A long time ago, in a land far away, before Team Jones became a team, there was college. While we were in college, we had the pleasure of living in neighboring duplexes, each with three other crazed roomies. Jers was one of Prince Charming’s roomies, and the one who’s room I took over after he left to get hitched and I was forced to move into a house full of stinky, inebriated males -another story for another day. Anyways, Jers is not only a great friend, but also a very talented and entertaining writer. He put this story up on Facebook, and has been gracious enough to allow me to toss it up here to allow you to better understand the male half of Team Jones. (Who am I kidding, I’m lazy, and haven’t posted in a while. Stealing someone else’s creativity is much easier than working up some of my own!)
Without Further Ado….
Back when Kristin and I were dating, about a thousand years ago, we used to go camping with my roommates quite often. In fact it seems like just about every weekend in the summertime we’d be camping.
We’d always go to a place north of Red Feather, called Cherokee Park, that offered several advantages over anything closer for several young men in their early twenties and their four-wheel drive vehicles. For one, there was minimal adult supervision, and by minimal, I mean none. And by supervision, I mean someone in a sober position to say “Put that down or you’ll kill someone!” It was also gorgeous. And by gorgeous, I mean someone saying every 5 minutes “HOLY COW, THIS IS GORGEOUS!!!” Finally, it had miles and miles of off-road 4-wheel drive paths (and non-paths), which were perfect for several young men in their early twenties with minimal adult supervision and their four-wheel drive vehicles.
On one of the trips, we were running through the many beaver ponds that crop up every spring, when Eddie’s 4Runner got water in its engine and seized up. I pulled my pickup around and started the long process (8 hours plus) of towing the 4Runner down the mountain.
Since we started the whole process after 1pm, this would mean it would be dark before we were finished.
Why did it take us that long? Well, there are several reasons for that, and they are as follows:
1). I’m not very bright. This can’t be emphasized enough.
2). I have friends who, although they are very nice and kind and wonderful and I’d do anything for them and they for me, are not very bright either, because they befriended the very un-bright person mentioned in reason #1.
3). Regardless of your religious or political views, your astrological sign, or your origin of birth, darkness comes at some point every day. I know this doesn’t come as a shock to intelligent people here, but we are not talking about intelligent people here. See reasons #1 and 2 if this still isn’t clear.
4). Tow straps purchased from K-Mart are rarely a wise purchase. We’ll get to that in a second.
5). Things always take longer in the mountains – cooking food, finding a camp site, driving home, towing a broken 4Runner – the more you need something, the longer it takes. I guess the sole exception would be the accidental lighting of forest fires – those seem to take no time at all.
As I said, we had begun to tow Eddie’s vehicle down the winding mountain road (Larimer County Road #80C, to be exact) after lunch with some very old, and by all accounts very cheap, tow straps. We all expected the trip to take us 2 hours max, so a few people, including the star of the story Adam Jones, decided to watch over the camp site while the rest of us made a trip down the mountain.
Since we were completely unprepared to deal with a vehicle in the steel grips of rigor mortis caused by the forced, but funny, displacement of beavers and small cutthroat trout from their impromptu ponds, I’m surprised we even had a tow strap, and I have no idea how we came up with a 2 hour trip estimate. The fact that we survived up there even one hour by ourselves is a true testament to God’s mercy on the ignorant and idiotic.
We made our way down, with Kristin and I in my truck and Beaman in the truck bed monitoring the tow strap, towing Eddie who was trying to steer the deceased 4Runner without power steering, and about half a dozen 4 wheelers zipping all around.
The tow strap’s job was to snap in half about every quarter mile. We’d all have to unload, scratch our heads, assign blame, curse the tow strap and its purchaser, argue over which half of the strap was longer, come to blows, laugh, spit and shake hands, then tie knots in both halves and swear to each other that this time it would hold better. Five minutes later the strap would break and we’d start the whole process over again. One problem was that every time the tow strap broke and we tied it back together, the combined lengths of the two halves would get shorter and shorter, meaning Eddie was getting closer and closer to my nice truck, sans decent brakes and power steering. By the time we got to the last bend in the road, we had literally reached the end of our rope. The tow strap couldn’t be repaired any more, and it was so short I could see Eddie’s eyes in my rear view mirror.
