Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 21:17

Wrong Way

I was putting away some clothes in the bedroom Tuesday night when I heard what sounded like a large truck coming up the road just outside our house.

Since the township closed the road last week, traffic has been rather scarce. The only vehicles I see go by are the neighbor a quarter mile up the road, who owns a construction business and drives a four-wheel drive truck, and the neighbor's brother, who has some beef cattle at his brother's place.

I hurried into the dining room to look out the window. Sure enough, a large truck had stopped at the end of our upper driveway and was in the process of backing up.

"What is it?" Randy asked.

"It's a big truck of some sort. And now he's backing up," I said.

Randy slipped on some boots and went outside. Through the trees, I could see the headlights as the truck backed down around the hill.

My husband was gone for about five minutes, and before he returned to the house, the truck once again inched its way up the hill and then went past the driveway.

Just at that moment, Randy came back in the house.

"Who was it?" I asked.

As it turned out, the truck was a liquid propane truck from one of the local cooperatives. (Someone must have been out of propane. Why else would the driver be out at 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday evening?)

The driver told Randy he had been given wrong directions and couldn't find the place he was looking for. He had planned to head out back to the main road because he had a general idea of where he was supposed to go. Except when he came around the corner, intending to use our road to get back to the main road, he saw that the road was closed.

He had been sitting there, trying to decide what to do, when Randy arrived.

I can just imagine what the driver's reaction must have been when he saw the "road closed" sign. In the first place, he had been driving around in a sparsely populated township and had just driven about a mile on a very muddy road (the one north of the house has never been paved). He had been given wrong directions. He was lost. And now when he finally figured out where he was -- there was a closed road between him and where he needed to go.

"I told him he could get through as long as he stayed to the left," Randy said.

We could hear the truck as the driver slowly made his way around the corner below the house and then as he drove west. When I could no longer hear the truck, I figured he had made it past the other neighbor's place all right.

Our road still is not in very good shape. Essentially only one driving lane is available. About one-third of the road on the north side is just about gone. That's where the road started to wash away. The township has hauled in some crushed rock, but they've still got a lot of work to do to get the road in good condition. I know for certain if two vehicles met up along the way, one of them would have to back up because there's not room for two vehicles to pass.

Getting into our lower driveway also is quite a delicate operation. I have not been parking in back of the house because it's pretty mucky back there, too, so that just leaves the driveway at the front of the house.

There are deep, soft, muddy spots on either side of our lower driveway, which cuts out a good portion of drivable road, and there's another mucky spot right across from the driveway. I have to come to almost a complete stop and then carefully aim my truck for the narrow section where I know it's solid.

So far, so good, though.

Robins! -- Sunday evening when we took the dogs for a walk, we saw a flock of robins flying overhead. But the robins had not yet come to the yard. Tuesday morning I heard them in the yard! They were twittering and singing from the trees next to the road!

The robins are here! The robins are here!

And I've heard geese flying over, too. And sandhill cranes.

Who will be next?

To tell you the truth, though, I'm surprised that I have not yet heard killdeer. Usually the killdeer are the first to arrive every spring.

LeAnn R. Ralph