The Drive

Why would anyone spend a moment of their time writing about or describing the drive from the road the live on to their home? A very reasonable question only last Autumn for my European audience. But after a winter featuring the alien conditions of snow and ice which didn’t melt for several days or even weeks the question has attained some relevance for you and retains its utter relevance for Mainers like us.

Our drive, like most others in the world, runs from our road to our home. That is where the simplicity ends. Our drive has to be an all weather feature or what our friends and neighbours term, suitable for four season use. Okay, I hear you say, so you have to drive on it in winter, still not entirely sure what the big deal is here.

I will list the characteristics which make our drive an occasional headache for us, especially in the winter. Firstly our house is approximately 50 feet above the level of the road. But even before that is taken into account our road is sloping steeply from the direction we most commonly enter it.

We get snow in Maine every winter, and from early January to mid March it lies on the ground. Last winter we received about 11 feet in total, the average is about 16 feet for here. The North of the state gets up to fifty feet each winter. Given that this is the reality of our Winter the community, local and State Governmental agencies are all geared up for snow clearance. So throughout each storm (the local term for a snowfall) all the roads are snow ploughed. Our drive on the other hand is private property and we have to have it plough ourselves. Many families do it themselves either by hand or with a snow blower. Our drive is about 400 feet long and those two options are simply impractical. We have to have ours ploughed and we hire someone to do it for us. He rarely comes during a storm however, unless it lasts more than 12 hours, which is unusual.

The schools don’t make their students brave the roads either to or from school during storms and so cancel school at short notice. The famous ‘snow day’; when the boys were much younger, and Edwina and I were working, that was a nightmare but that is not directly relevant to this discussion. But if you are in employment you are expected to turn up except for the really severe storms. In my job my patients’ illnesses don’t have snow days so I do have to go in, as many patients determinedly make their way in to see me.

This means that me, and occasionally Edwina, are confronted with a trip home in snow. Given that the roads are ploughed and one has experience of driving in snow getting to the bottom of our drive is the easy part. Once we get home the hard part begins.

As we come up our road to the entrance to the drive we are either gunning the engine to get up our road or keeping it in low gear and creeping down our road. The drive runs at an approximate 130 degree angle from the road if you are coming up our road or about a 50 degree angle if you are coming down it. This means that you have to lose all your speed to get onto the drive which will have some snow on it, sometimes a foot of snow. So now you are on the drive at low speed . Now you want to gain some speed and traction to get up to the house and the garage. At first the drive is relatively flat for about 200 feet and at first glance one might think great, gun the car to gain momentum for the climb up to the house. Unfortunately the flat part is slightly S shaped and so the driver can’t gain too much speed as the faster you go the less grip you have for the turns.

So you have managed to get up to about 10 miles per hour on the S shaped flat part of the drive. Why only that low speed? Because as the drive starts to get steep it also turns sharply to the left. Too much speed and you end up on the lawn, too little speed and you can’t get up the hill. But what about four wheel drive I hear you enquire? Good question, and it most certainly helps but if the snow has fallen on ice or the snow is thick and heavy all four wheels struggle for grip.

We now have all three of our vehicles with four wheel drive; previously our people carrier (van in local parlance) was front wheel drive and heavy. I could not get it up the drive about two times a winter. I sold it this summer and I’m excited to see how my new vehicle will fare this upcoming winter.

Meanwhile we return to the snowy drive. It turns sharply uphill and to the left and you manage to make it up that. Surely that is game over. Sadly not. We have to get the car into the garage otherwise the plough man may hit it and/or it may get stuck in the snow leading to many minutes spent digging it out after the storm is over. At the end of the steep section we are confronted by a sharp 90 degree turn to the left followed by an equally sharp 90 degree turn to the right to get into the garage. And the drive slopes up moderately to get into the garage.

So our intrepid driver has gone through the S-bend, the sharp turn, the uphill section and now has to negotiate a quick left right turn all with enough speed to get up the hill, a low enough speed to make the final two turns and with enough speed then to drive up into the garage. It is quite a challenge.

