The Matchett Road Ordeal
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MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
It was the high end of the afternoon, and the sunlight was at its loveliest. Just moments before dusk, and veiled by gray winter skies, an increasingly-blue glow illuminated the inhospitable northern landscape. Having spent the day in the city a few hours south, shopping and sipping coffee with its residents, I was making my return trip home down the old highway when I took notice of the delightful lighting conditions. Although it was nearing supper time, and I was beginning to grow hungry, I decided that wasting such splendid light, when I had my camera nearby, was not only potentially regretful, but impossible for the very same reason.
I decided to leave the highway and explore the vast open back roads of the northern part of the state. Navigating solely by compass, I took one whimsical turn, and then another, until I was thoroughly engrossed in the endless twisting network of barely maintained seasonal roads and homesteader farms. Traffic was non existent, and beyond the periodic plume of smoke rising from a distant chimney, there was very little to suggest any sort of human presence. Cresting a large hill, and rolling slowly down its far side, a road sign caught my eye:
Matchett Road.
Particularly barren and foreboding, even among the already bleak road network, something about it seemed to hold a sense of destiny and déjà vu. Naturally, I slowed and turned down it, driving a mile or so with nary a sight to behold, before stopping in the center of the road and setting up my camera equipment for some timer-set self portraits, as sampled above. Once finished, I packed my tripod and camera back into the car, and set out for a place to turn around. Although I had no idea where I was, I knew by my compass that I was following the road in the wrong direction, and rather than continue down it into God-knows-where, I wanted to simply go back the way I came. A quarter mile or so up the road I discovered an entryway to a small farmer’s nook on my left, marked by recent tire tracks. Had I known at the time that the tracks were those of a tractor with chained tires, and not a standard motor vehicle, I may have continued down the road for a better place to turn around…but as it was, I didn’t know, and was unable to foresee the impending consequences of this particular ignorance.
I turned the nose of my car into the driveway, marked by two wooden posts with no trespassing signs, shifted into reverse, touched the accelerator…and went nowhere. The front end of my car vibrated slightly above the sliding wheels, but did little more than that. The path in front of me ran off the road, between the fence posts, and dipped down a small hill, before opening up into a little clearing of sorts. The tracks I had previously noticed continued down the small hill, where it was apparent they made a three point turn in the clearing, and came back up. After attempting to rock my car back and forth a bit, but failing to gain any backwards motion due to the incline, I decided to follow the tracks down the small hill and into the clearing, where it was flat, and where I hoped to have enough room to gain the backwards momentum needed to free my vehicle from the snow. The m
ove was folly, however, and once I reached the place where the previous vehicle had turned around, I found myself mired in a foot of hard-packed country snow at the bottom of the hill; unable to move a single inch forwards or backwards.
The painful gravity of the situation suddenly began to take hold, and after a long pause to gain my calm and composure, I exited the vehicle after donning my hat and mittens; feeling a bit faint from hunger, too much coffee, and impending panic. The wind tore across the field and battered my face, and I desperately looked around for something useful to assist me. The sun had begun it’s descent, and snow was now coming down in fine painful particles. The pleasant blue light that had covered the countryside had sunk into deep and sinister tones, and I knew I had to stake my next move before I lost the light entirely. To the left of my vehicle was a large wood pile partially buried in the snow; directly in front of it a heap of junk and farm equipment; and to the right of it an old pick-up truck with three wheels, contently tucked under a thick blanket of snow. The pick-up stirred deep anger in me…the way it seemed to just sit there and laugh at my steadily increasing desire to be anywhere else but there, and I put the anger to use, furiously digging my car out with my hands and feet.
I had only managed to clear away my wheels before my more-style-than-function mittens became ice cold and weather-saturated, forcing me back into the heat of the running car for another attempt at backing out of the debacle. I was able to wiggle free slightly, backing up a few inches before once again getting stuck, and it was then that I realized that I was going to have to dig the entire clearing out if I was to have any hope of getting my vehicle back on the road. Thoroughly weak from hunger, with a quarter tank of gas, frozen hands, and nothing to dig with, I decided to try using my cell phone to call in help:
"Hello?"
"Paul! Hey, I need your help. I’m stuck in a field."
"You’re what? Where?"
"Somewhere northeast of Traverse. Matchett road."
"Ok…where is that?"
"I have no idea, I was hoping you knew. Try google mapping it."
"….ok……….I’m searching for it, and I’m getting nothing. How do you spell it?"
