Fouche Gap Claims Another Victim

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This story, like so many of my stories, starts with taking the dogs for their regular morning walk. We walked down the driveway and then along the front of our property on Lavender Trail. The first thing we noticed when we reached the intersection with Fouche Gap Road was a set of three highway hazard triangles blocking access down into Texas Valley. We proceeded, wondering what we would find. Or, at least I wondered. The dogs probably not so much.

What we found was a tour bus that didn’t quite make it around the first hairpin curve down on that side of the mountain. This is what it looked like when we came back up. I think the driver kept his lunch in the compartment that’s open.

I asked the driver whether he was following a GPS. He said yes. If you happen to come from the south side of the mountain and want to get to some place in the valley, a GPS will usually route you over Fouche Gap Road. There is a perfectly good road with no sharp curves and no steep grades that can take you into the valley, but Fouche Gap is a good shortcut. This is the second time a vehicle too long to make the curves in this road has followed a GPS into disaster. Or at least a big inconvenience.

He had been taking six passengers to a farm in the valley that hosts weddings at a venue, as they say. Fortunately for the passengers, someone was coming up from the valley and could take them back down to the wedding venue. I know you’re wondering why they needed a bus that size for six passengers. Me, too, but I didn’t ask.

The front wheels of the bus were right at the edge of a fairly deep ditch. The back of the bus was scraping the pavement. He couldn’t come or go. I was a little surprised that he had made it up the south side of the mountain, because there is another serious hairpin curve on that side. The big difference is that that curve is closer to level, while the one that trapped the bus takes a steep dive down through the curve.

I suggested that he get a bulldozer, and then set his bus on fire and push it off the road, but he said he had already called for a big wrecker.

The dogs and I continued down to our normal turnaround, and then came back up. A couple of cars passed us on their way up. I tried to flag them down, but one couldn’t figure out what I wanted him to do. No worry. He found out soon enough.

The guy in the pickup that’s turning around in the photo above is someone I speak to when he passes me and the dogs. He stopped this time, and asked whether something was still across the road. I couldn’t quite understand what he said, but I figured he must be talking about the bus, so I said, “Yes.” Then he said he had brought his chain saw to get it off the road. I was a little puzzled by that, but as he drove off I called out, “That might work.” I think I meant,”That probably won’t work.” But then I replayed his words in my mind and realized he had asked about a tree across the road.

The big wrecker showed up just as I came back up to the bus.

I thought about staying to watch what happened. I think the wrecker was going to pick up the back of the bus and move it over. It would have been interesting to watch, in a large-machine-at-work kind of way, but I thought it might take a while. That was a good decision (on a day with some not so good decisions, fortunately not my own), because it was about two and a half hours later before I heard the wrecker and the bus come back to the top of the mountain.

A couple of months ago Leah and I were coming up the mountain and found the road blocked at the second hairpin curve on the south side. It was a big tractor-trailer truck carrying chickens. The driver said his GPS had routed him over Fouche Gap. The front of his truck was pushed up against the bank at the side of the road, and his trailer wheels were off the pavement, perilously close to a steep drop-off. The wrecker he called was probably the same size as the bus wrecker. It might even have been the same wrecker. In that case, we had to take the 10-mile detour out the nice, level, no-sharp-curve road into the valley and then up the far side to our house. I never found out how the truck driver got back off the mountain, but the truck was gone the next time we drove down, so he must have managed somehow.

On the bus job, the wrecker had backed down from the intersection at the top of the mountain, somewhere around a quarter to a third of a mile. When he got the bus unstuck, the bus driver had to back up to the top of the mountain. At least he wasn’t towing a trailer.

I think a sign on Huffaker Road warning of very sharp curves might save some trouble on Fouche Gap Road. I think I’ll suggest that to the county, even though it will reduce the drama on the mountain.

Aunt Lorraine

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Leah’s Aunt Lorraine died on Tuesday. She was 89.

Lorraine was Leah’s mother’s sister, the last of that generation in Leah’s family. Although they lived in Winston-Salem, NC, and we didn’t get a chance to see her often, she was Leah’s favorite. The last time we saw her was at least five years ago, although Leah spoke to her often, or at least as often as she could actually get her to answer her phone.

Her health had been deteriorating for some time. She was in and out of the hospital and nursing homes. At the end, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, untreatable at her age and in her condition.

Leah is still in the stage of thinking about calling her to tell her about something that has happened here. That passes, of course. She will miss her aunt.

I wrote about milestones in my last post. This is another milestone, but not a welcome one.

Milestones

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We passed two important milestones on Wednesday.

I have mentioned before, probably too many times, that we have a regular Wednesday lunch of huevos rancheros at our favorite Mexican restaurant. But for at least five weeks Leah has not been able to attend. She has had a really painful time with sciatica.

