Author: Al
Posted: 2009-04-29 23:44:16
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Two Days at the Gates of Hell
With Commentary From Art Alexakis
Some people might find it odd that I wanted to bring my family to Hell's Gate, but I had been there once before, and it was really a quaint little place. There were tons of reasons to bring them along anyway. Nobody from work could go with me, or wanted to go with me. I had a near impossible schedule, needed some extra hands, and we all needed a few days out of the house we had been remodeling. Hell's Gate would be lovely this time of year.
What was actually odd about the trip was that I had apparently brought along the Everclear front man, Art Alexakis for the ride. Going to Hell's Gate didn't seem like a big deal. It was the constant angry-white-boy-depression songs that kept rolling through my head that signaled I was in trouble.
I've had a soft spot for Everclear since they were popular when I was in high school. As an angsty teenager longing to escape South Mississippi, their message that “Everything sucks” spoke volumes to me. The band seemed to soften up at about the same time that I did, so we've just stuck together ever since. Of all of the things that I listened to when I was seventeen, I am pretty sure that Everclear is the only one that I still seek out. As an adult, I lament that there are no Everclear songs on Rock Band. Art is one of the few singers that I can imitate without hurting myself and/or others.
The snow started about two hours before we were to make our first stop. I had been to that site twice before to fix the same problem, so I was already a little superstitious about going back. We were on the twisty road between Boise and Lewiston, and snow meant that we were going to be making very slow progress. Then, from the MP3 player came Art, jamming out the most awesome version of “Speed Racer” ever recorded.
I can't pin down the day or hour when I became timid. All I know is that one year I drove like a maniac, and didn't have a care in the world for neither life nor limb. Then the next year I drove like someone's grandmother. It was sometime after the birth of my son, and before he was old enough to call me daddy. Even so, there I was driving a mini-van, with my wife, kids, and dog in the seats around me, and snow falling more heavily every minute, and all I wanted to do was floor the accelerator. I've done it before under similar conditions. It is an involuntary, animal like reflex. Today, however, the county sheriff was tailing me.
It was excruciating. I wanted to go fast. I needed to go fast. The caution signs at each turn and twist seemed to have a slower and slower speed posted, and I had no choice to obey. Finally I pulled into the slow vehicle turnout. The officer behind me slowed down and stayed in the passing lane (He's a demon on wheels: “Speed Racer). There would be no getting out of his sight.
After a torturous hour of being shadowed by the cop, we pulled over at the gas station in a little town to let the dog out for a moment. As we pulled up and parked in front of the “Keep your pets in your car” sign, my phone sprang to life. Back in cell coverage. I wonder what's happening today. A quick look at the number of emails in my work account, and the pending voice and text messages told me that I was being missed somewhere.
A server that I am responsible for had mysteriously locked up unbelievably hard (I will be singing in the rain when the bad dreams come and it all goes wrong again: “When It All Goes Wrong Again”). A call to my slightly perturbed boss told me that the problem had been fixed with a sledgehammer (reboot). That call also confirmed that I was making ridiculously bad time, and would have trouble getting to my first stop, Pittsburg Landing.
We bought a few provisions, and were back on the road. The snow continued off and on. Sixty short miles, and four non-trivial rock chips later (I will buy you a new car, perfect, shiny, and new: “I Will Buy You A New Life”), it was time to leave the main road behind. Pittsburg Landing, the boat dock with a hundred ways to spell its name, lay on the other side of the ridge that separates the Salmon river from the Snake. I took a look at the snow covered hilltops, and one at the front of my mini-van, and then one at the light rainfall outside. Sure, all I've got is street tires on this all-wheel drive, but I can do this. It's just a little precipitation. We were about eight miles in when the rain turned to snow (Yeah, I hate the way I feel, and it makes no sense: “Chrysanthemum”). The road was still relatively clean, and the only thing that I lamented was that my family was being robbed of the breathtaking view.
Then the road took a turn for the worse. Our little engine that could made it through the first patch of snow covered road without incident. Then the next patch was on an incline. I floored it, and we crawled through. Then the next patch was on a much steeper incline. I floored the pedal again, and we started crawling, then we stopped, then we started sliding backwards. I turned the wheels and put the parking break on. We stopped. I got out and inspected the situation. We were hopelessly blocked by at least an inch of snow... Maybe an inch and a half. This was ridiculous. I got back in the van and watched as a guy in a truck flew past us. Stupid van. I mulled over the idea of chaining up and forging ahead, but I knew that this side of the hill was a pleasant Sunday stroll compared to the other side. If, by some miracle, we made it down alive, we wouldn't be getting out until a plow came through.
