This post could, maybe even should, be huge... but as it stands, and not wanting to relive/revisit some seriously dark days, I'll keep it to just merely quite large.
Where to begin, the beginning I suppose.
Our move, in factual physical truth, began on May 29th with me getting the moving truck and car trailer. That went well. Amy, me and our two downstairs neighbors staked out 3 parking spaces on the street, directly in front of our brownstone the night before, and as I neared with the truck and trailer, both vehicles were cleared aside to allow for the 16ft truck plus full car, double-axle trailer. That went well too.
Little did I know then, that would be all that went well for many days...
The movers showed up a few hours later, on time and as promised. They did a walk-thru of our place, frowned, walked out to the truck and looked in the rear, and frowned some more. Not good. They didn't really want to say, out loud at least, that they could fit everything we had slated for the move. Mind you, this was after months of selling, donating, and just plain, throwing shit out. We had paired down drastically. Budget, the company we were renting the truck and trailer from, also agreed that all we needed was a 16ft truck. This would play into things later as well. I could tell from the looks on the faces of all 3 moving guys, they weren't sure if all our stuff would fit. I was unsure too.
As they day went on, we had many well-wishers stop by, most asked the same questions we had been asked a gazillion times in the last 5 months, "Minnesota?? Cold out there. You're gonna miss it here, you'll be back. The winter will kill you... been there on business, brutally cold. Pretty. Damn cold. Why you going there for the love of all things decent & good?" I answered that question, notice how I call it "A Question"?, so many times in the last 5 or 6 months that I felt precisely like a politician answering the same canned bullshit on issues of healthcare or foreign policy. It was endless. However, on the moving day, with the high temperature, little sleep and a moving crew of 3 very doubtful looking lads, The Question was getting extremely tired for me/us to answer.
Some of Chloe's friends stopped by too, it was bittersweet for her, them & us...
Inside the house, Amy was beginning to freak out as she was still packing and didn't enjoy nor want to hear my hourly updates on how quickly the truck was filling up, how unquickly the house was emptying, and how late we were running.
Finally they were done, a quarter of our stuff was still inside and wouldn't fit into the car, so we gave it to the movers and any neighbors who happened by-that wanted it, otherwise our poor unsuspecting landlord would be stuck with keeping/selling/or throwing it out. Life can be that way, sometimes.
We drove the car up and onto the car trailer, cinched it down, while Amy & Chloe loaded the cat with his food, water and poopbox into the car + any other little things that would fit, I put the Saris bike rack onto the back end of the car and loaded our bikes up and onto the rack. We had planned to be en route by 9pm, instead it was just hitting midnight when we hugged the last neighbor goodbye... we sat in the cab of the truck for a minute, cried as a family for a longer minute, and with a turn of a key: pulled away into the great unknown and left behind the home where Amy and me had started our family: the only home Chloe had ever known... The house she was physically and actually born in, 7 years ago.
It was heartbreaking, and wonderfully exciting too.
We drove from the Hudson River through all of New Jersey and into Pennsylvania... I started to get tired and decided on a hotel just outside Stroudsburg, PA. After negotiating our cat into the room with the night manager [a great guy who will play heavily into our saga later], I sent Amy & Chloe up to the room to settle in while I began unpacking food from the back of the truck and getting the bikes off the rack. As I was doing this I noticed an Oldsmobile SUV driving around the hotel parking lot, no big deal I thought to myself, a security guy, cool. After about 10 minutes he drove over and rolled down his window. I said hi and he asked me if we were moving in. I said, "To the hotel? Yeah, for the night." He said, "No, I mean the area". I, like a complete dickhead, said, "No, we are leaving NYC for Minnesota". He said, "Ahhh, rough winters out there". Urgh, here we go again. He then said, "So you have everything in there huh?" At this point I got a touch concerned and asked him if he was security... he looked surprised and said no... that he just likes "people and to drive around seeing things". Odd, not cool. And with that he drove off.
Pissed at myself for giving away too much info, I sat down on the curb and realized it was 4am and I didn't want to now also be worried about the truck and all our stuff while this moron cruised hotel parking lots looking, potentially, for an easy hit. As I was pondering the reasons for the move and why I was sitting in the middle of nowhere at 4am, with every single thing I owned in a rental truck, while my wife and daughter were upstairs in a room probably wondering where I was, he drove back into the parking lot.
Furious [and irrationally tired I'm sure, in retrospect] I tore off after him, across the lot... tore, as in "Tore" for a large, tired, but extremely pissed person. He saw me coming, and burned rubber back out of the lot. Enough was enough. I went into the office, told the manager what had gone down, I wanted my bread back and didn't feel comfortable staying there. He understood and agreed. I had him call the room and tell Chloe and Amy what had happened and to come down and meet me in the parking lot, while I went back outside and waited near the truck. He also called the State Police [I have no clue what did or didn't happen as a result of that though... I did however, supply the night manager with a car make/model and license number]. Chloe and Amy showed up, I told them what happened, and we left.
