The Subaru got a trailer hitch, today. While walking back to work from the trailer hitch shop I saw a dead cat in the gutter. It looked like a chunk of dirty gray slush that fell out from under someone’s car. It very well could have been, except that the slush was gray and not red. We sand our roads with red cinder out here in Oregon, so chunks of slush look like fresh cuts of red meat.

The cat was not that fresh.

Jody, Joel and I went on a hike over the weekend, and instead of a cat we brought two dogs with us. It was supposed to be a pleasant hike up to the Tumalo waterfalls, but the road was closed and on our hike to the trail Joel saw some cliffs he wanted to explore. He kept talking about these cliffs and wouldn’t shut up about these cliffs, so finally Jody threw down the gauntlet and told Joel to find a trail and lead us to these cliffs.

There wasn’t a path, so Joel made a trail through the thick, scratchy manzanita and other sundry pucker brush, straight up a thousand vertical feet to the cliffs. I would say that we reached the cliffs without a scratch, if only I wasn’t still bleeding from those damned bushes.

All in all, the toil and blood and sweat was totally worth it, as the view from the cliffs was spectacular. We explored a pinnacle that we dubbed Spider Monkey Face and were surprised to actually find bolted routes already set on it. We also found an icy logging road which we would take back to the trailhead, deciding not to do battle with the manzanita again.

At the logging road we were greeted by a monster truck Suburban. Even though it had big knobby tires and cans of beer, it was having trouble making it up the icy road. It kept sliding backwards. We slid down beside it and began our descent back to the trailhead. The road was rather slippery. We made it a game where everyone in the group had to fall at least once. Then everyone had to fall twice. No one had to really try, it wasn’t that kind of game, but it was still fun.

Jody and Joel had already fallen twice and it was my turn to fall, but then Jody skipped my turn and fell a third time. He fell in one direction and his foot fell in another, and he screamed in agonizing pain. He said he heard it pop. After taking it easy for a couple minutes Jody tried to stand up, but he could not put any weight on his foot. I was sure that his ankle was broken, and we still had more than a mile of slippery logging road back to the trailhead.

Luckily for us, there were two monster trucks sitting not even fifty feet from where Jody fell. It is almost as though the monster trucks made him fall, or he fell in an attempt to impress the monster trucks, or something. Joel and I slid down to talk to the fellows with the monster trucks, to see if we could get an evac. One of the monster trucks had a busted front line and it wasn’t going anywhere. The toolbox was out and everything. What’s more, these guys had just heard that their friends in the Suburban were completely stuck, and needed help out.

Luckily, there was one monster truck that still worked. It was a Frankensteinian creation that the guys had built out of spare parts the week before, an 80’s pickup truck with a two-person cab and no actual “pickup”. The bed had been removed completely, leaving nothing in back but the truck’s frame and a fuel tank.

We got Jody loaded up, and Todd was kind enough to give the two of us a ride back to the trailhead. Every time we hit a bump (and there were many bumps), it would jam Jody’s foot and he would hiss in pain. The road back was long, really long, and I don’t know what we would have done had Todd and his crew not been out four-wheeling that day.

After a cramped, bumpy ride wrought with pain and agony, the monster truck reached the car. Come to think of it, I’ll bet that Jody broke his ankle just so he could get a ride in a monster truck. That’s dedication. We got Jody down from the monster truck (which was no small feat, considering the cab sits about four feet off the ground) and loaded him into Joel’s Forester. Less than half an hour later, Joel and the dogs came jogging out of the woods.

At this point, any sensible person would request that we go to the emergency room immediately. However, Jody is not a sensible person and he was definitely not in sensible company, so we first made a stop at Parilla’s and grabbed some wraps and beer. We argued over whether the proper plural form of the name was Wrap of Khans or Wraps of Khan. We came to no consensus. We also told the people working at Parilla’s that if Jody survived, they could use his story in future advertising campaigns. “I broke my ankle in the woods, and when I finally reached town I had to get wraps and beer at Parilla’s before going to the hospital!”

Luckily for Jody his ankle wasn’t broken, but was just a really bad sprain. Luck is relative, though. You would think after all that trouble, with the ice and the monster trucks and everything, that he would have at least gotten a broken bone out of the deal. Sprains are sissy. I suppose I can keep saying that until Jody is healed up enough to kick my ass. He has threatened to break off his bad foot in my ass if I keep saying that, though I think it’d be worth the second trip to the emergency room just to see him do it.

No matter what happens, though, a second trip to Parilla’s will be in order.

Hey! Also! Check out Jody’s account of this excursion, entitled Tumalo Something!