Begrudgingly, I managed to turn us around and head back for the little spot where I knew there was cell coverage just fifty yards ahead. Time to call the boss and admit failure. It's probably a good thing that my family was along for the ride. I would have gotten over that hill or died trying if it were just my life in my hands. I hate to fail (You jump through the big hoop. You play all the right games: “Everything To Everyone”). The boss was supportive though. Playing the safety card at work begets a form of political correctness. If you do a thing for safety's sake, then no matter how silly it was, you have at least bought a few days to explain yourself. More than not, you've gotten a free pass. This was the first time I played the safety card. I hope to never do so again.
At least now we could get to Lewiston early, and scout some of the sites I had on my list as secondary objectives. As we passed the next town, my son complained that he didn't feel right, and had a headache. He has come by some honest whining genes from my family, and I write him off a lot because of this. Today was no exception. In the back of my head, though, I thought that if he was getting car sick, he shouldn't be watching the DVD player in back. “Turn off the DVD player” I told him. He gets a lot of instruction from me, most of which I never double check for compliance, so he writes me off a lot. He gave me some gibberish about why he wasn't going to do that, and because I was busy concentrating on driving through what had now become a snow storm on a mountain pass, I ignored him (I don't wanna hear those words you feel you have to say, when you find out how I used to be, back in the day: “Here We Go Again”).
Moments later, we were treated to the symphony of a prolonged vomit session. The turnouts were all snowed in, and we were still climbing the hill, so I didn't dare try to stop. It seemed to go on forever. Connor would later recount that he threw up three times. “Yeah, but it was all one event.” I would correct him. Up the hill, and down the other side, and what seemed like an eternity later, we came to a small town. By the time we pulled over, the van smelled of Gatorade and bile. Which, if you are looking for a name for your alternative or new wave band, I think Gatorade and Bile would be pretty bitchin.
We arrived in Lewiston, too early to even check into the hotel. Soon we were at Hell's Gate, a lovely little state park on the Snake River. The kids and the dog, and I went to investigate the Flow Monitor there. It was almost in working order. The screen was barely visible, and someone had been kind enough to scratch the Lexan window making it that much harder to tell what was going on. I wonder how personally I will take it when someone inevitably shoots or otherwise vandalizes the units that I have designed.
Then we went across the river, and hit another site. It was in good running order really. My heart sinks a little when I pull up to one of these, and it is working fine. I was tasked with replacing them last year because they “never worked right.” So, I feel a little useless when they do indeed work properly (There is this place inside, where all the good things die: “You Make Me Feel Like A Whore”).
Next up was an hour trip down a narrow river road to Heller Bar. I tried to do the speed limit, but thirty-five just seemed out of the question when fifty-five felt too slow. Niki slept, so I cut loose and had fun, wishing that Speed Racer would finally return on the MP3 player. It never did.
At the site, the Flow Monitor was in fairly bad shape. The screen was abysmally hard to see, and the whole thing was located out of the way and under a tree. I was tasked with replacing this one on this trip, with the intention of moving it to a permanent home sometime in the near future. That now seemed out of the question. This unit was in bad shape, but the site needed a day of prep work just to be ready to install the replacement. Trees would have to be cut, or bucket trucks procured to get the sat modem anywhere useful. I took pictures so that I could show my boss how unreasonable this task was.
Back at the hotel, I sat down to work, while the kids and Niki ran off to the indoor pool. The indoor pool was all I had heard about since I first made the mistake of telling the kids that the hotel had a pool. I logged on to the office system, and tried to figure out what had gone so wrong that morning while I was away. No luck. In the mean time, I uploaded the pictures from Heller Bar and asked for advice. My boss, never one to take the hint that by “advice,” I simply meant “confirmation of what I was already thinking,” told me to go ahead and get it done (You can have your way again, yeah, you believe what you wanna believe: “Thrift Store Chair”). I had to meet with a guy from the BLM there tomorrow anyway, so I may as well get something accomplished while I waited.
