No Trail!

What a winter it has been! We’ve enjoyed unparalleled cross country skiing, snowshoeing, and ice skating, and our long, steep driveway makes an exciting, sometimes death defying, sled run. Understandably, it can be challenging to motor vehicles trying to get up it. We have a fantastic, fearless UPS driver, Frank, whom I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts, but not all drivers are as game.

One day as Beau and I were returning from a walk, something caught my eye at the bottom of our driveway. There was a slip of paper taped to our red wooden street number sign. You can see it in the above photo if you look closely in the top left corner. Very subtle.

It was a note from our FedEx driver saying that a package had been left at “1st sand barrell up drive.” Sure enough, there it was, carefully wrapped to withstand the elements.

We had several more sand barrell deliveries through the course of the winter, and every one made me laugh. After all, without a sense of humor, I would just be cranky, and no one wants that!

I’ll tell you who isn’t cranky — Stephen Bartlett. He’s been working at a log landing at the bend in our driveway for a good part of the winter (see the post, Daddy Time), and when he encountered a car stuck in a snowbank part way up, he knew just what to do — haul it out, of course, and be friendly about it. (After all, the driver already felt terrible.) Here’s the thing: GPS leads people who are looking for the Mount Israel trailhead right up our driveway. It may be because long ago a fire road up the mountain went through our property, but said road is now completely overgrown. No trail, folks!

On that day the hapless hiker was a student from U-Mass Dartmouth driving a wee Honda Fit, which lacks both the traction and clearance for our driveway in winter. Especially this winter. Stephen extracted him (and his vehicle) from the snowbank and sent him on his way to the actual trailhead about 5 miles by road. Then what should appear on a tree along our driveway? The “no trail” sign that Stephen made himself using a board scrap from his saw mill. My favorite part? The “Sorry.” That’s not just good manners, it’s kindness. There’s a lot of that going around in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Aren’t we lucky to live here?