Sometimes I wish that puzzles were made of metal and each piece weighed a hundred pounds, because then people could actually have an idea what I mean when I say that everything is starting to fall together. When you talk about puzzles, most have in their mind the vision of a tired old man, with white hair growing out of his ears, hunched over a card table strewn with puzzle pieces, slowly and meticulously arranging them into their intended pattern.

This is not what I mean when I say that things are falling together. My thought involves a machine shop and a crane, with a large chunk of metal suspended over a floor littered with twisted wreckage. For months the piece will hang in the air, nudged into position an inch at a time, searching for a proper fit while simultaneously trying to make sense of the mess on the floor. Out of nowhere the piece will cut loose, and when it hits the floor the earth shakes. The earth shakes, and the wreckage rearranges itself into an iron tapestry, radiating out from its new edition.

I have fired off my job application for working as a trip leader in the BWCA this summer. I have picked up the tickets for my kiteboarding trip to Baja this February, and all the paperwork for renewing my passport is in the mail. On my trip to Hood River last weekend I found a great place to live, and I’m all set up to move in next month. Today I dropped by the trailer store down the street and ordered a trailer hitch for mah Soob, and I should have time to get it installed after New Year’s. I’m set to take off for Minnesota next week, they expect me for Yukon Days, and I have some vague plans for meeting up with friends both old and less-old.

Today I finished up with my errands far earlier than expected, so I gathered all my snowboarding gear and was at the Mountain by 1:00. If you don’t count hiking Mount Bachelor with Shane in August, or gibbing in our front yard earlier this month, this was my first time back on my board since I busted my leg back in March.

To ride again was spectacular. It was a banner day at the Mountain, sunny and fifty degrees at the base. I managed to hit up every single chairlift that was open, including Sunrise, Rainbow, Skyliner, Sunshine (i like the kiddie terrain park, so sue me), Pine Marten, Outback and Summit. My muscles protested over the first few runs, but after crushing their dissent I picked up my skills pretty much right where I left them back in March.

I chose not to gib and huck as strongly as I did at the end of last year, mostly because it was my first time out, and also because that’s exactly how I busted myself up the last time. My carving was really strong, and I can just about lay out flat against the snow when the conditions are right (like, when it’s not 3:55 and everything isn’t iced up). I could pull an endless chain of flatland 360s in either direction, and I’m still perfecting all four of my air 180s (frontside and backside regular, and frontside and backside switch). I can comfortably ride switch for extended periods, and I have no problem linking turns so long as I remind myself to keep pressure on my front (usually my back) foot. I still need practice on spinning my nose and tail butters.

Even early in my session, I was already ecstatic to be on the snow again. I was riding up an all but abandoned Rainbow Chair when my cell phone rang. It was Erin, who had called to inform me that she had just been in a car accident, and then tell me that she was just kidding, and then ask whether I wanted to make a trip to the UberHeartless MegaSuper TransGlobal Store. I told her that I was on a chairlift, and she asked how that was, and I said that it was the best thing in the world right now.

I added that if there was some way I could do this every single day and still maintain my existence, I would. She told me not to dislocate my shoulder, which is probably good advice.

The personality of our ice maker could only be described as over-zealous. It makes ice, it fills itself up with ice, and it continues to make more ice. You know when the ice maker is full because it will instantly fill your glass with ice, no questions asked. It fills your glass with ice before you can even ask the question Why am I getting ice? I want to enjoy a tall glass of beer to celebrate the sounds my wrists make, they sound like cement mixers. I want to celebrate the cement mixers with a glass of beer, but I don’t need ice for a glass of beer.

I don’t need ice, but before I can say so our ice maker has already filled my glass with ice. And when this happens, and it happens a lot, we know that when we open the freezer all the ice will pour out and get all over our cherry floors. To keep this from happening I will often empty our ice maker into a large mixing bowl, and fling the ice into the street for the cars. I like to think of it as tossing feed to the chickens. I toss the ice to the cars and they all crowd around one another to get best pickings at the ice.

The cars are learning, they learn so fast these days with their computer chips and their mouse brains that have flown F-16 fighter jets, so they know that when I leave the house with a large metal bowl that they will probably get fed. The cars all drive up on the lawn begging for ice, and while this was okay a few months ago when we didn’t have a lawn, we now have a lovely carpet of sod that the cars tear up when they beg for ice.

I have since learned that our ice maker has an off switch. We knew this, apparently, but Shane forbids us from using the off switch. You see, Shane has sympathy for our ice maker, and Shane understands that our ice maker has feelings, and its feelings get hurt when we don’t let it get enough exercise. It gets bored and irritable.

