****
"We're there already?" Ed asked in amazement, when Mary finally woke him. "You were supposed to wake me after we got through the Schenectady area." Ed hated driving through cities and even driving around cities. Through the truck windows he could see that they were surrounded by several huge rounded, tree-covered mountain peaks, presumably the Adirondacks. There were no Mohawks in sight though.
"I wasn't very tired so I just kept driving," explained Mary. "But we aren't there yet; we still have to go maybe thirty miles west on a twisty, narrow, hilly, bumpy road. I knew that you'd want to drive through that yourself, manly man that you are."
"Sure, thanks; that sounds like a manly man's job all right," he said as he climbed out of the passenger side and walked around the truck to climb up into the driver's seat. He was glad to climb back into the warm comfort of the cab; it was shockingly cold outside.
"What happened to the fall season?" he asked, as he gazed at the nearby trees. "Did I sleep through it? Most of the leaves have fallen here. We had perfectly green leaves in Virginia, and just a hint of color in Pennsylvania."
"We drove through fall," said Mary. "Around here it's nearly winter."
The truck was parked along a narrow, twisty mountain road, on a grassy shoulder just big enough to hold it and the car it towed. The road itself was hard-packed unpaved gravel he noticed, and not very wide. Big old-growth trees on each side of it formed a nearly solid canopy overhead, even though most of their leaves had fallen. The road seemed very rustic and picturesque, but not very utilitarian. Driving this road would be slow. "This surely can't be the main road into Mohawk County!"
"According to Jack it's the only road into Mohawk County," Mary informed him.
"Great! How far does the GPS say that we have to go?"
"Our GPS conked out on us a few miles back; this road apparently isn't in its data base at all. Neither is Giants' Rest, for that matter. Not even a postal zip code exists!"
"That doesn't seem possible. They have to have mail! What about tax returns and junk mail and letters to Santa? And how are we navigating then? You said before we left Virginia that you had a couple of routes completely worked out."
"Uncle Jack sent directions to me for these last few miles, I'm simply following them."
"Swell; for navigation we're relying on letters from a non-existent post office about a non-existent road to a non-existent town." Ed put the truck into low gear, slowly inched it out of the grass and began driving along the road. The road itself wasn't really any smoother than the bumpy grassy clearing had been he noticed; the truck and its contents rattled and banged almost continuously. It will be a miracle if nothing gets broken, he figured. No, amend that: it will be a miracle if everything doesn't get broken. It also didn't help that fallen leaves half covered the road surface, making it slippery and hard to judge where the road was in some spots. Driving on this road was a real bitch! "How far did you say we still have to go according to Uncle Jack?"
"Thirty miles as the crow flies, maybe. Maybe sixty-plus, if the crow follows all the road curves. Giants' Rest is near the middle of the Adirondacks."
"Wonderful! That could take most of the afternoon on this cow-path of a road, traveling between ten and twenty miles an hour. I don't dare go faster around curves and over bumps, or we'll have nothing but a truck full of busted goods by the time we get there, or I'll lose track of the road in the fallen leaves and drive us off a cliff."
"There would have been over twice as many miles over mountain roads if we had come more directly up from the south-west, and we would still end up on this road."
"Yes, things could indeed be even worse. Thanks; knowing that always makes me feel much better." He shifted the semi-automatic transmission from second gear to third as they crested a hill. At least there was no clutch to deal with, and trees and hills often blocked the direct sunlight that they would otherwise be driving into as they made their way west. Yes, things could be even worse. Swell.
"Wake me up when we get there, Grumpy," Mary responded, as she curled up in her passenger seat and pulled her baseball cap down over her eyes.
"How will I know when we get there?" Ed asked. Now they were going uphill again already. He shifted from third gear back into second again as he glanced at the truck's fuel gage. The tank was almost full; Mary must have gotten gas while he slept. Smart girl! They would burn a lot of gas driving in the lower gears.
"You'll know. This road ends at Giants' Rest."
"Great! That sounds easy!"
It wasn't. After only half an hour of guiding the big U-Haul truck along the twisting road Ed was already becoming weary. At least traffic was super light. He passed two empty pickup trucks driving in the opposite direction and that was all. In both instances opposing vehicles had to pull half-way off the narrow road in order to avoid head-on collisions. But it could have been worse, Ed constantly told himself. At least they weren't climbing over mountain ridges; the Adirondacks were in the form of mounds rather than the long ridges that formed the Appalachians. This road mostly twisted around the mountains without having to climb totally over them. Ed wasn't disappointed. There was still plenty of uphill and downhill to suit him, thrown in with the endless curves.
