delivery trucks had to have been Sprinters.
**Obvious metaphors associated with kickoffs, launches, and new beginnings occurred to me: a lot about adventure itself is about commitment. Committing to face failure and/or thrill, discomfort and/or real joy, a shift in your identity--are you committed to slumming it, brushing your teeth on the sidewalk in front of people you used to work for and paying for tacos with couch coins so you can avoid working and climb for 30 days straight. . . or, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1965-66, are you hocking your household appliances to liquidate what little cash they hold and putting your family through hell because the one of the greatest novels the world has never read yet is still being typed out on your typewriter? Committing to adventure and expedition can change the way people view you, can change the way people trust you. . .perhaps for the worse. . .perhaps for the better. But you wont know that until you jump.
