March Mudness

The talk of some towns may be the NCAA basketball tournament, but in Sandwich we’re talking about the mud. Those of us who live on dirt roads have to carefully plan our early spring travel because getting “stuck in the mud” is a real possibility. The biggest surprise for me this year was our mail delivery. Our route driver has a Jeep with extra high clearance, and she kept delivering through it all. Someone posted a hilarious video of our UPS driver bombing down a deeply rutted muddy road with the truck sliding and bucking the whole way. I’d give you a link to the video, but it may have gotten him in trouble with UPS, so I won’t pile on.

Rain didn’t help matters, but it did melt away some of the snow, and as the road bed began thawing out, we were on our way to normalcy. (Note the contrast between the first photo and this one.) There were a couple of anxious days in there when the sap was flowing and many maple sugarers weren’t able to get to their trees. Fortunately for us, the farm’s trees are mostly on the farm and the sap buckets were reachable, though slush slogging was required.

Mud’s nothing new in this neck of the woods, and many of us dirt road residents resort to parking our cars on paved roads and walking to our houses toting grocery bags. We parked a car down at the farm for a couple of days and walked through the woods to and from home. The Sandwich Police Department posted the above photos of cars belonging to people who didn’t heed the warnings, and the “Sandwich Board” (our local online message board) was abuzz with colorful mud stories from years past. Several residents remembered having to walk out muddy roads to catch the school bus, and one person remembered having to exit her mud trapped car through a window. I’m pretty sure that everyone has enjoyed the break from divisive political posts on the Sandwich Board. I much prefer to read about the weather!

Here’s our road after the Sandwich Road Department spread 650 tons of rock over the town’s 45 miles of dirt roads. (Fun fact: Sandwich, with a year-round population of about 1,200, is the third largest town in New Hampshire based on square mileage.) The first two loads spread on the stretch by our driveway were literally sucked into the mud. Good grief — sounds like a really bad horror movie!

All is well, now, and I’m hoping the road crew is getting some sleep. If you’d like to read about another Sandwich natural disaster, check out my post from a few years back on mouse-ageddon. (Click here for Mouse Patrol.) I’ll leave you with a video I came across when searching “UPS truck in mud.” We used to have draft horses on the farm (click here for Horse Days), but lately it’s Steve and his skidder doing the road rescues, including pushing a FedEx truck up our icy driveway. Why watch basketball when you can watch this?!