Laughter and A Tree

As kids doing the norm is boring, the main goal is to do something a little rebellious every once in a while. Well, this was me in the winter of 2016. I had saved all my nickles, and dimes to buy a snowmobile the year prior. See when you have a snowmobile the painful wait all year for that first snow, but when it finally does start coming you are ecstatic about it. We had gotten the day off from school the day prior, and there seemed to be enough to go out. One pull, one smooth smooth pull and it turned over like it never got turned off. I had been waiting for that sound all year. I ran it around the yard a few times to get the feel back, and before long I wanted to hit the trail behind my house. Now this trail was unique it went through the woods to my grandmother’s house which was about a mile ride that I had done numerous times before, so I was never expecting the worst. I told my dad I was headed down and would call him in 20 min. Little did I know I would never use the phone.

I had just turned onto the strip before the wood bridge down back as I had done a hundred times before, but this time my finger was hitting the throttle a little more than usual. As I went to turn the front ski wouldn’t turn. At this moment I knew I was in for trouble my snowmobile was going right for a tree. My immediate instinct was to hit the break, but I was already so close. I felt the impact of the tree and almost flew over the top of my handlebars. I sat there for a second with my head on my handlebar wondering how this simple trip turned into a crash in the middle of the woods. What now I kept asking, still a little confused I stepped off and examined the damage. There was a dent in my hood, and I was hoping there wasn’t any more damage. So now I had to find my way out.

The first thing I tried to do was pull my snowmobile away from the tree. The problem is at this time I wasn’t strong enough. Now I was stuck, in the middle of the woods about a mile away on a trail with deep snow. I took my phone out and went to call my dad when I dialed his number the line went dead. I had no signal at all. That was strike two, my third option was to try and just tug the ski. With all the effort I was putting in, there seemed to be no success. My problem was I didn’t want to leave my snowmobile in the middle of woods unoccupied. So I had to sit there, and wait and hope that my dad would realize I never made it to my grandparents. My heart was finally getting a little calmer at this point, and I realized that maybe that option wasn’t going to be the best especially if he got a call at work, but It couldn’t hurt to wait an extra few minutes and then start walking towards the house.

After about 20 minutes sitting there, and just thinking something odd happened. I started to laugh, just laugh at how stupid I had been for going to fast into that corner, and being too reckless to understand the laws of gravity. Maybe things like this were supposed to happen for me to learn a lesson. At this point grabbing my cloves, and hat I started to walk laughing even more now looking back at my snowmobile against the tree, as I did this I hear a roar in the woods. In his full work uniform riding his snowmobile, my dad came out the clearing. I had never been so happy to see him. I told him what happened, and we pulled it out from the tree, and I was able to run it again, and finally get to my destination. To this day I still laugh at this situation, and it makes me think of how dumb I was at this point in my life.

Photo by Aleksander Markin. Александр Маркин on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA