TILT

Now there's something you don't see every day.

My brain struggled to process what my eyes were seeing. It was the scale I couldn't quite grasp. It was as though a child had flung his toy road grader down in the sandbox when he got called in for dinner. But this was a real road grader, impossibly huge. It wasn't just stuck in the mud, it was buried in it. It was in the ditch, and rotated ninety degrees on its long axis, so that the axles were perpendicular to the surface of the road. Only half of it was still sticking up out of the mud. There was no need to ask myself who had so carelessly thrown this thirty-foot-long, five-ton behemoth down in the mud like that. This had Wally written all over it.

Some people just should not operate machinery. My Uncle Wally was one of them.

I was on my way to work of a Sunday morning, and had just turned onto the ski area road. There's about a mile of straight flat until you get to the gate where the road starts climbing and curving. I was looking forward to the variable conditions of a clear, warm spring day. My morning class would be challenged by the hard, fast, ice (but I would enjoy a few bullet runs before the circus started); my noon private would be heroes in the sugar; and my afternoon group lesson would learn more than all the rest put together as they got their feet under them in the slow, forgiving slush.

A hundred yards on, Wally plodded along on foot. Utterly dejected. Head down. Knuckles dragging.

I rolled down the passenger side window as I pulled alongside. “Bad morning, Wal? You want a ride? Or you want to walk it off?”

He spoke to his feet “I'll ride.”

We drove on for several minutes in silence. I finally said “You want to talk about it?”

“No, dammit, I do not. I only pulled over to roll a cigarette. I didn't know how soft it was.”

“What do you mean you didn't know how soft it was? You'd turned it around to start working the uphill side, so you been pulling ditches all morning on the way down. Maybe it's time to invest in ready-rolls.”

“Shut up. You're fired.”

I grinned at him. “You gonna take my classes? I'm the only instructor you got. Besides, Wal, who pulls a road grader over for anything? You got the biggest dog in the fight, dude. Park right in the middle of the damn road to roll your smoke. Make 'em go around. It's a helluva lot easier to pull a car out of the ditch with the road grader than vice versa.”

“Shut up. After today you're fired.”

Northern Arizona Mud: 1

Wally: 0

I'd worked for Wally for more than a decade by then and would go on to work at Wally World for nearly ten more winters. He never meant it when he fired me. He needed me a lot more than I needed the job. I made my living at the auto parts shop during the week and taught skiing at Wally World on weekends for fun and extra money. Most of the time I was the only one on what was loosely called the ski school. I was always the only one trained to my craft and with any experience. It was a bust-ass job. There were some weekends I taught upwards of 150 beginners by myself and was grateful to go back to running the rat race at the auto parts shop so I could catch my breath.

His name wasn't Wally and he wasn't my uncle. We called him Wally (after Wally World in that comedy movie) because it felt a lot like we were working in a cartoon strip. Wally owned a charming little anachronism called Williams Ski Area just outside of Williams, Arizona. It wasn't so much a ski area as it was a caricature of one. The technological advances of the latter half of the twentieth century had passed Wally World by entirely. Some time in the 60s Wally and his brother had driven a wheezing old forties-vintage farm tractor up what would become the beginner's run and put it up on blocks. Wrapped a rope around one of the tires and called it a lift. Must have worked some kind of magic to get the tramway inspector to sign off on it.

Wally couldn't afford to buy new equipment any more than he could pay experienced people. He took discards from real ski areas and brought them back to life with chewing gum and baling wire. He got the poma lift for free for carting it away from Hesperus ski area in southwestern Colorado, and the Thiokol (snowcat) was a Wolf Creek castoff. I don't know where he got the road grader but it was a derelict POS just like all the rest.

Wally was a wreck looking for a place to happen as soon as he left the shop in or with any machine, big or little. He had to do all the summer felling and clearing by himself because there wasn't a logger in three states who would get within twenty miles of him if he had a running chainsaw in his hand. The butt of a tree he'd been felling had kicked back and hit him in the face the day I met him, to interview for the job. Looked like he was lucky to still have his head attached to his shoulders his face was such a mess. And as for his winter operator errors, burying the road grader was just the most impressive among them. Trying to make a sharper turn than the machine was designed for, he would pull the stick back on one of the Thiokol tracks while pushing the other one forward about once a winter. The machine would rotate, corkscrewing itself down into the snow until it met frozen earth, where it would chew a track, blow hoses, and puke hydraulic fluid. He buried it one year right where you had to get off the poma. Another time he buried it, the snow was deep enough only the roof was sticking out of the crater he dug himself down into. And he did it right in the middle of the only good teaching terrain for beginners in the whole place, in the base area, while I was teaching there. I had to restrain myself from choking his neck as he climbed up out of the hole he'd dug with that silly “oops” grin on his face. Scared my poor wobbly-legged first day people near to death. I could see the terror in their faces. Tears were shed. Some took their skis off, walked down, and would never again put skis on their feet.

I learned to avoid him when he was operating machinery like everybody else, but make no mistake, I loved my Uncle Wally. He was a smart, educated man whose intelligence and education found no practical use whatsoever in the real world he inhabited. I'll be casting no stones his way on that account. He was a sweet person who kept his business afloat, barely, on a shoestring. This is something that every small businessperson in Williams can relate to, myself included. He shared his charming little anachronism with everyone, especially if they were willing to pitch in. He collected snowmelt from the roof for water to flush the toilets with so the potable water could be conserved for drinking and use in the kitchen. He was happy in his poverty, as am I.

Surprisingly, Wally died of old age and as he aged he turned into a mountain gnome. He curled in on himself like his ancient, worn pack boots had curled up at the toes. He'd always had elfin features—-a long pointy nose with bright, intense eyes burning behind thick glasses. He looked like an old apple, brown and craggy, always bundled in the same old tattered winter gear; ski pants worn shiny, his signature hand-knit conical blue hat with a ragged tassel at the tip, a scarf of indeterminate color, and a down vest I think might have been yellow once, but which had turned black from the grease in the shop. He developed a bad hip in his old age like so many of us do, and with it, a mincing gait not far removed from the beautiful, tight tele turns he made as a younger man.

If the fables and fairy tales have it right, gnomes make their way through the world at a little different pace than the rest of us. Wally had always heard his own drummer and did not much care what the rest of the world thought of him, he was doing the best he could under the circumstances with what he had. It's all any of us can do.

AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer(digital design engineer) in silicon valley. He worked on new product designs ranging from hard-disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to simple battery monitors for electric cars.

A few years ago he gave his spot on the freeway to someone else and left:–) Now days he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel and supporting the idea of the full-circle of food; grow, harvest, store, prepare, preserve and propagate. He is still a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it more efficiently.