As I was finishing up on the computer, I got a call from Niki. Apparently, the “indoor pool” was across the street at the athletic club. How quaint? I drove the van over so that the kids wouldn't have to walk a block in the cold while they were wet and shivering. As I arrived, the family was being kicked out so that the club could hold an old lady water aerobics class. Awesome. (Do you remember when we were happy?: “Otis Redding”)
After a quick meal, it was time to try and sleep, something that we hadn't really done very much of in the past two weeks due to remodeling. The trouble with that was two fold. First, I just don't sleep well in hotels. Second, DING! Wait. We had an elevator in our room? Nope, just walls made of a single layer of the finest ancient parchment money could buy. All night, we were treated to the sound of drunken guests, and elevator doors, and yipping lap dogs (I see faces on the ceiling. I see them move, I hear them singing. I lay back in here by myself, I think about the time that I've spent in hell: “When It All Goes Wrong Again”).
An eternity later, morning came, and I was ready to face the day ahead. My first task was to make awkward conversation with my boat driver. He's just the kind of person that I agonize over spending time with. I would much rather be around a group of blue collar workers than my fellow computer nerds. That statement, however, comes with one caveat. I would rather be in a corner not interacting with said blue collar workers. If I have to talk, then all bets are off. I hate the droning and predictable conversation you get from the typical computer geek, but at least I know the ritual. With everyone else, my only hope is beer. Unfortunately, most folks like our boat driver, Tim, look down on me for drinking anything but domestic swill. Honestly, I look down on them a little for only drinking domestic swill, so we are even. Tim is the archetypal boat driver, and he likes his domestic swill (He does not give a damn, no because he has no shame: “Baby Talk”).
Once we were on the river, the tension eased up. Tim put his headphones on and started driving. I shamelessly enjoyed the sights and silence. I've only been on the jet boat once before, so I still get a boyish thrill when we go through the rather trivial rapids near Lewiston. This boat ride was short though. We put in at Heller Bar to make that install go more easily, and so our final destination was only fifteen minutes away by boat.
Our destination was Cache Creek, where there is a visitor's center that is only accessible by boat for most of the year. Caretakers volunteer to man the station on a rotating basis. They're usually quite interesting characters. On arrival, the unit in place was having lots of software issues. Now I felt relevant. It was mounted to the dock strangely though. That was going to be fun. When we finally got everything dismantled, it was clear that my prep work before the trip had been in vane. I held up the new monitor in a few different locations and solicited opinions from the caretaker and Tim. They both liked things the way they had been before. Lovely. I made an audible lament about needing a drill press. To my delight, I was told that they had one in the shop at the visitor's center.
This visitor's center is a little building up on top of the hill, somewhere around fifty vertical feet from the dock. It is powered by an in-stream generator, and we aren't allowed to use power from it for our stuff. I bounded up the hill looking forward to saving myself some time. Inside the shop, I found a press that was more suited to woodworking than cutting through metal. The drill bits didn't look like they had ever been sharpened, and every time I pulled the lever, the lights in the shop dimmed and flickered. My favorite part, however, was the sulfur based cutting fluid. I managed to drill two holes before the bit started grinding itself into oblivion. Time to go back to the dock and use the cordless drill. The funny thing was, my cordless drill cut through the thing like it was made of butter. So much for saving time.
Finally, everything was mounted. Of course, the insides of the old unit were nothing like the insides of the unit I had replaced previously. I had come woefully unprepared. I started cutting cables, and crimping wires. This would be a bit of trial and error. As I assembled my newly made cables, I noticed that something, from the trip up, to the ride in the back of the truck, to the ride in the boat, to the drilling, had broken an important solder point. I had been hoping that there would be something else to fix.
A quarter hour past my deadline to meet my BLM contact, everything seemed completely assembled. I flipped on the power, and watched the command line to see if everything was working properly. I waited the customary few minutes to see if any communication had been established. Nothing. Time to trek back up the hill and see what the modem is doing. At the top of the hill, I discovered that the batteries feeding power to the modem were dead, and for some reason the solar power was not doing anything beneficial. No time to deal with this now, we would have to rush back to our starting point in order to meet my contact (Just when I think I have driven my life where I wanted it to be, it takes me to a place that I do not want to go: “Short Blond Hair”).
We arrived at Heller Bar thirty minutes late, and there was no one around. “Can you tie a Bowline?” was the question posed to me. “It's been a while, but sure.” I had tied one successful Bowline knot four months earlier. I jumped out of the boat, and tied it off to the line conveniently located by the ramp. As I looked at my handiwork, I was pretty sure that it wasn't quite right, but would probably hold. We walked around the entire bar, and couldn't find any evidence that the guy from the BLM was near. Is he late too, or has he given up on us? We spent fifteen minutes looking the site over and confirming my initial thoughts that installing in a temporary location was a waste of time. The great thing about being as lazy as I am, is that you can almost always find someone who will be lazy with you.