I was going to write this blog as a “how could I make my drive the worst possible winter driving experience” format. And at this point you can see why. And when you only get to practice this about 8 times a year and mostly in an eight week period of the year one gets out of practice very quickly. So far we have not damaged any vehicles or buildings doing this but that could always change.

The costs of re-routing the drive or moving the garage are prohibitive (20 thousand dollars or more) so we are stuck with our winter obstacle course. Please wish us luck for this season.

Until next time,

Gavin

May 21st 2009

You don’t have rednecks???

This was the incredulous response during a conversation I had with one of my staff members last week when she asked me if had gone to school with any rednecks. And it quite sent my mind to work on exactly what the question meant.

To most of us, especially those over here in the United States, a redneck is a clearly defined part of the population. And if you go by the clichéd descriptions widely circulated in the media, then you could easily be forgiven for saying that yes indeed, we don’t have rednecks in the UK. We don’t have people living in trailers or unheated shacks in the middle of the woods, or at least not by the million! We don’t have uneducated, fiercely independent families living off the land through hunting, fishing and some smallholding agriculture. We’ve all seen the 70’s movie, Deliverance. It featured two very frightening brothers who terrorized a group of urban friends in the woods and rivers of Georgia. They were armed, they were prejudiced and they had little respect for contemporary values or the law. (Eat your heart out George W.Bush!!). They were particularly horrifying for a European audience as we weren’t familiar with that tradition or style of living.

So what is a redneck? In addition to all the preconceptions above they are a sizeable minority of rural population in the US. They are poor, often brutally so. But they celebrate their poverty with a gritty resourcefulness. There are numerous websites and postings on the web which show endless examples of their ability to recycle and adapt items for new uses and their surroundings. They often have religion, and this gets more strident the further south one travels. Sometimes they are fundamental evangelists but most often they are just conservative church goers in keeping with many of their fellow citizens. They really have no need for a great education as they are practical people who live on and from the land. So they have big families, live together in groups and clans. Sometimes they involved in long and bitter disputes with rival clans.

For recreation they keep it pretty simple. They love the land, so they hunt (and I mean with guns for birds, deer, bear etc etc), they fish too. They take great interest in their vehicles and other hardware. So they love boats and cars. It is true that they spend Sunday afternoons watching NASCAR (American stock car racing) and drinking beer. I know this because they proudly tell everyone that that is what they do on Sundays. Church and then NASCAR.

I’m often asked have I ever met a redneck. The reason the question is asked is that another common misconception is that rednecks only live in the Southern United States. The answer is that many of my patients are Rednecks and indeed I work with at least one. They are a feature of rural life in the US, and we live and work in a rural area. Our rednecks share many of the same characteristics of their well documented brethren in the South but have a number of unique challenges to overcome. For a start there is winter here. So they have to live in ‘winterized’ homes and have a form of heating. Many heat their homes with only a wood furnace fueled by trees they cut from their own land. I can tell you that living in a wood heated home in our climate is true hardship. And what does a redneck do in the winter? Well they can ice fish and bow hunt for a start. In addition instead of riding dirt bikes and four wheelers the winter redneck rides a snowmobile for their fun.

Given the setting of the Ducker home I can report that we are surrounded by rednecks on our road. And like any neighbourhood, there are good neighbours and bad ones. Those who drive four wheelers and snow mobiles in large cavorting, heavy drinking groups are a pain. But most are quiet and respectful neighbours, just as we are.

I have visited redneck homes in my role as medical officer for the local towns. In general it has been to either to determine if a home is suitable for children to grow up in or whether the home should be condemned. In the first instance, one home I inspected had three kids under the age of five. The stairs into the trailer had no banisters, the kids slept on bare mattresses with blankets and the yard was a toxic waste dump of broken beer bottles, old appliances, day to day trash and animal droppings. But they did have a 40 inch TV to watch NASCAR! In one example of the second instance the lady concerned had no family left and had allowed 40 cats to run wild while she lay in bed all day, too ill to move. That setting was just tragic (and almost as smelly as a latrine in urban Shanghai!).