I had heard of sciatica but never understood how debilitating it could be. She has been taking a lot of pain pills for a long time with very limited relief. She had an epidural two weeks ago last Monday which hurt like hell and provided no relief . She has promised she will never have another one. On Tuesday she finally got a prescription for gabapentin, which is used for nerve pain. That seems to have helped, because around noon on Wednesday, she suggested that maybe we could eat at the Mexican restaurant. And so we did.

This was the best lunch we have had in a long time. Maria, the waitress who knows us best, served us. The hot sauce was the best we have ever had. I have heard TV chefs talk about chilis having a fruity flavor when prepared a certain way, but until we had this sauce, I had never tasted it. It was exactly the right combination of heat and flavor. The burrito sauce was also good. And the eggs.

So, we passed a milestone: Leah was able to get out of the house and have lunch. I don’t know whether it was a major milestone, but it certainly felt that way.

The second milestone involved a dog.

Zoe has a history of running away. I have told the story of her four-day road trip to who-knows-where, and at least a couple of other all-day affairs. On Wednesday afternoon I took Zoe and Sam into the front yard to play. I put them on about a 10-foot leash so they can get some running in. They had played for a while, and I was fairly relaxed, when they saw a squirrel near a tree at the edge of the yard. Zoe took off and jerked the leash out of my hand. She ran to the tree, and when the squirrel climbed the tree, Zoe kept going into the woods.

I called and called as she disappeared. I couldn’t run after her because I had Sam on his leash (plus arthritis in my knees), but Leah heard me calling and came out. She held Sam, and I was just getting read to hobble into the woods after Zoe when Leah said, “Here she comes!”

Yes, Zoe came back when she was called. It took a little more calling than would be ideal, but she actually came back to us.

So, we turned a corner. We passed a milestone. But I’m still going to keep her on her leash when she’s outside.

She’s lying on our living room couch in the photo. Leah is not thrilled to have her on the furniture, so she stays off until Leah goes to bed. Then she steps up to the couch and asks permission. I pat the cushion and she jumps up. Leah knows she’s doing it, but doesn’t really complain, as long as she doesn’t actually see it.

Fall

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Apparently, from what I can find, autumn is called fall for the exact reason you might think it is — this is the season when leaves fall.

But not only leaves. When I was walking the dogs a few days ago, we came into an area where a lot of large oak trees overhang the road. These were falling from the trees.

A lot of them were falling. I could hear them hitting the leaves, and I could hear them hitting the road around us. I thought about recording the sound of falling acorns, but, even though they were falling frequently, I figured I wouldn’t be able to get a good recording. Oaks are pretty shy about that kind of thing.

I think we were all fortunate that none of them hit us.

These acorns come from the chestnut oak (Quercas montana), the most common oak around this part of the mountain. The chestnut oak itself is quite common from Massachusetts all the way down the mountainous spine of the East to Mississippi. It has a cousin, the swamp chestnut oak, which grows in lowland areas, as opposed to our chestnut oak, which, as its name implies, grows in higher elevations.

Our chestnut oak’s acorns are among the largest in the US.

The Wikipedia article says the chestnut oak acorn ranges in size up to around 1 1/2 inches. As you can see, one of the acorns I picked up from the road is around that size. The swamp chestnut oak’s acorns may be larger (or maybe not). The bur oak’s acorns are said to be larger, but bur, or burr, oaks don’t grow around here.

These are good throwing acorns. They are also useful as chew toys for dogs, although apparently the taste discourages them from chewing too long. Wildlife find them appetizing. There are other places along the road where squirrels have had a picnic and left all the chewed up skins on the road. The acorns of the white oak group, of which the chestnut oak is a member, have less tannins and are therefore less bitter than acorns from the red oaks. I don’t really know because I haven’t sampled them.

Another thing the Wikipedia article says is that the wood of the chestnut oak is dense and makes good firewood. I have found that to be true, second only to the dogwood, I think. A few years ago we cut several large oaks that were threatening the garage at our old house, and they burned well. It is not uncommon to see several trunks sprouting from the same spot, which tends to make them somewhat weak as they get bigger. For that reason I cut any that were close to the house. At our new house we have mainly pines and maples, so I haven’t had the chance to try much oak in our wood burning stove.

But if one of the oaks along the road had actually dropped an acorn on my head, I might have considered a little oak rustling.

Little lizard

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Mollie brought this little lizard into the house Saturday afternoon.

It’s small, probably only about an inch and a half long. I have seen a few young lizards like this on the driveway. It was only a matter of time until Mollie caught one.

This one seemed unharmed. I scooped it up and took it outside. I released it on an old oak stump not far from the house.

It’s an Eastern Fence Lizard. I think it’s probably a male, and probably only weeks to a couple of months old. Adults are around four to seven inches long.

They have a fairly large range, from northern Florida to New Jersey and New York in the north, and from the Atlantic coast as far west as Colorado and Wyoming.

They are arboreal, although they are so well camouflaged that they must be hard to see on a tree. The imported fire ant can attack and kill these lizards as well as their eggs. I hope my usual practice of killing every fire ant nest I find helps these little creatures.