Ho! Ho! Oh!

Can't get there from here

Although peace on earth and good will to all people is a wish or prayer we should like to have all year, people who think it would be nice to have Christmas all year round do not know how undesirable that would be. It is not the message that is the problem it is the celebration. There is only so much celebrating a person can do. I cannot even imagine myself getting up in the small hours of the morning to bargain hunt on the day after Thanksgiving. Celebrations are a sprint rather than a marathon. Two weeks is more than enough time to prepare for and enjoy the festivities. I have often heard that holidays are stressful. You would think that starting my shopping a mere two weeks before Christmas would be stressful, but it is not. I still manage to go with the flow. This year was different.

First there was a blown engine in the truck. It cost a small fortune to replace that engine, and once it was replaced the starter conked out on me. The gifts this year were going to be much smaller than usual. That is disappointing but not disastrous. It is not really about the gifts; they are merely tokens of love. The love is still there whether the gifts are grand or small. The big thing was all the time that was lost on those repairs. Now another time bandit reared its ugly head. It was seven days of unrelenting rain. When I drove home from work on Monday I was playing dodge rocks in the fog. The rules are simple. You take a road cut into the hill. Then add to that hill enough water to loosen the hill’s grip on the boulders and rocks it is holding until it lets some of those boulders and rocks fall down onto the road. The challenge for the driver is to avoid hitting those rocks and boulders while driving through the downpour and the fog. It helps if the driver is able to ignore the strong possibility that a boulder might land on his head while he is doing this. Fortunately I arrived home in tact. The game, however, made me realize that slides of a greater magnitude were probably in the offing.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are my days off of work. In spite of the rain, I was able to complete most of my shopping on Tuesday. On Wednesday the rain, which was already heavy, greatly increased. I spent a large part of Wednesday diverting the water flowing from the hill behind my house so that the water flowed around the house rather than through it. Then it started snowing. I would normally call the volume of snow that fell a dusting, but this was really more of a slushing. It was wet, heavy and slicker than snot. There was no way I was going to drive through it if I had a choice, and I had a choice. I poured a cup of coffee and stayed at home.

On Thursday the rain let up. Now it was time to make another foray into the market place for the last few gifts. The closest highway that would take my brother and I down the hill to the city was closed because of slides. The other highway that would take us down the mountain would also take us twenty miles out of our way, and there was a long detour around a slide on that highway. When we joined up with the highway again I could not help noticing the rocks and debris piled along the side of the road. CALTRANS obviously had its hands full trying to keep most of that road open. We took the highway to the 10 freeway and headed east. The traffic was doing the infamous stop and crawl. We decided to get off the freeway and take the surface streets only to find that they were also jammed up.

One of the things that made this area so ideal for growing oranges is the rich topsoil that washed into the valley from the mountains. So seldom do we receive so much rain that it is all too easy to forget where that topsoil came from. When we do get that much rain it becomes all too obvious that those things we call washes are actually washes, and that the roads cutting through those washes are a part of them. Now that the flood reclaimed the washes those roads were useless. Detour after detour mocked us by saying “you can’t get there from here.” And the “there” we were trying to get to soon turned into the anywhere we could travel to get somewhere to the south east of where we were. Everyone was trying to navigate through a clogged maze. It was an exhaust spewing mass of confusion and frustration. We turned onto a road taking us northwest.

“There is no southeast today,” my brother said.

“It’s a forbidden direction, and only those foolhardy souls who have far more time and patience than we do would think of challenging the prohibition,” I said.

It was now two o’clock in the afternoon, and we stopped to have lunch. After lunch we went with the flow. Which is to say we traveled northwest. The only thing flowing in the other direction was water and mud and rocks. We played dodge rocks on the rim, took the detour, and had a stiff drink when we got home. The television news broadcasts were showing houses filled with mud, houses sliding down hills, and cars that were almost completely buried. We were lucky. The price we paid for being reminded of where the topsoil came from was only our time and a bit of frustration. It is now Christmas eave. I did not shop where I wanted to shop today, but I did managed to finish my shopping. The gifts and the fact that I am working half of Christmas day do not seem that important. It is still Christmas, and I am grateful for my family, my friends, and for a warm place to sleep. I understand we are supposed to get another storm on Christmas day. I never thought I would say this, but I would rather have snow than rain right now.

First published in macsbackporch.fictionforall.com on Dec. 24, 2010.