We’ve been at the cabin since Friday evening. Friday was supposed to be a big day at Mayo, starting the drug study treatment. I needed to have the prescription drug part of the plan in hand, shipped to my house, so I could start the pill the same day as the infusion. Thursday afternoon we found out there was miscommunication in the ménage à trois of the specialty pharmacy, my insurance, and my Mayo doctor, regarding insufficient pre-authorization. It looked like it would take days to resolve. We had to cancel all of the next day’s Mayo appointments, and push to the next week. Basically, the moment that decision was made, whatever had been gumming the works cleared out and the drug would be arriving on time – but by then my slots had been given to other patients, so we hopped in the car and headed to the cabin.
So many changes here, just in the past two weeks! There were endless pairs of trumpeter swans communing along the lakeshore the last time we were here, spending most of their time in the water feeding, big fluffy swan butts in the air. Swanbergs in the mist. They are surprisingly loud, chortling well into the night. The swans are now gone, nesting somewhere, but the loons have arrived. The peepers are peeping in the slough, and the wood ducks are awkwardly careening around, scoping nesting sites. Evolution has not given them grace.
As we headed out of Minneapolis on Friday, the place where we picked up lunch was selling frozen pizza dough balls. We have a little propane pizza oven at the cabin, and I took it apart to make sure no one was living in it before we fired it up. On a roll, I also opened the gas grill to find a very startled mouse family staring back at me. The babies were no longer pink, but just barely. We decided to close the lid and hope that mother mouse would decide to relocate her family, so we can catch them in traps later in their lives. Really wanted to avoid creating a mouse inferno in our Weber.
Ran into Larry’s Market in Battle Lake looking for fresh mozzarella (nope!) or pre-shredded, packaged mozzarella (yes!) for our mouseless pizzas. Coming back up our ½ mile long driveway, I drove by something on the ground that made me stop, back up, and crunch the car into a tree. I was actually a bit stuck there for a moment, thoroughly hung up, but I managed to get back to the cabin. Where I was unable to open the driver’s side door. I called Bob from behind the wheel, and just explained “I broke the car.”
Bob came outside, plucked a chunk of wood out of the doorframe, and opened my door. Whew, that still works. He then surveyed the damage and tried to guess what had happened. “Did you spin out?” No. He was perplexed about the series of large dents all along the side of the car, while the headlights, tail lights, and both bumpers were totally fine. “Did a bear run out of the woods?” No. But you’re sort of getting closer…
We’ve never seen a bear here at the cabin, but there are periodic sightings. Bears around here are a bit mythical, like Big Foot. The latest grainy photo was from last week and we calculated it to be less than 2 or 3 miles from us, so practically right here. We always keep our eyes peeled for wildlife, but that turns out to be mostly deer, turkeys, a pheasant, a bald eagle, or a skunk (live skunk sightings are quite rare!). We always call them out when we see them, even the deer, and we’re lousy with deer. We’ll point out Canada geese, for god’s sake. And there are so fucking many geese here, friends made bumper stickers in high school saying “Fergus Falls: Old people, police, geese” and that truly summed it up.
A bear might actually cause me to crash the car in excitement. I guess I can sort of blame this on a bear. Actually the failed promise of a bear…what I thought I saw along the driveway was bear poop. There were a couple black lumps that don’t fit the “normal” profile of shit I’d expect to see on the road. If I could identify bear scat (which I’ve never seen before), we would know the bear is really somewhere close.
Something like that was what was running through my mind as I threw the car into reverse, thought, “Oh, my neck no longer allows me to turn to see out the back of the car,” then, “Doesn’t matter, I have a back up camera” and hit the gas.
When diagramming the series of events for Bob still didn’t make him understand how I’d managed it, we actually drove back out to the scene of the accident and he tried to set up a reenactment. There’s a massive wound on the tree I hit, and there was, indeed, only one tree, so that gave my story some credibility. But he’s still puzzled. Later tonight he admitted that the only thing he could think of was that I kept turning the wheel and gunning it, so the car slammed sideways into the tree again and again, and I think I successfully convinced him that I wasn’t a total fucking idiot who would do that. But now that you mention it, how the fuck did it happen? I mean, it is impressive. I managed to separately dent each door and the back quarter panel, yet not damage the door handles or the gas cap. Also, turns out I ran over the possible bear shit but actually dirt clumps when I got the car off the tree, so Bob was never able to see what I saw, the very reasonable thing that set off the events that will include him spending money in a body shop.