Stuck Truck

I picked Greg up at about 1:00 yesterday so we could both come up here to the church building for a few hours and get some work done. The main roads between Greg’s house and mine — Bell, 45th, Hillside — were, for the most part, cleared. But the residential streets were all still very tricky. A near-record 19-inches of snow doesn’t just go away in a couple of hours, even in the sunshine and temperatures in the upper 30s. I slowed down to a crawl in the middle of his street so he could jump in as I went by and, dodging stranded vehicles among ten-foot walls of plowed snow, we made it to the church parking lot in pretty good shape.

It was on the way out of the church parking where we got in trouble.

For a couple of guys in a really big truck with a bunch of snow around, a three-foot drift in front of the office doors looked really inviting.  But we weren’t totally certain the truck could make it through. So we eyed the smaller 18-inch drift in the circle drive. Yes, we can get through that.

And we almost did.

We “high-centered” it, according to the terminology used in the warnings I had received from Scott and John Todd as the blizzard approached Sunday night. I was only about six inches away from getting through. But I was stuck. While Greg dug around the church flower beds for some garden mulch and sticks to put under the tires for traction, Mark came out of his office with a shovel. And we dug out. Mark and Greg were laughing; I was upset I couldn’t make it all the way through the snow drift. But now we were running late to pick Whitney up from work. So Greg got in and — good gravy!!! — I proceeded to back right into another snow drift not ten feet away from where we were! Mark hadn’t even walked back to his car to lock up the shovel. This second drift wasn’t even twelve inches, I don’t think. But we were stuck. Again.

This time, while I dug out, Greg snapped a few pictures on his cell phone. And the one you see here wound up on the home page of our church website last night under the heading “Breaking News” and the caption “Our preacher from Dallas took his chances with the snow… Anybody have a shovel?”

I saw it early this morning. Nice, Hannah.

The parking lots are still a mess here, the east side of our building is still packed in ice, and 15th Street isn’t good. So we’re cancelling Bible classes and Wacky Wednesday and our youth group Huddles and Muddles for tonight. Everything should be scraped clean and dry for Sunday morning. But just in case, I’m packing a shovel in the back of my truck.

Peace,

Allan