Eddie and I had agreed that one more *snap* and we’d just have to let his vehicle coast and have the tow truck try to pick it up where it came to a halt. Another problem was that we had to dodge traffic heading *up* the hill as we were heading down. In order to see where we were going, Eddie had to keep his 4Runner to the left of my truck so he could turn with me as we drove down the dusty road. Kristin would have to radio to Eddie (I had brought 2 radios… come to think of it, we were *slightly* prepared to some degree – yeah Team Jones!) that a car was coming, and he’d pull back in behind me and drive blind until the car passed, then he’d pull back out to the left to see where we were dragging him.
As we reached the last bend, we met a car coming up the road, and Kristin again radioed Eddie to get behind us. As he did, Beaman yelled out the strap was starting to break. As the car passed us, I had Kristin tell Eddie we were going to sling-shot him around the bend. “Ready Eddie?” went the call and as we pulled into the curve, the tow strap snapped one last time, and Eddie and 4Runner went sailing past us.
We stayed with him long enough to make sure the tow truck arrived and started to make our way back to camp. By now it was pitch dark outside, and a few of the people back at camp had grown a little concerned that we hadn’t made it back yet.
Adam decided to hop on his brand new 4 wheeler and head our way to see what was taking so much time. What Adam was about to find out was that his 4 wheeler had developed a nasty habit of letting the bulb jiggle loose from the headlight as he drove 30mph down a bumpy dusty road.
Anyone who has camped in the mountains knows that when it gets dark, it gets DARK. And when your headlight goes out, it gets TOO dark and TOO fast way TOO quickly. When it first happened, Jones was able to fix it with the last available sunlight. By the third time it happened, it was almost ten, too dark to search for a missing bulb, and he had no idea where he was.
He started to wonder why he hadn’t packed a flashlight. It was at that inconvenient point that reality decided to take a break from the longstanding relationship it had maintained with our Mr. Jones and left him completely at the mercy of his own imagination. He started hearing noises and growling and he started to think that maybe the growling was no longer coming from his stomach and then he started to hear lips smacking and teeth chomping and he was pretty sure it wasn’t coming from his 4 wheeler and then he started seeing imaginary animals wearing funny hats in the pitch darkness and one of them was driving a Segway which he thought was a little bit odd but who was he to judge and then something brushed his leg and for a moment he thought it was a nice soft bunny but then it snarled at him and he decided nice soft bunnies don’t snarl and if they do they’re not the kind of bunnies he’d like to associate with regardless of their texture and then he was *almost positive* he saw a pterodactyl and he decided that regardless of where you are in the world especially when the lights go out you should never ever see a pterodactyl especially not one with a t-shirt that says “Windsor High Class of 1994”.
And then he saw a white light. “So this is it” he whispered to himself. “This is how it all goes down. I go out like a sucker to some pink panther driving a Segway”. Only it wasn’t a Segway, it was a Toyota Tacoma, and the pink panther driving it wasn’t a pink panther but me, making like a bread truck (hauling buns) at 40mph towards Mr. “Completely Paralyzed in a State of Terror” Jones.
We all jumped out of the truck and started yelling “Jonesy!!! What are you doing in the middle of the road???” As reality decided to recommit itself fully to Adam Jones, he told us of the light bulb and the headlight and the panthers and bunnies and a partially-clothed pterodactyl, and he swore he’d never go anywhere without a flashlight. We packed him and his 4 wheeler into the truck and made it back to camp to tell and retell the it’s-funny-now story.
The next morning, as we packed up to explore what we were pretty sure was still Colorado, Adam opened the seat of his 4 wheeler, where he found his lovely princess-girlfriend Erin Blank (now Jones) had put his flashlight the day before. She just hadn’t bothered to tell him.
**Note from the owner of this blog -the lovely princess DID tell him where the flashlight was, he just CHOSE to be paying attention to something else at the time. So there.
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