Prepping for Tribal Council

This Thursday I'm going to the County Road Commission meeting. I've been busy printing maps and photos to be sure I have them when I need them. If I wait, I might forget.

I had originally intended to just be there to request they put the long-deferred maintenance on our road on to their project list for this coming summer, but things changed a bit when we got hit with a blizzard exactly one week ago. That's when the asshat who operates the snowplow for our road decided to prove he's not just incompetent, he's a prick.

The dude has been remarkably annoying all winter. The first couple times it snowed he didn't bother plowing to the end of our road; he turned around by the neighbor's driveway. Okay, I thought, like just about every other person in Baraga County he's not familiar with our road and he thinks that's where it ends. I called the County Road Commission office; that didn't help -- next time it snowed, once again he did not plow to the end.

So I went in to the office, laid it on thick with the office administrator about the road not ending where the operator apparently thought it ended, and she said she'd talk with the foreman or the engineer. They'd make sure the operator got the message. At the time, I also told her (as we've been telling people for years) that because the road hasn't been properly maintained, it's real easy to not realize it is indeed county road. It doesn't get graded in the summer, the right of way hasn't been brushed in so long there are trees growing in it that are practically saw timber size. You know, you shouldn't look at a tree that's growing on what is technically the shoulder of a road and start wondering just how many board feet a person could get out of it. About once every other year or so, usually after I've called to complain that we're going to have to buy an Amphicar to get through the giant puddle that never goes away, they'll do a load or two of gravel.

The puddle never goes away because there's a spring about 50 feet up the road and no ditch on that side so there's water running or seeping from late March into November. Permanent puddle.

Anyway, as the result of two things, one being the close to complete lack of maintenance and the rather odd fact the neighbor's driveway looks like real road (and not the goat trail of my childhood), it can be difficult to comprehend that the road swings to the left to go around the hill and not to the right. The latter is the result of the road commission buying fill dirt from my uncle in the 1980's. Back when I was a little barracuda and we lived on what had been my grandfather's farm, the driveway was indeed a goat trail. Rocky, rutted, and generally better suited for horses than for cars. There was a rock outcropping that meant people had to be careful driving in or out or risk losing a muffler.

My old man got disgusted enough with the condition of the driveway that he spent real money on a contractor who used dynamite and a bulldozer to make it less of a hazard. Then when the county bought the fill dirt, they built the driveway up more so it could handle heavy truck traffic. That was around 30 years ago, but they did such a good job that it still looks like a road, unlike the actual road that terminates at our property line. People get lost all the time trying to find our place because the road doesn't look like a road. Every new UPS or FedEx driver wants to deliver to the neighbor instead of us because they don't believe there's a road here, and even people who live up here have trouble finding it.

The silver lining, of course, is that it's probably been 30 years since we had Jehovah's Witness knock on the front door.

In any case, after the phone call, a visit to the office, and more phone calls the dude did start plowing all the way to the end of the road. Sort of. It is a short section, probably less than the length of a football field, but it's barely one lane wide, has a nasty sharp curve, and there is no turn around where it ends. There used to be one, the county put it in, but they then forgot about it, did not maintain it, and the swamp reclaimed it. The operator realized that no matter which way he came in, front end first or by reversing, there was going to be backing up involved. It then became clear to me that the poor sap had minimal experience in driving a dump truck in reverse, at least not when it required more than just backing in a straight line or doing a nice neat T-turn. His tracks had enough wandering in them that you'd have thought he'd never had to back a truck up before. The S.O. did a fair amount of muttering about people who can't use mirrors to reverse. (The S.O. did over-the-road for awhile and has alley docked semis in New Orleans. He doesn't have much respect for truck drivers who don't know how to use their mirrors.)

 Maybe it was because of the backing problem, but whether or not our little short section got plowed continued to be more a matter of random chance than anything else. Time after time I'd drive out pushing snow with the bumper of my Focus, get to the end of the neighbor's driveway, and discover that once again that's where the plow turned around. More phone calls to the Road Commission, a slight improvement for a week or two, and then back to the same shit performance. The truly weird part was if it hasn't snowed much at all, he'd plow. If we got ten inches? Nope. That's when I'd have to make another phone call.

The last time I got annoyed on my way to town, which was a little over a week ago, I decided, okay, time for another in person visit. This was just a couple days before the blizzard. I stopped at the Road Commission office, talked with the secretary/office administrator/whatever she is and asked when the Road Commission met next. I wasn't actually planning to bitch about the specific driver; I just wanted to ask them to do some basic maintenance on our little short piece of road, maybe get it up to where it would at least meet the DNR standards for an ATV trail. My reasoning was (and still is) if that short section of road actually looked like county road and the first curve was more clearly defined, two things might happen. One is that the guys out operating the equipment would know for sure what was road and what was not. The other is that by widening the final 300 feet a bit, it would be easier for the snow plow operator to do his job in the winter.

