Story-A-Day #156: Ice Trucking

ICE TRUCKING

It had seemed like a good idea. Why wouldn’t it? He would take his truck down to the lake and cruise along the shorelines. His dog next to him, head lolling out the window, licking at the breeze; it would be a great way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

For a while, it had been. They had raced along the shoreline, tires spinning in the mud on one side, and crunching through the ice that had started to pile up on the other. It was freeing, an almost euphoric liberation that was unmatched to any he had had since the trails closed down for the season.

He missed snowmobiling, but for today, this was a sufficient substitute.

They shuddered and juked along the shore, weaving recklessly out on the ice to send up great fans of water, before skidding back into the muddy shore to cover the truck in filth.

Everything was just as he would have wanted it right up until the moment he hit the log. There was a jarring blast that sent him and the dog flying up off the vinyl bench in the truck’s cab and when they came down, there was a sharper snap that the one the log had made as they obliterated their passage through it.

At first he thought it might be his dog, and a sickening sense of regret welled up from within. The dog proved to be fine though, a comically confused grim curling upwards from the space where his lolling tongue kept pace with his breathing.

He got out to inspect the area. The shattered debris of the log filled the wake of their passage and he could see where the bulk of it remained entombed in the solid ice.

He hoped for a moment, that it might just have been another piece of log shattering, but as he lowered to his knees to peer under the truck, he realized the extent of the damage. He had cracked an axel, thereby putting the truck out of commission.

With a sheepish feeling of stupidity, he started the long walk back towards town so he could call a tow truck.

As he walked along the muddy shore, his dog bounding playfully ahead of him, he couldn’t help but smile. It hadn’t ended well, but it sure had started out as a perfect day.