Weight loss

Well...
I now know what a Shrimp at Red Lobster actually feels like before it
gets to your table. Wet, frozen, hot, wet, cold. In that order. It's
4:20am on Sunday morning and I have been so cold for so many hours that
I really feel hypothermic.
I headed out to get Joy at about 7:pm with the thought in mind to try
and salvage as much of the evening plans that had previously been made
before I had to meet Matt at UAB after his show (Flaming Guns of the Red
Sage) at 10:pm to head out to the WMA in Helena to extricate our oldest
son Wes and his Jeep from a creek. I had talked to Wes several times on
his cell phone and he was indeed stuck. VERY stuck. He had buried the
front axle in a soft spot while trying to cross a creek, and in his
attempts to get the front end out of the hole, he had now dug his own
hole for the rear axle to reside in. He was in a T-shirt, no jacket, no
GPS, no shovel, no flare. About the only thing he had was a very stuck
Jeep. And his boss. He had taken his boss 4 wheeling to show him how
much fun it is. Luckily his boss is about the same age and is a little
under privileged in the "adventure" department too, so he was having a
ball too.
Before he called me, he had called one of Matt's Jeeper room mates,
Scott, and had managed to talk him "in" to where they were stuck. Well,
almost "in". Scott somehow managed to loose his ability for 4WD and it
was only pulling with the front axle, and he was down in a hole when he
discovered this little problem. Let me just say that he now could not
make it out of the hole and was just as stuck and helpless as Wes was.
That left Matt's monster Jeep and me and Monty to effect the rescue.
Wes told me they (4) were very cold and were all huddled in Scott's Jeep
for warmth since Wes' tailpipe was in the water and he didn't want to
run the engine until it was time to "go". Scott was running low on
fuel, so they ran it a little, cut it off, got cold, ran it some more.
He said if they didn't run out of fuel before I got there, they would be
lucky.
Do y'all believe in "Murphy's Law"? I do, so before stopping to get
Joy, I made a detour by Wally World and picked up 6 heavy sweatshirts
(all orange, just for my Auburn buds), 8 thermal "Emergency Blankets",
yet ANOTHER tow strap, a 12 pack of AA and AAA batteries for our
handheld radio's, GPS, etc., and a 3 pack of the "Sky Blazer Aerial
Flares" and 12 packs of the chemical reaction hand warmer pouches, some
"Power Bars" and other assorted high energy foods and Gatorades. Plus I
had already packed 2 shovels, a Come-A-Long, some chain, some wire rope,
and assorted short straps to protect the trees when we anchored to them
for winching with the Come-A-Long, and a bunch of flashlights.
Picked Joy up at 8:pm on the money and she said she would pass on the
evening of fun that I now had before me. "Just take me home and I'll go
to bed" was the exact words I believe. So I did. Made it back to UAB
by 9:pm so I only had an hour's wait for Matt to come out. Monty has a
heater fan problem, so no heat unless the vehicle is moving, which means
I would sit there and freeze my bottom off until he came out. I knew he
had gotten wind that Wes was stuck, but I didn't know if he had planned
to be part of the rescue posse or not, so I had no choice but to sit and
shiver.
Wes called and gave me a new update... He was still stuck, Scott was
still stuck in the hole, and we now had another player. They had gotten
ahold of another Jeepin' friend, Dillon, and while trying to pull Scott
out of the hole, his tow strap popped off and he was now nose down in a
ditch, STUCK! Well, let's see... 3 Jeeps in, 0 Jeeps out. This place
was starting to sound like the Bermuda Triangle of the 4WD world. I
suggested they might try to cannibalize some parts off of Dillon's Jeep
to try and repair Scott's Jeep while I waited for Matt. Or now that
there were 5 of them there, they might try digging Wes' Jeep out. Wes
said all they had to dig with were sticks, and that just wasn't working.
I tell him as soon as Matt comes out we'll head that way.
Wes calls back in about 20 minutes and tells me that they had coerced
another friend to attempt a rescue in his 4x4 truck, and he too was now
stuck on the other side of the creek from Wes. I told him to stop
calling people, I couldn't get them all out tonight if I had too. As I
was sitting there shivering at the Alys Stephen's Center, two more Jeep
"Buds" pulled up in their Jeeps after hearing the call for help. And
just before Matt actually came out, we had one more rescue crew arrive
with 3 more people. Matt makes it out about 10:15pm and we make a
convoy and head towards Helena. Finally!