Then the blizzard hit. Of course, on Sunday morning we didn't know yet it was going to an actual true blizzard. The weather forecast was for a lot of snow and horrible driving conditions, but the snowfall totals in the forecasts are notoriously inaccurate. Fairly early in the morning the S.O. was on the phone with a friend who also lives at the end of a dead end road. During the course of their conversation the friend tells him, "yes, the plows are out. The snowplow just turned around in my yard a little while ago." Okay, the plows are out. So the S.O. decides to work on clearing our driveway even though it's still snowing. His reasoning is that if a lot is going to fall, get rid of what's fallen so far so it will be easier to get rid of the rest later. He gets out to the end of our driveway -- absolutely no sign of the snowplow. Once again the asshat had seen fit to plow all the way into someone else's front yard but could not be bothered to plow actual county road.

I'd had it. Final straw. We'd been putting up with crap service all winter. I vented on Facebook in a local sales and discussion group. Got a lot of shit comments from people who seemed to think I was expecting the guy to do more than his actual job, but that's par for the course with Facebook. It brings out the idiot in people.

Monday morning the sky is clear blue, not a cloud in sight, and the wind is gone. It's a lovely winter day. I call the county to suggest to them they might want to send the front end loader up to open our little bit of road -- that curve makes it tricky, and if there'd be a lot of drifting the regular plow, either truck or grader, might get stuck. After lunch the S.O. fires up the snowthrower and heads out to clear the driveway. He comes back from his first pass absolutely furious. He's so pissed I'm worried he's going to have what used to be referred to as an apoplectic fit. Why is he furious? See photo below.

Asshat snowplow driver had made one pass, came straight in pushing snow ahead of him, and then backed out, leaving a humongous pile sitting at the end of the county road. And, because he truly is an ass who never did figure out just where the county road ends and our driveway begins, he left the whole mess several feet over on the county's side of the line.

This is when, as the saying does, the fecal matter began to hit the air distribution system. The shit flinging wasn't in full force until after I called the Road Commission office to ask when they were going to be back to finish clearing the road. That's when the secretary (or whatever she is) said, in essence, "Oh, he's done up there. He said he went in with the grader and he's done." Lots of questions from me along the lines of "It's going to take a loader to move that pile! What are we supposed to do?" with the secretary responding with the polite version of "Fuck off and die. Not the county's problem." Some polite blithering about how he couldn't do any better because he had the grader.

Okay. First a long email to the county engineer, who from what I could gather later was pretty much unaware there was an ongoing issue (I should have contacted him months ago but made the rather foolish mistake of assuming the secretary was passing on my messages. So much for that fantasy.) The email to the engineer had two attachments: a formal letter of complaint about the snowplow operator (and, yes, I'm doing hard copies, too, one through the postal service and one being hand carried in this Thursday) and a copy of the photo of Mount FOAD. That was followed by another vent on the local sales and discussion group, which once again elicited the usual flurry of totally shit comments from idiots -- I loved the people who advised us to get some snow removal equipment (note photo above where our cleared driveway ends a few feet before Mount FOAD) or told us "You shouldn't have moved here if you didn't want to deal with snow." It's a little late for that advice considering the S.O. was born in a house that used to stand close to where the Woman Cave is now. This farm has been in his family for over 100 years.

However, mixed in with those comments was one from a woman who said "My husband is the snowplow operator in Herman. He would never have done that!" News flash, lady. Your husband is a dick. One does wonder just what the dude got to hear once he got home and his wife asked him if he'd really deliberately blocked access to the county road for two senior citizens. If the dude disliked us before for sure we're on his shit list now. C'est la vie.

Communicating with the engineer got results. The grader was back Tuesday morning. The road was cleared. He did it the same way it could easily have been done on Monday, through coming straight in and back blading Mount FOAD out of the road. One of the reasons both the S.O. and I were so pissed about that mountain is that we both knew perfectly well it was a "fuck you" from the operator because we'd complained about him in the past. The secretary may be technologically illiterate enough to believe that the front plow on a grader is fixed in place so back blading wouldn't be an option. The photo at the top is pretty compelling evidence that's not true.

Would the road have gotten cleared if I hadn't complained so vigorously? Probably not. The one pass in and an immediate out sends a pretty clear message that he had done all he planned to do, especially when he did it before noon. He made the rather stupid assumption that we'd get out the shovels and take care of his mess ourselves. He was wrong, and he royally pissed us off. He was supposed to be opening roads. Instead, he chose to block us, something that no other equipment operator has ever done in the S.O.'s lifetime. The one thing we could always count on was that if we could our car to the road, the road would be open.

Because Facebook does this odd thing where you get notified if a friend is tagged in other posts, quite a few people who do not live in Baraga County now know for sure that a lot of the stereotypes about rural areas are true. A couple told me they kind of got sucked into reading the whole comment thread, especially after the S.O. jumped into it. Like me, they thought it was pretty funny we were being advised to go back to where we came from. Ignorance is apparently bliss for way too many people. What's the equivalent of "Paddle faster. I hear banjos" when the snow is four feet deep? The woods up here really are full of dumb fucks.

One of those non-local friends, a fellow "Survivor" fan, has teased me about the Road Commission meeting and wants to know if I can do a live feed from "Tribal Council." Tempting though it is, I think I'll pass.