No Brakes On The Mountain : Pam's Wild Ride

When it comes to picking a category, being married to Pam might come under something like At Least It's Never Boring or Pammie's Believe It Or Not. No brakes on the mountain? No big! Just one more incident during the ongoing wild ride that consitutes a life partnership with one of the most amazing redheads on God's green Earth.

Sarah Palin's Alaska has nothing on Pam's Montana...or Pam's South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona.... In fact, you pick a state, and I'll tell you a story.

This story takes place in Montana during the winter of 2001-2002. I was gone, driving a big rig OTR (over the road). Pam was living alone for most of each month--except for a passel of kitty-cats--in our survival cabin on 20 acres situated in the Missouri River Ranch development a few miles from Craig, Montana. She was 50 years of age at the time, five feet tall, somewhere around 100 pounds of Pioneer Woman.

An email exchange with my friend, Red Elk, actually triggered the formation of this page. Here's the exact text, only slightly edited (names changed, etc) to protect the privacy of certain characters in the narrative (you'll understand why):

PAM'S WILD RIDE (ONE OF 'EM!)

A related Pam-story, circa 2002 (I think it was). I was gone, OTR truck driving, and Pam was living alone on the mountain with the wildlife and wilder human residents.

One midafternoon, midwinter, she had been visiting the Friends. They lived several miles up the mountain from our valley floor location. Coming down out of there, it was super-steep (dirt trail, hardly a "road"), with one nasty hairpin turn about halfway down. Very slick trail, too, but we had a 1974 4wd GMC pickup which handled the slick part pretty well (chained up on all 4).

But that truck was a problem, every day we owned it. It was a pure piece of junk, really, with a 350 Olds engine that had been jammed in there (it took us months to identify that), a bad starter, automatic (yech!) transmission, the power steering had gone out before we got it home from the Deer Lodge seller--Hell, it broke down the first time we tried, had to be TOWED back to Deer Lodge from almost to Avon, took 2 tries just to get it to our property. On the second try, the power steering belt broke near Helena. Never did replace it.

And brakes? HAH! Sometimes we had 'em, sometimes not. They'd gone out completely on me one day, wouldn't you know, right on that first steep drop from the Friends', but I was really fortunate--it was midsummer, dry trail. I had time enough to decide, cranked the truck off the hairpin and hard-right UP the steep slope, came to a stop, rolled it back, picked up the tools that had flown around from the toolbox on the floor, and made it on down the hill.

But when it happened to Pam in the SAME SPOT, trying an uphill shot was not an option. As slick as it was, the truck would have rolled for sure. So she ran it DOWN off the hairpin (to avoid ROLLING the rig over right there).

She had a passenger: Pedophile pervert 200 pound, six foot Sonof Friend, age 17 (we didn't know then that he was a pedophile, but last we knew, he was doing federal time in Texas). As they were flying down through the snow between the pine trees, Pam told big Sonof, "When I yell, help me crank the wheel hard right!"

So he fainted on her. Literally. Passed out. Turned out he couldn't handle the stress, had 6 months earlier totaled a car on another part of the mountain, etc. Now she had 200 pounds of dead meat held up by nothing but her powerful little right arm and a huge shot of adrenaline, and she's maneuvering a big pickup left-handed, one-handed, with NO POWER STEERING down, slalom style through the trees.

At the bottom, brought it to a halt, but in snow enough it was going to need a bit of help getting back up on the road. NEVER TOUCHED THE PAINT ON SO MUCH AS A PASSING PINE NEEDLE.

Sonof came to, eyes went wide, RAN back up the 1/4 mile (steep) to his parents' house. Daddy Friend quickly cranked up his old Subaru station wagon--quickly, 'cause Pam was waiting, her feet wouldn't take a climb back to their house (shrapnel in feet), and the heater in the truck didn't work, either. About 10 degrees out, sun about to go down. In the end, no harm, no foul.

Got me one HELL of a woman!