What stayed behind though, in the room, was Amy's purse with her cell, credit cards, money, all of her nursing licensure, her Social Security card, her drivers license and our car's registration. She wouldn't realize this for another 12 hours, and she wouldn't have the heart [or nerve] to tell me about this for another 20 hours because of the really bad stuff that was about to happen to us.
We drove another couple hours and found an Econo Lodge, checked in, unloaded the bikes, cat, us, some food and passed out cold. Woke up a few hours later, I went bike riding around the parking lot and surrounding area while the girls assembled themselves w/showers, food and packing. After getting the bikes back onto the trailered car, we were underway. Things felt improved, better. Wrong.
Precisely 1 hour and 45 minutes later, everything came to a grinding halt.
While cresting a slight grade on the westbound lane of Interstate 80, and getting into the passing lane to get around some very slow moving semis, we started down a slow-right swooping hill on grooved concrete with a fair amount of potholes. Going no faster than 50 or 55mph... it was at this point that the truck started rocking, at first slightly, and then, very pronounced, side to side. To our right were trucks, to our left, something around a 100ft. drop off down onto the eastbound lane of I-80. It all happened in a matter of seconds... no issues at all, and then BAM, "...this is bad, very bad".
Chloe was screaming, "Daddy STOP IT!". I guess she thought I was doing it as some sort of joke. I vaguely recall calmly [surprising] saying, "I'm not doing it, but I'm trying to stop it.". I was alternating between tapping the gas and tapping the brake. Nothing seemed to bring the truck out of it. At one point I can recall looking into the sideviews and seeing lots of traffic beside and behind us, the next... all the traffic was waaaay behind us, coming to a stop, lots of cars and trucks with double flashers on. I can only imagine what our car and truck must have looked like from behind. The other thing I remember seeing was this... I looked, briefly, out my sideview on the drivers side, and saw the car and trailer in the mirror one second, and then gone, and then back in view, and then gone again... and each time I could see it, it was swinging wider and wider over and onto the shoulder... getting closer and closer to smacking the guardrail. Not good.
After either me, the truck, me & the truck, luck, karma, God, Satan, little green people, small bunny rabbits, all 10 or none of them got the truck back under control... I nailed the 4-way flashers, bolted into the right lane, onto the shoulder, parked it and did a walk-around. Fully expecting, almost praying, for an obvious thing like a blowout or something, I found nothing. I even had Amy look... nothing. It was at this point that I had something really weird happen, something unlike I've ever experienced before: I simultaneously started shaking, crying, laughing [sort of], and dry-heaving. Amy, who is always and absolutely Rock Solid in the face of serious events [she's a trauma nurse after all, it's what she does], looked at me very seriously and said without batting an eye, "Scott, that was bad... we were gonna roll". With that, I hit all fours and puked.
After creeping the truck another mile down I-80. on the shoulder to the next exit, we got off at Milesburg, PA. What was to be our new home for the next 2 days. After many phone calls and lots of waiting near a highway, Budget sent a roadcrew out to us. They found nothing. Then one of the guys suggested taking us to a Weigh-Station. We were 2000 pounds over the rear axle gross maximum weight. The source of the problem had been found. The solution wouldn't be so easy, nor pleasant.
Here's the truck [and very freaked out cat in little blue tote] just moments after the incident [I'm in the cab, on hold, listening to Muzak, waiting for a Budget rep to pick up the phone, Amy & Chloe are sitting next to a little creek... it's 93 degrees outside, we are precisely 4.5 hours from New York City, and lightyears away from Minnesota... and I have never felt more like this move was the single biggest mistake a husband & father could bring forth onto his family]
This is Chloe, next to a creek with oil slicks and little Bluegill, lovely [Note-lots of trucks going by, just yards away... made a metal note to Self, "Excellent location for our next family vacation"]:
And this is the wonderful news, that no professional truck driver would ever drive that [and this was their direct quote] "Death Truck", being broken to me at the Weigh Station [by the way, these gentlemen called the problem, "Your car and car trailer are driving the truck"... they also mentioned that we were extremely lucky to have not rolled the truck over-as, apparently, that is what usually happens when trailers begin driving trucks-and not the other way around]...
While all this was going on, Chloe found the owner of the place, asked him if he had anything "Cool" to look at now that she was "out in the Country". He mentioned that he did... in fact he owned Lamas and the farm was next door. So she and Amy took off down there, camera in hand, while I stayed back with the menfolk and heard more tales about "trucks that are overweight, have their trailers drive them, and all the carnage that ensues as a result of such things", and it wasn't pretty either.
Chloe finds great and beautiful things in times of stress and danger:
And then she found the donkeys too...
...to be continued [when I have the stomach to keep reliving it].
Peace & Blessings~
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