It was about 11:pm when the asphalt turned to dirt under our wheels as
we rolled on to the last know landmark. We would have to try and get
them to "talk us in" by cell phone, or just start wandering until we
flushed `em out. After 15 minutes of calling all of their cell phones,
all we ever got was "Please wait while we attempt to locate the Nextel
Customer for you..." message. Great. So we all head out in different
directions hoping one of our 4 vehicles will run across the "Jeep
Abyss". I tell everyone to tune to CB radio channel 4 and give me a
comm check so at least we won't loose anyone, and to call in every 5
minutes. I am all alone (I tried talking a friend into going with me,
but they said, and I quote, "no, hell no. Call me in the morning") and
riding around in the woods looking for a needle in a haystack. It
wasn't long before I hear "I found them". I replied "Where", and the
reply I got was "Right here, under my Jeep". Seems they had found
Scott's Jeep down in the hole as they tried to run over it. No serious
damage done. We all converge on the GPS coordinates given, and sure
enough, Scott's Jeep was there, but that was it, no people, no other
Jeep that should have been stuck in a nearby ditch, nothing... but tracks.
We follow the tracks for about 10 minutes further back into the
"nowhereness" and we all started smelling wood smoke at about the same
time, but that's all we can determine, is it is wood smoke from a fire,
but we haven't got a clue which direction to go in. I tell everybody to
turn off their vehicles and be very quite, it only takes a few minutes
before I hear Wes' very loud and unique laugh. We head "thataway". We
start to see a faint glow off in the distance between the pine trees and
we follow it all the way to the little lost boys. They had been good
little Scouts and had built themselves a heck of a bonfire to stay warm
by. We all take turns standing by the roaring fire and try to figure
out how to get Wes' Jeep out of the hole he dug for himself. They had
managed to get Dillon's Jeep out of the ditch, but it had damaged his
shift linkage and the best he could do was 4High and it wouldn't go into
1st gear. Basically that means he had absolutely no pulling power, so
they hadn't even bothered with trying.
I break out the shovels and pass them around as I tell them we'll all
take turns digging. We dig the rear out without too much effort, but
with every shovelful we remove from around the front tires, the mud and
water just slide back in, replacing what we had removed. We manage to
cut some relief's behind each front tire and the "pumpkin" (center of
the differential) so maybe that will allow us freedom to move rearward
without having to fight the added drag and friction of the mud and dirt.
We let Matt hook up and try his hand at pulling his big brother out of
the pit. We shortened his pull strap to 10' so we could let it out 5
feet at a time if he started spinning those massive meats he calls
"tires" and digging his own holes. Three attempts later, we're at the
full 20' length of the strap and Wes' Jeep hasn't so much as moved. So
we put another Jeep with big tires side-by-side with Matt's and hook
double 20' straps to the sunk Jeep. Still no movement, but man did we
toss some real estate around. We hook another Jeep to the front of
those two and "heave ho" again. Still not much in the way of movement.
I have never seen anything that 3 Jeeps hooked together could not
pull, until tonight. But both of his bumpers were on the ground, so he
was "stuck-stuck" (highly technical Jeep terminology).
We hook the fourth Jeep side-by-side with #3. So it now looks like we
have 4 horses hooked to a wagon, and still no go. Monty and I are the
last vehicle to hook up, I "V" my strap going through my trailer hitch
mount and hook the two free ends to both of the front Jeeps. I tell
everyone that we are going to do a slow pull, and try not to spin our
tires. First tug, nothing. Second tug, nothing. Third tug, nothing.
This is starting to look grim. I survey the situation again in solitude
while everyone else heats their backsides over at the fire. The only
thing I can figure is we are basically trying to drag Wes' Jeep over a
wall of dirt that it is hunkered down behind. And that's going to be
hard. We need some way to lift it as we pull. I jokingly ask "Anyone
got a chainsaw". I hear "Yup, I got one" We quickly do the "t i m b e
rrrrrrrr" thing to the largest diameter pine we can find, cut us a 2
foot long section from the thickest part of the trunk and wedge it in
front of his rear bumper and put the straps up and over it. This time
it will be lifting the rear bumper upwards before it starts trying to
pull it rearward.
We all climb back in and try one more slow pull. Without even spinning
a tire it lifted Wes' Jeep up out of the hole and rearward about 6
inches before we had to stop to keep from running over the tree trunk.
We repositioned the makeshift lever and once again gave a slow pull and
that did the trick. Wes' Jeep was now about 2 feet beyond the holes he
had dug with his wheels and the bumpers were sitting about 18 inches
above ground level. We hooked two 20 foot straps together and tossed
them to the other side of the stream for the truck to hook up to. We
gave a 6 Jeep tug and pulled that little Toyota truck out if his mud
hole, across the holes that Wes had created and right on up the bank.
We unhooked everyone and got everyone turned around heading the same
direction and boogied for the the next "stuck".
After pushing Scott's Jeep out of his bowl he was stuck in, we put
Scott's Jeep in the lead so we could all push if we had too and headed
for the city lights. Hungry, wet, tired we were a silent bunch as we
headed back to Southside. As we got on the RME from 280 I heard my CB
crackle to life and the voice said, "Hey, y'all wanna go to Al's?"
That's all it took to wake everybody up and get us fired up again. I
was on my last nod as I called it a night, thanked everybody, and headed
for the house. I got to get back up in about an hour and take Joy to
work @ 7:am. Something tells me I'll be going back to bed when I get
back home!
Tim.