It gets bored and irritable, and not only that, the cars will starve to death this winter if we don’t feed them. They need us to feed them this winter because it has been a bad snow year so far for the Northwest. It’s been so bad that Mount Hood hasn’t opened because of rain, and runs at Mount Bachelor have been closed because of avalanches.

You might say that an avalanche suggests a good snow year. You might say that, but consider this. Consider that when an avalanche happens, all the snow peels right off the mountain and into the parking lots and rustic cabins. Consider that we ski on the mountain, not on the parking lots and rustic cabins.

Take a piece of paper and sketch out a diagram that illustrates where the snow is and where the snow needs to be. Use arrows and familiar iconography to illustrate your point.

You have fifteen minutes.

Somewhere along the line, I became an authority on monster trucks. This didn’t result from me being a knowledge leader or anything on the subject of monster trucks, mind you. I actually don’t know a heck of a lot about monster trucks. I’ve been to two monster truck shows in my life.

I was five years old when I went to my first monster truck show, and I fell asleep. The second one I was fourteen and I went with a group of friends, and we all looked like we were out to attend a GWAR concert or something. Not because we were soaked in blood, and not cuz we were at risk of being eaten by a giant worm, but because we were dressed in combat boots and ripped t-shirts and wallet chains. I’ve never been to a GWAR concert, actually, but they’re gonna be here in Bend tomorrow.

That’s the problem with the music scene in Bend. It runs cold for two months straight, and you get used to absolutely nothing cool ever happening, and then BAM, out of nowhere here comes Captured! By Robots or GWAR or Big Wu or Justin Roth, and they’re playing music and tearing limbs off giant cyborg dinosaurs right in your backyard, and the gallons of blood are spraying right through your bedroom window.

Yeah. My knowledge of monster trucks is rather limited. The show I went to when I was fourteen and GWAR was kinda lame, too. No dirt bikes, no accidents, no natural disasters. And there was this one guy who said he was gonna break the world record for the most consecutive endos, but all he did was ruin his Oldsmobile on a freakin’ test run. Lame with a capital F, I tell ya.

Even though that’s all I got for monster truck shows, I have been to a real honest to gosh shit-kicker demolition derby. This was a real demolition derby, and it took place in a small northwestern Wisconsin town by the name of Spooner. This isn’t the small northwestern Wisconsin town where six people are shot dead by a guy with an SKS 7.62mm semi-automatic rifle. But it’s near that town. There are actually multiple towns in northwestern Wisconsin, despite widespread attempts to conflate them.

While monster truck shows are typically advertised on TV by that same guy who repeats every word three times, and splice together five million quarter-second clips from a thousand monster truck shows, real demo derbies are advertised on local radio if you’re lucky. Usually you learn about them from a hot pink flyer posted at the local IGA. While monster truck shows sign on the best announcer possible to keep the audience buzzed even when nothing is getting smashed, demo derbies usually give a six pack to the guy who runs the Saturday morning farm animal auction.

The show itself is kind of lame, but demo derbies are all about context. I mean, check out the whole scene. If you’re at a demo derby you’re probaby at a county fair or something, and you can probably ride a gas-powered ferris wheel that creaks and shudders, operated by an old man who shudders and creaks. You can probably play ring-toss or bottle-break or shin-kick or some other classic county fair game, and if you win big you can probably get yourself a framed picture of an 80’s Playmate, screened on a mirror.

Even though I’ve been living out west for a year and a half, and Central Oregon for over a year, I still haven’t been to a western demo derby or a rodeo or a county fair. Of this I am ashamed, but it’s no shame that a quick needle to the arm won’t fix. And even though I’ve never been to one of these events, I see monster trucks every day.

A phenomenon that I’ve witnessed extensively out west, and one that I never noticed in the midwest, is the personal monster truck. These guys take a regular truck, jack the suspension up three feet, and underneath they jam the biggest damned tires they can find. Seriously, you need to use a crane just to get up into these things.

And yet I’ve got nothing against the personal monster truck. Every time I see a Hummer H2 I’ll give it the middle finger, but when I see a personal monster truck I just laugh. The more ridiculously large it is, the harder I laugh. I give additional props if the back window has one of those tasteless rip-off stickers where Calvin is pissing on the Chevy symbol. I’ll give still more props if Calvin is pissing on the Chevy logo, and the sticker is on a Chevy truck. Or Ford. I paid my dues to the American car industry, having driven a Ford Tempo for six years and a Mercury Tracer for two, and I take no sides.

What it goes back to is this: All I need in life is 113 acres of land, a truck and a few cases of PBR. Oh, and I’d really like to have a river, so I have somewhere to toss my empties. I’m an environmentally conscious person, so I’ll be sure to fill up those cans with water so they sink to the bottom.