I’m MacGyver. Seriously.
I was driving home from work the same way I always do, taking 680 to I-29 North, on the way home from work. I made it the entire drive on the interstate just fine, but on the way home the drive through Council Bluffs was a little messy. I was driving down N. 16th street towards Broadway when I noticed ambulances and police cars at the intersection.
‘Man,’ I thought. ‘An accident.’
So I turned onto Avenue B. heading East, thinking I’d just turn off onto Kanesville from 8th street. Guess what intesection had another accident and two cop cars.
‘DAMN!’ I shouted out loud, annoyed.
So, Avenue B. turned into Mynster street and right at the intersection of 7th and Mynster my car got stuck in the snow for about an hour. If you’ve lived in Council Bluffs, you’re probably aware of what a nice street this is to be stuck in.
I tried moving it back and forth to no avail, but just as it seemed that I was making my way through the snow, I would again be stuck. I got stuck and unstuck then stuck again for about 10 minutes when a man in a coverall came waking down the street.
‘You stuck?’ he asked.
Not realizing immediately that this brain-dead moron was, in fact, a brain-dead moron, I replied, ‘Yeah.’
He just stood there for a minute.
‘Do you have a shovel?’ I asked him.
‘Naw,’ he said, teeth protruding from his mouth. I was starting to realize that this guy suffered from something I like to call, Cousin Cletus Syndrome, and probably wasn’t going to be of much help.
I shut my car door and tried backing up again.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
‘ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!’
Cousin Cletus in the Coverall, stared at the car a little more and tapped on my window. I opened the door as my window does not roll down more than 2 inches without sticking, and he stared at me again, still very confused looking, and it seemed he was having a hard time remembering what he was going to say.
‘Lemme give you a push,’ he offered.
You know, I knew it was a stupid idea when he offered, but I figured that at the very least, I would be helping this man towards his lifelong goal of totally annhilating his remaining brain cells, with the exhaust from my car, so I let him try pushing. For easily another 10 minutes Cousin Cletus ran back and forth around my car, pushing the front end with me in accelerating in reverse, pushing the back end with me attemped to pull forward, and on and on, with no success. I was just getting more and more agitated and Cousin Cletus seemed to be losing wind.
He shrugged and lit up a cigatrette. I went back to the pattern of forward and reverse with no success. Cletus tried pushing in both directions again, and was definently losing steam. Eventually he grew bored and walked onto into the night, perhaps to make someone else miserable, or maybe just to visit the rest of his co-actors in the movie Deliverance. I don’t know.
I called my dad on my cellphone. He said he’d come and try to get me out, but he had to snowblow a path out of his driveway first. I was now 25 minutes into this and getting really angry about my dumb luck.
On most street corners, in most neighborhoods in Council Bluffs, you can usually fine a bucket filled with sand on the street corners, so you have some way of getting a car unstuck, should that happen to you. There was not one to be found. I walked up and down and around the block, and was getting frustrated. No one had a shovel, and several of the houses were just abandoned and boarded up.
I was now stomping through the snow and swearing at the top of my lungs. I was dancing around my car, kicking snow and screaming like a crazy man. I was making animal noises and beating my chest and throwing my hands in the air like a televangelist proclaiming the end of the world! I was going to raise the dead, damn it, because there was no other way I was going to get out of that neighborhood!
There was no sand to put down, no salt, and no shovels! If I could just get some flat, un-iced and un-snowed ground behind me, I could probably get out of very easily. But What was I going to do? Or use?
That’s when it clicked for me. Right on the other side of the intersection, on the other side of the street was a boarded up and abandoned old house. I started laughing manically. I had a plan. Nothing was going to stop me. No person was going to stop me. I was going to get out of this and get home in time for a beer to celebrate my victory over nature. This wasn’t about getting a car out of the snow anymore. This was one man’s battle against mother nature. This was all about getting right up in her face and belting her across the keister with a protruding middle finger, then telling her what to do with her snow storm!
I had been stuck in the snow for 45 minutes now, and was getting a little punchy in the head. I started eyeing the old wreck of a house for easy window covers to tear down. They were plywood and looked fairly tall.
I ran over to the house and pulled two of the window covers off and ran back to my car with them. I’m fairly sure that counts as trespassing or something, but at this point, I think the owner of an derelict, abandoned, desolate, ugly looking house has nothing terribly important to worry about. The covers were plywood and each about 3′ x 5′.
I ran them as tightly as I could underneath my back tires, and hopped into the car. I started it up and got the movement I needed to get unstuck. I roared over those boards and began my drive home.
I made it home alive and quite honsetly, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be home from anywhere. And let this be a lesson to you:
There’s a reason animals hibernate all winter long.
