by Nellie Curtiss …
That night was one of those long snowy nights. I parallel parked outside my son’s apartment just where the deer make a nightly trek to the cottonwoods along the Rio Grande in Alamosa.
My service dog Schroeder and I moseyed up the broken concrete walk avoiding iced over snow. Seated on a stool under the roofline window, I watched as my son turned this knob and that one and inserted the barbecue lighter into the gas door to light his antique heater. Finally, I heard him exclaim, “That’s it!”
He said, “I haven’t had the heater on much as my neighbor’s heat transferred through the walls and kept my apartment warm without having to lift a match to my furnace.” I remembered thinking, “It’s true this ice age that sunk into the Valley was something else and caught a lot of people off guard with single digit temperatures and 8-inches of snow.”
As mothers and sons do from time to time, we talked. He updated me on his work, and we talked about ordering pizza. Enjoying the tasty marinera, we ate stuffed crust veggie-lovers pizza and jumped when the movie startled us. Snowpiercer met the need for apocalyptic science-fiction. Now eight years later, I’d summarize it as life on a post nuclear train that circles the earth annually. The bureaucracy of rail cars was populated by people of different classes on the verge of revolution. Still today in 2023, I would add, not much different from today’s angst that Professor Robert Reich discusses in his pod casts on “income inequality”, bottom percenters versus top one percenters, and the dirt poor versus uber rich.
Soon it was time to head back home before the 40 degrees dropped to subfreezing. We said our goodbyes with hugs and pats to Schroeder; and off I walked to my tiny car.
I put the gear in REVERSE and backed up enough to gently edge out of the spot. With gear in drive, the Smart car gyrated out of a parallel position into a hilarious 90-degree angle to the curb. How did this happen?
My son heard the commotion from his apartment and agreed it was the ice shelf in the gutter; and he tried pushing my tiny box of a car out. Even though it was about the size of a golf cart, it went nowhere except to slide back into the curb. He tried some cardboard. A neighbor peeked out and came out with some deicing salt.
By then I had Geico’s Emergency Roadside Service on my cell. After making sure I wasn’t in an accident or hurt or the car damaged, Geico’s representative called Layton’s Towing in Alamosa.
Before I even sat down inside my son’s apartment to wait for the rescue, Layton’s pulled up and around; then, necessarily blocked traffic traveling south.
Quickly, he looked for the towing hook under the lime green “toy” car; but couldn’t find it. When he stood up from kneeling, I said: “I thought you and my son might be able to push it out since it is so small.”
Both men pressed gently, and I idled the gas pedal a bit in drive gear, and after the second try, we cleared the miniature glacier’s ledge that had formed, and I was off driving.
After turning north, I yelled back: “Do I need to sign anything?”
My son relayed Layton’s answer, “No.”
Now I felt a lot like Santa lifting into the sky as I waved, and drove out of sight shouting, “Thank you, thank you! And to all a good night!”
— Nelda Curtiss is a retired college educator and long-time local columnist. Reach her at columnsbynellie.com or email her at columnsbynellie@gmail.com
Cutline for picture: Colored pencil sketch entitled “Stuck on Ice”, by Nellie Curtiss, 2023.
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