Don't Catch Yourself Slippin'
The Turning Feral Devotional - Day
Day 58 - Sometimes you find yourself slipping. This can be related to your health, your ambition, your affection, or in my case this morning… you can find yourself literally slipping off the road. Yup, as most metaphors go they often tie back to real life events and the idea of “slipping” clearly comes from trying to drive on ice.
Usually at this time of year our sixty-eight mile dirt road is covered in several feet of snow and is packed down into an all-together grippy surface that makes travel a breeze (except for avalanches of course). Yet this year we have had almost no precipitation, which has resulted in patchy spots of slick ice. Because of the long stretches of open dirt between the ice, I decided to tempt fate and make our morning drive chain-less.
As you can likely surmise, that tempting of fate was silly. At five in the morning with temperatures hovering just above 0*F we started to slide down a steep hill. With my tires overinflated for the conditions there was nothing I could do except try to get one of my front tires into the inside ditch to try and prevent us from going off the river-side edge, which carried with it about a 30 ft. drop. With a quick prayer, I feathered the brakes until we came to a stop facing 180* in the opposite direction looking up hill in the direction from which we came. Yikes.
With two kids, two dogs, and a wife all crammed in the truck, we took a second to high-five at our luck before I went out in the dark to put chains on. With some finesse I got our chains on and backed down the hill until I could conduct a painful 40-point turn to get pointed back in the right direction. With adrenaline spiked, we slowly scooted home on intermittent sheets of ice while I reflected on how unnecessary it was to get caught slipping.
You see, I knew the conditions warranted chains but I wanted to see how far I could get without them for no reason other than laziness. Clearly this turned out to not be too far and I was lucky that something worse didn’t happen to me and my family. All of this makes an appropriate metaphor for life, though. If you see something you could slip on, don’t be lazy and wait for a potentially dangerous scenario to take action… take the time and put some chains on (metaphorically speaking) early and get ahead of the issue!
Daily Prompt: Where are you slipping in life? What can you do to make sure you are staying ahead of it?:
Motivational Passage:
“The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun…”
― Jim Morrison
Rewilding Action: Speaking of tires… It’s handy to have emergency tire sealant on hand when you are driving in the backcountry. The brand “slime” has worked well for me and can usually patch a hole as long as it’s not in the sidewall. The biggest thing (which I learned the hard way) is to make sure you keep it in your cab… otherwise the slime tends to freeze, which is useless when you are trying to repair a tire in the snow.