"I don’t remember, I can’t spell for shit, you know that. M-A-T-…."
I spelled it out as best I could, and waited for a reply…but my friend had become silent on the other end. I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it.
The screen was blank, it’s battery depleted. Swell.
I tried it a couple more times but it was no use. I couldn’t get it to ring more than once without dying again, so I tossed it in the back seat and moved right along to plan B.
Setting out on foot in the direction I had come, it was a good fifteen minutes before I spotted the first trace of civilization on the horizon. High on a hill, and a very long ways off, I could see the outline of a series of barn silos. Darkness had, by then, all but overtaken the land, and a single strange pin-like tower jutted above the silos with a throbbing red beacon on top. Holding the beacon in my mind like a prayer, I slowly made my way towards it.
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MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
I tried the farmhouse first, but with little expectation. The windows were all dead-black, and no footsteps around either the front or back door had disturbed the day’s snowfall. Behind the house, two large barns rose high and defiantly into the heavens. Attached to the front of one barn was a small concrete annex, with two yellow windows brightly illuminating the slushy driveway. All else was dark, and although the annex was obviously a new addition to the barns, it carried its own sense of age and deterioration. Next to one window was an old wooden door with no handle, loosely flopping open in the shifting air. I let myself in.
The first thing that I noticed, beyond the blinding yet grossly-cozy yellow glow and warmth, was the smell. While the greater area had, of course, smelled strongly of cattle droppings, the aroma was significantly more potent and acrid inside. The ceiling was low, and there was an enormous round metal container of some kind in the middle of the room. On the far wall was a wooden dart board that looked like it was hand painted in 1945, and used heavily every day since. The paint was now just a rumor, and the center of it had a dried-out pulpy look to it. There was nobody in sight, but to the right was a door with a small plastic window that was thoroughly fogged. I pressed on through it, and found myself in a significantly more unusual room than the one I had just left. It was filled with steam, like a sauna, and hissing water muted the sounds my shoes may have otherwise made in the erratic puddles on the concrete floor. The room stretched back as far as I could see, which wasn’t very far, and the floor had a large concrete-lined ditch running through the center of it, much like an extended automotive undercarriage workspace. Hanging near the sides of this ditch were various pieces of farm equipment that I couldn’t hope to identify, and standing in the middle of all of this was a man in an enormous rubber bib with his back to me, hosing off some of the hanging equipment.
It was at this point, I decided, that my story was about to go one of two ways. It would either be a stereotypical hack and slash horror movie at my expense, or an uplifting made for TV drama that would instill faith in the kindness of strangers and small town folk…either the man would turn around at my greeting and chase me down with a meat hook, or he would come to my rescue and pull my car out of the lot, then invite me over for supper where I would fall in love with his sister and live the happily-ever-after simple life on the farm.
Naturally, neither scenario played out. I was instead handed a shovel and more or less pushed out the door, as the young man, while gracious and polite as could be expected, had little time or resources to help me with my plight:
"…wellll….I’d take you back to the wood pile on the tractor and pull you out,
but it aint plugged in…I don’t got a phone here to call no one, and I gotta
hurry up with this so I can get out to the other barn to feed the lambs, but you
can borrow a shovel if you want, and if you run into trouble my grannie
lives just a mile or so past where you’re stuck. Just knock on her door,
she’s got a phone there, she can call you a wrecker if you can’t get out.
Just be sure to bring the shovel back when you’re done with it…"
I thanked him for the shovel, of course, and set out once again in the dark with thedevice slung over my shoulder like a musket. Thus armed, and blessed with the digestive sweet moment between hunger and fainting (that hour or two when energy returns for one final round), I began feeling a bit optimistic about my situation. I shoveled happily away when I at last returned to my vehicle (after running my car for a few minutes to warm myself and enjoy a well earned cigarette), and after thoroughly digging the immediate area out I was able to get my car moving a few yards backwards and forwards. Once I had grounds for solid momentum, I tossed the shovel in the back seat, and repeatedly rammed my car backwards, up the hill, as far as it would let me, before returning to my original position at the bottom and repeating. It took perhaps twenty minutes of this, the last few yards being particularly difficult, but the satisfaction of finally plowing through that last little bit of snow, and hearing my rear wheels touch down and grab hold of the road, was among the best feelings I have experienced in this later portion of my life. I had forgotten that satisfaction was not an intrinsic part of being a sentient being, but rather a bi-product of overcoming toil and adversity with one’s own hands.