Mental Images - Part 2

Ditches. They lurk everywhere. Along the sides of roads and in fields. Recently, I heard Punkn explaining why she didn't like them much. I am very glad Punkn survived her misadventure with a ditch with only bruises. Once more I was reminded of a time where it "could have been a Kodak moment."

A year or two out of college, about thirty years ago now, I was driving down a gravel road late one very dark night; it was either moonless or overcast and my old car's headlights barely penetrated the darkness of the remote area of strip-mined southern Indiana. The road was a mere car and half wide and the gravel surface covered with coal dust - I had been driving for hours.

While memory doesn't serve to tell me where I was going, I do remember needing to use the "little boy's room" - There was only one light to be seen as far as I could see in any direction about half a mile away on the porch of a farmhouse. I had seen no cars for hours on end, so I figured I'd just pull over a little and just stop there in the middle of the road. I opened the door and stepped out into the darkest night I think I've ever seen - and down, down I went as if I had stepped into an elevator shaft. I barely had the presence of mind to grab the chrome-plated threshold of the bottom of the car door and dangled there - I could feel nothing below my feet.



As it turned out, I had stopped just short of an intersection along side a ditch that was about 8 or 9 feet deep. The tires on the driver's side of the car were half-on and half-off the crumbly edge of the loose gravel road. While I hung there hoping my night vision would show me something, anything at all; I heard the front tire slowly crunching and sliding and finally it slipped off the edge of the road - leaving the wheel hanging suspended over the ditch and the frame of the car resting on the road.



I will never forget what little I could see in the dim light of the round overhead interior dome light - the car door opened, the driver seat above my head, the gleam from the worn spots on the steering wheel, and my hand holding on to the bottom of the door frame. No camera or film needed. I eventually collected my wits, and hand over hand, pulled myself back into the car where I found the car was completely stuck. I climbed on through the car, went out the other side, and walked toward the dim porch light making very, very sure my foot hit something solid before I went onwards.

At long last I got to the front door of the farm and knocked, a plaid-shirted farmer opened the door and after I told him my tale of woe, he simply said, "Come 'round back." I guess I was a bit soiled or perhaps had even soiled my... umm... well, anyway, I got around back and the farmer had fired up his tractor and told me to get on. We rode back to the car where he chained up the back bumper to the tractor and pulled the car back onto the road. I offered him all the what little money I had and he refused, saying, "Just bein' neighborly, 'spect you'd do the same fer me if need be."

So when Alice Kay posted that song titled "That's A Man" by Jack Ingram - that's why I said what I did, about respecting farmers - like this one farmer that quietly lived in the middle of nowhere - but worthy of respect.