As I pondered the answer to the opening question I had to define rednecks. They form the rural underclass here. Poor people who are poorly educated who find it next to impossible to escape from their impoverished backgrounds, assuming that is they want to. They are below the radar for many of the social services here, partly because they value their independence and partly because our social services here are underdeveloped by European standards. There is an underclass in the UK too. But like the rest of the population they are urban based and very few live in rural areas. The underclass in Britain, were virtually non existent until the advent of Thatcherism which valued the individual and their goals over those of the whole society. British rednecks share many of the same problems of their American equivalent. Poverty, poor education and no easy way out. The related problems of alcoholism, substance abuse and broken families and relationships. The difference is they live in urban areas where a relatively well developed welfare state attempts to give whatever help they may need to survive. Of course the United States has many similar urban areas too.

So, in England, we do have rednecks after all. They are our, inner city or overspill urban rednecks and over here we have our classic rural rednecks. Americans choose to call their urban rednecks by their location; minority ghettoes.

Until next time,

Gavin

post and the weather

Hello again everyone,

I'm finally back on line and just itching to go. i have so much stored news over the last three years that i'm not quite sure where to start.

This afternoon I'm off work and it was a bit cold to take the dog for a walk so I was doing some work indoors. I looked out of the window to see the dog sat at the bottom of our drive. This was highly unusual until I realized she was watching a man work on our postbox.

Perhaps I need to take a step backwards at this point for our British readers. Similar to the UK there is a government run postal service here, the United States Postal Service (USPS), for those who love their cycling you will remember they sponsored Lance Armstrong when we was winning his first five Tour de France's. They are pretty efficient compared to the Royal Mail, and they have to be. There are at least four competing nationwide/worldwide private postal companies.

The service runs like any other. They have post boxes to post mail in and they deliver to homes. There are a couple of important differences from the UK however. Firstly post is delivered to a postbox each home has standing out on the road. So the postman never has to get out of his car. One often sees the postman doing deliveries, terrifying all the motorists by driving on the wrong side of the road and just moving from box to box. Each road has their postboxes all on the same side of the road, which halves the danger I guess!! So if you live on the other side of the road you have to cross the road to collect your mail, which thus restores the danger quotient. This is how it works in rural Maine, at least, it probably functions similarly but with some differences in cities and towns.

The other nice feature and important difference to the UK is that you can use your postbox to post mail. So the postman will not only deliver mail, he will collect it from your home too. How cool is that? Each box has a little flag on it and if you have post to collect all you do is put the flag up and the postman will collect it for you. For free!!

Which brings me back to the beginning of the story. So our box is situated at the bottom of our drive and looks splendid. It is white. Why is that a problem? Because we have snow on the ground for three months a year, that's why!! Last year it got taken out by a snowplough, I patched it up to get through the winter and when it was warm enough last spring I went out and sank a new post for it and put it back up properly again. Two weeks ago it got taken out again! A white box on a slight corner, I just assumed it was a combination of our stupidity and bad luck.

Edwina went and opened up a PO Box at Waterville post office so our post could be diverted there and safely collected until I repaired the box. I happened to be in the town office this week, registering the dog and enquired if I had any right to claim damages from the town over the damage to my postbox. The clerk said she thought so, took my name and promised me someone would call.

Low and behold, they sent someone out to repair it today and once he avoided being licked to death by the dog and freezing to death in -14C cold he did a really nice job. Contrary to my expectations, there was no "a white box in Maine, huh? that's sensible!" or "putting your box on a corner huh? Are you looking for an excuse to get rid of it?" Instead there was an apology and a promise it wouldn't happen again. And he did a really nice job!

Until next time,

Gavin