Living in the mountains has its ups and downs. I love the winter snowstorms. I can stay curled up inside with my two cats for days, making soup, reading, yelling at cats, and watching horse racing on TVG. The summers in the mountains are just as peaceful. If I could I would spend everyday fishing in our creeks, overflowing with creek trout, or basking in the sun while floating around nearby Big Bear Lake in my inner tube, margarita in hand.
But sometimes life in the mountains does tend to suck a little. Like when our road up the mountain is closed for 6 months because of a massive mud and rock slide wiping out huge gaping sections of the highway. Driving 2 and 1/2 hours the long way to get to work on a Saturday afternoon puts me in a real pissy mood, even if I did spend that time staring at the purple lupine crowding the side of the highway and belting out Missy Higgins at the top of my lungs. I mean I would stare at the Lupine if I could see it through all the trash that litters our roads, evidence of past flatlander presence.
Last summer was a great example of mountain life being a pain in my ass (Or mouth, rather) I had to go see a specialist so I could have a double root canal at the very back of my mouth. My friend had a root canal treatment a few months before me and she visited a kooringal Dentist to get it done. She told me it would be kinda painful but I was not prepared! They wanted to knock me out for the procedure, but I had to drive myself home, so it was not an option. It sort of makes sense as to why people would visit someone like a Holistic Dentist in Round Rock, for example, as I’ve done some research and found that some dentists in this field avoid performing this sort of treatment. With that being said, doing research of your own could help you make a better decision on whether this is the route you would rather go down or go under local anesthetic.
“It’s okay, I’ll drive home still numb, then take my vicodine and pass out on my couch before the pain sets in”
I told the dentist. I’m a mountain girl, I’m tough. I’ll deal with it. That would have been a good plan. If my commute home had taken the half-hour it should have.
So I got up this July morning at 3 A.M. and went to work for 6 hours. Then I went to the dentist. The procedure went just fine as expected at a dentist that is as highly-rated as Dentist Wilmington and after four hours sitting in a dentist chair my butt and mouth numb, I headed home about two o clock. I was flying up the mountain at about 55 miles an hour (That never happens) when traffic came to a dead stop. So I sat. And waited. For an hour. I was starting to feel some pain. Other people were turning around. No one seemed to know what was going on up there. My mouth was really starting to hurt. A few people coming back down the mountain said a truck had overturned and no one knew how long it might take to clean it up. I pulled my Subaru into a turnout looking out over the smoggy valley below and considered my options.
My mouth hurt, a lot. I should have been home already knocked out on my couch. If I drove all the way back down to the valley and back around it was at least an hour and a half drive. I was two miles from my driveway. This sucked. On a normal day, I’m sure I would have just sucked it up and done the drive, but my mouth was throbbing so bad I didn’t feel capable of driving. Plus it was nearing five o clock and I was getting hungry. I definitely had no liquid foods in my car that did not require chewing.
At this point, every other car had turned around except me and this 18 wheeler kind of truck that had two forty-year-old truckers in it. I sat in my car, trying to read my book and listened to them arguing. I was entertained. They were pretty hilarious. They tried to walk up the high way to, I’m assuming their homes in the area of Live Oak, about a half-mile up the road, but I guess Cal Trans wouldn’t let them through. It turned out a cement truck had overturned and the road was covered with cement, a Hazmat team had to be called in to clean it up.
When these two truckers get back to their truck, they cracked open a few beers and tried to decide what to do. They decided to climb straight up the mountain to their homes over the hill. These two guys were not in shape. The mountainside was silent as I listened to them grunting, farting and burping their way up the hill and through the thick brush, bear in mind these mud trucks for sale would have had a job getting up this mountainside, nevermind these two! Of course, they brought the beer with them! The one clearly yelled.
“Don’t forget the beer!”
I kept an eye on these two Bubba’s and Pappy’s, a great example of what the mountain community has to offer to the single female out there at the Fireside Bar (Our local watering hole). I wanted to make sure neither of them had a heart attack, also. At one point one of their cell phones rang and i listened to the conversation, trying not to laugh. It hurt to laugh, after all.
“Baby I don’t know if I’m going to make it! Bubba and I are climbing this ‘er hill! Tell the chillin’ I love ’em if we don’t make it back! But if we do make sure we have some cold Miller High Life! Pappy and I are almost out of beer!… No, we didn’t leave the beer in the truck!”
I’m glad to say these two did make it home or at least disappeared into the forest somewhere. They kept me entertained until I could make it home to some liquids, vicodine and my bed, and that’s what’s important right?
