If At First You Don't Succeed

I set out from Seattle at 10:00 in the morning on Sunday. All my gear was in the truck’s bed and two trailered boats were hitched behind.  

My first day on the road set pace for the next few days; I hammered out a solid 15-and-a-half-hour drive which got me as far as southern Idaho.

Monday was a 13.5 hour marathon to Southern Colorado, a landscape that forever resonates with me like a vague feeling of deja vu. And this time, at last, I pinpointed the origins of that feeling, and it’s a bit… strange.

As a very young child I was convinced that my real mother was a woman named “Skin,” who met her demise when her run-away wagon went off a cliff.

And in a fit of pique I told my fake mother, the one who gave birth to me in this lifetime, all about it when she had the temerity to command me about as if I was only a very young child.

I have elaborate recollections of the place these childhood imaginings captured -- the rolling hills, the cut of the geology, the specific trees and plants, the lodgepole farmhouse architecture… even an early fear of marauding “indians.”

In short, I imagined a country exactly like this as where Skin met her demise.

Putting those images in context with a physical place supplanted the deja vu as I drove through the verdant and rolling farm country of Colorado.

As I said -- it’s all a bit strange. I spent the day with “Coming ‘round the mountain” stuck in my head.

I thoroughly enjoyed my stint in Durango with one of my all time favorite people, Meg – and while we work together (remotely), we almost managed to not talk about a single work-related thing before I hit the road and continued on my way, camping that night outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The fourth day, Wednesday, was a 13-hour run to a campground in Van Buren, Arkansas which had few amenities and most of the campers lived there full-time. It was the loudest place imaginable, with rumbling Harleys driving through the shabbiness in the wee hours of the morning, perpetual dog barks from all quarters, constant train horns, slamming car and camper doors… 

I gratefully escaped that sleep-robbing site at 0545 Thursday morning, embarking on what would turn out to be a very lively 19 hour day of driving.

I maintained a state of highway hypnotism similar to the previous days of driving until about half way through Alabama, when the sky clouded over and a light rain began to fall.

Someone, I don’t remember who, asked about “the storm.”

“What storm?” I asked.

The rain picked up and soon I was driving in a torrent. Then, just outside the little town of Eufaula, Georgia, I drove through a sustained blast of 60-80 knot winds and a blinding rain which forced me to slow down to 30 mph.  

I couldn’t keep the truck on the road, the trailer whipped behind me, and I started to wonder if this was “the storm” someone had asked me about.

I didn’t see a rain-wrapped funnel cloud, but what I drove through certainly looked and acted like a tornado’s inflow jet -- a weather condition you don’t mistake for anything else after you’ve encountered it once.

After that lively joust with Mother Nature's wrath, it was just rain, rain, and more rain. 

The “storm” I was now hearing about at every touch point indicated it was actually a hurricane heading north, and I was directly and exactly in the path it was predicted to take.

When I got to Waycross, the serious wind began. I figured I should have as much gas in the tank as possible so I stopped and topped up, and on a whim I bought a lottery ticket.  

Before you ask -- no, no I did not.  And even if I did I wouldn’t tell.

The drive from Waycross to Brunswick required all my focus.  

The wind gained intensity with every mile east. I followed my GPS closely – the world outside had shrunk to a small sphere of light cast against horizontal sheets of rain. I wished several times that Toyota had one more faster windshield wiper speed.

I myopically followed the GPS. I thought I knew what highway I was on. I thought it was flat and I’d come into town, then take a right on highway 17 and head down the coast.

But then I came upon the Sidney Lanier bridge and realized I severely “misremembered.”

The Sidney Lanier Bridge is 486 feet tall.  The clearance beneath it is 185 feet. It is 7,779 feet long. Once you start up it, you cannot stop.

Of course, I was towing a trailer with two 16 foot polyethylene canoes and amas… a lightweight load that presented a disproportionately large amount of sail area to the advancing winds of Hurricane Helene on my beam, which was now hitting in force.

I went up that bridge with white knuckles and an endless stream of invectives, knowing full well that the trailer would be blown over somewhere above the 200 foot altitude where the wind would be higher than the mere hurricane force winds near sea level, below.

Somehow, miraculously, I made it over that bridge and down the other side without any incident other than severe terror fatigue.  

When I got to my brother’s house in Brunswick, I unloaded the truck in the torrent. The water was ankle deep in front of his house but it didn’t make any difference -- I was soaked as soon as I opened the truck door.

I went to bed and fell asleep to the house shuddering under the weight of the wind buffeting it, the howl of wind-driven rain through the trees, and the banging of things being destroyed outside.  

When I awoke there was no power. The wind had died back to mere gale force in the late morning.  

A survey of damage revealed holes in a neighbor’s roof, another neighbor's garage door imploded, and my brother’s house lost critical parts of its roof and would need replacing.

An ear-splitting pump station alarm blared like a communal form of waterboarding.  The second day after the storm we stood in the street - me, Hannah, and a group of neighbors - and plotted in detail our desperate act of vandalism that would grant us the blissful relief of silence.

As we reached a consensus to commit our civic crime the alarm stopped.

There was nothing for me to do except continue on with the reason for driving all that way in the first place, so I set about readying for the final leg of the trip.

To clarify -- the two boats I transported from Seattle to Brunswick are not mine.  They are incidental to this story. MY boat is already here. Not Manu’iki’iki, but another Pacifica-inspired multihull canoe – a boat I bought online in Florida, sight unseen, and paid my brother to pick up.

Anyway… it’s best to not get lost in the weeds.

I had a solar generator I made for this trip so I kept my gear charged. 

I spent a day rewiring my boat’s trailer, another day setting up the boat and configuring the gear, and a third running the two incidental boats I brought from Seattle up to Tybee, then back again to Brunswick.

Today is that third day after arrival. I have my gear, my boat, my truck and myself ready to bolt first thing in the morning, back up to Tybee, for the purpose of this trip.

To be continued....