To make things more mysterious and interesting, after perhaps twenty miles all signs warning of coming curves and how fast to drive when rounding them totally disappeared. In fact except for the lousy road there was no sign of civilization whatsoever. No phone or electric lines. No houses or shops. There was only the endlessly twisting gravel road.
They did pass one side road. Signs indicated that it was a dead-end road that led to a landfill. Perhaps even the Mohawk created trash! To Ed it was a promising suggestion of some degree of civilization beyond longhouses and out-houses. Perhaps Running Bear had indeed exaggerated how primitive the Mohawks lived!
The bumps, curves, and hills continued. Mary slept through the whole damn thing. Mary could sleep through anything. It was a gift.
Ed could already use another nap himself, but sheer terror thankfully kept him awake throughout it all. This was indeed more a cow path than a road he decided, for insane cows with a death wish, a path that wound dangerously around huge boulders and trees and along the edges of cliffs with no guard rails. All of the leaves on the road, many of them wet, made it like driving on a gazillion banana peels. Aided by wet leaves they could very easily slide off the road and end up at the bottom of a deep ravine where they would never be found. Hell, maybe there were already dozens of wrecked U-Haul vehicles at the bottom of the ravines that surrounded this shitty road, loaded with the skeletons of prospective Giants' Rest school teachers and their families!
This was unsatisfactory. A road should be straight and smooth and have stripes and warning signs and so-forth. Ed had read somewhere that taxes in New York were among the highest in the country. Where the hells were those tax dollars going? Not to this road, that's for damn sure! If he lived through the day he vowed to Twitter some very nasty words about this road. He was up to five followers on Twitter. They'd pass on his road rage to their five followers and so-forth until the whole world was outraged! Then again, maybe this wasn't a government road; maybe it was private. Perhaps that was why the curve warning signs had disappeared.
Government road or private road, it seemed endless. Even Ed's Jerry-transformed body was tiring. His arms were sore from wrestling the big truck steering wheel and gear shift; his legs were sore from alternately working the brake and gas peddles, and his mind and his seat-sore butt were numb from the entire damned experience. If Running Bear only realized how lousy this road was, he could have used it as a very convincing argument against any foolish attempt to move to Giants' Rest. Left turn, right turn, uphill, downhill; it never ended. The good news was, after the first hundred or so hairpin curves Ed was well experienced in how fast to drive through them. The bad news was that he was too exhausted to properly apply what he was learning.
He considered waking Mary a
nd asking her to drive for a while, but quickly gave up on that notion. He was the husband; it was his husbandly duty to protect his wife from terrible ordeals of any sort except childbirth. Besides, he had his foolish manly pride to consider. But those were all fleeting thoughts compared with his need to relentlessly focus on not crashing the truck, even though he had purchased the extra U-Haul insurance.
"DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF WITH CRASHING; WE JANTS WILL SURVIVE ANY CONCEIVABLE WRECKAGE SITUATION," chimed the jants after a particularly bad curve that strained Ed's driving skills to the limit.
"THAT'S JUST SWELL," Ed responded mentally, with as much sarcasm as he could muster under the circumstances. He was getting better at telepathy; he seldom spoke aloud anymore when communicating thoughts to them. They were getting better at listening too; lately they even seemed to detect sarcasm and other nuances of speech and thought. Right now Ed was too tired and stressed-out to care what the hell the jants thought about his thoughts.
Every so often now Ed drove past crude hand-painted signs that indeed confirmed that he was driving on a private road on private property and that trespass without Mohawk Tribe permission was illegal and strictly forbidden. This was usually followed by convenient turn-about loops that provided law-breaking trespassers with ample opportunities to turn around and leave. Ed seriously considered doing just that. He could give some excuse to Mary that he got confused driving the twisty leaf-obscured road and got himself turned around the wrong way by accident.
But no, that would only mean that Mary would insist that they try again, and he'd have to needlessly repeat this arduous drive. Besides, he kept telling himself that he was more than half-way now, past the fabled point of no return, such that driving out of these mountains would prove to be even worse than continuing forward. No, he was stuck; he had to drive all the way through to Giants' Rest somehow.
****
Global Warming Fun 2: Ice Giants Wake! Page 4