As we were walking back to the boat ready to abandon the meeting, my contact arrived. He apologized for being late, and we assured him that it was no big deal. His tardiness was forgiven when he said that he hoped we wouldn't be installing in the same location as the old unit. He quickly agreed to my preferred new location, and we were headed back upriver.
The ride back was fun because we went much faster than we had gone earlier in the day. Back at the dock, I robbed Peter to pay Paul. That is, I took a battery from the dock unit and installed where the two dead batteries were at the visitor's center. In theory this shouldn't be a problem. The new units use next to zero power, unlike the old ones, and the new units allow for the sat modems to be placed into modes that do not consume so much power either. Hopefully, the system can be sustained on just the two batteries. If nothing else, I thought that I could get a test run out of them and the boat driver could install fresh ones at some other point.
With the batteries in place, I rebooted everything and waited patiently for new data to flow like the river itself. Minutes passed, and nothing. (I cannot communicate, like I wish I could, “Out Of My Depth”). At this point the boat driver laid down in the back of the boat (I do not deal with my problems like I know I should: “Out Of My Depth”) and I felt just a little bit of panic. It is amazing how time flies when you desperately need to get things done quickly. We were now hopelessly late. Niki would have been waiting for me for a couple hours back in Lewiston, and we hadn't even started the trip home yet.
I diagnosed and fixed several problems over the next thirty minutes. The modem had an incorrect address in it, because we had never used it in this mode before, so it was never configured to initiate communications. There were a few crossed wires, and other miscellaneous things. All required a couple trips up and down the hill. At this point, it felt good to run up and down, and I may have been doing it for spite or penance... I'm not sure which.
Finally, in a fit of desperation, I hooked up my laptop to the radio at the dock that sent the data up the hill and began the tedious task of trying to emulate one of these devices. My computer spit out a steady stream of unfamiliar human readable text. I really don't know what I said when I saw this for sure. I am, however, certain that it violated several human resource policies. (If the rest of my life is going to be like this, then I think I would rather die: “All F***ed Up”). I was dead in the water. The radios doing the relaying to the sat modem were chirping in so that I would know for sure that they were connected. The new flow monitor was seeing this data and getting very confused. Time to call home and report my failure.
The boss confirmed that “Oh yeah, they do that” and I swore a little more under my breath. The next call was to Niki, to confirm that I was still alive, if four hours late, and still over an hour away. She had been having her own adventures, as our van had broken down, and she had met all sorts of colorful people at the marina. Awesome.
Once we were back in cell phone range, I called her again, and the van was up and running. That was good. I asked her to just go back and wait at the hotel, and that we'd be a while still because we had to put the boat up. Of course, fifteen minutes later, the boat driver comes up with the suggestion that she really shouldn't do that, and that she should meet us at the spot I had told her to leave. Thanks man, better late than never.
Soon, we had a small, exhausted caravan headed to the shop. I reeked of sweat from all my trips up and down that hill, but no matter, only 7 or 8 short hours and I would be home. I still had that stop to make that we aborted on the way in to town.
My boss suggested that I stay another night in Lewiston so that I could have a chance of succeeding at the last objective. I practically dared him to just send me in. Sure, we wouldn't get home until 2 in the morning, and we would have to navigate treacherous mountain roads in the dark, but that would just make my story better once I had to fend off wolves or something. I was in the mood to be reckless, and in the melodrama of the moment, I thought that I could either win a victory at Pittsburg, or have a spectacular failure (I feel complete when I feel sick inside: “Misery Whip”).
Thankfully, reason prevailed, and we went to dinner before setting out to find a nicer hotel. We were met with success, and after I had some food in me, and a chance to settle down, the world seemed much brighter. The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. The kids had a good time in the nice, real, old-lady-free indoor pool. I noticed that Art had slipped away somewhere without saying goodbye. That was okay. I had plenty of other things rolling around in my head now.
One of my heroes (Lewis) once said that once things begin to go wrong, you will find that they continue to go wrong for a long time, but once they start to go right, they usually continue to go right.
That's kind of an odd fact of life, but it does seem to hold true. I don't think I'll ever quite understand why though.
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