Get up and get out of here. Now.

You are never too poor for good toilet paper. Even if you have to steal it. Some folks, when leaving a hotel room, go down a cehcklist: Ashtray? Check. Towels? Check. Shampoo? Check. Coffee? Check. Toilet paper? Check. Personally, my checklist is, Shampoo? Check. Coffee? Check. Styrofoam cups? Check. Toilet paper? Check. Apparently I'm not the only one.

If your suitcase contains all the shampoo and coffee from every hotel you've ever stayed in, you might be a redneck. Of course, you're paying to have consumed that stuff anyway.

One time we even took the Do Not Dsturb sign because the damn hook part ripped off while we were trying to get it over the doorknob. We duct taped it to our car window while we slept in our seats the next night.

I've noticed that the coffee quality decreases as hotel fanciness increases, and vice versa. Seriously, have you ever had Sheraton coffee? You don't want to. The only exception was the fancy hotel in Kona Hawaii, but that figures. The Motel 6 in one little podunk town in South Dakota that we stayed in on our way to Sturgis had the best coffee I ever had. I made a point of getting six bags.

My theory about this is that the shitholes want you to get up and get the hell outta there as soon as possible, so that they can move the next people in. And they know you'll come back for the coffee if you're ever in town again.

Of course, hotels actually have functional toilet paper. Truckstop toilet paper is translucent. You want a couple of rolls in your suitcase that won't get number two all over your hand. No wonder so many people keep a stock of toilet paper from the hotels they've stayed in on a road trip.

Gearhead habits and redneck lawns

If you cried at the end of World's Fastest Indian, you're probably a bit of a gearhead. I'll pass you the Kleenex.

If you sell cowboy furniture, walking sticks, and steel roses to pay for your Indian habit, you might be a gearhead.

If you have over five hundred horses in your garage and none of them are animals, you might be a gearhead.

If the first time you saw your house on Google Earth you couldn't help but say, "Man, what a dump!" before you realized, oh, that's our house, you might be a redneck. In my defense, that was right after we bought it as an abandoned property.

If, fifteen years later, your house can still be mistaken for an abandoned property at first glance, but hey, it's a mighty spiffy "abandoned property", you might be a redneck.

If you have more lawnmowers than grass but your lawn is covered in green plants anyway, you might be a redneck.

If you have the second-greenest lawn in the neighborhood and all you do is ignore it, you might be a redneck in a yuppie area. They work so hard on their yards that the yard can't live without them.

If you've ever had a yard that consisted entirely of poison ivy, you're probably that poor fella in the Reader's Digest last April. That was a freakin' hilarious article. Life lesson, don't take off your clothes when there's poison ivy around.

If you're in a hole...

...Stop digging. Don't get me wrong, I loved Boyd Coddington's taste(rest his soul) and thought he was a good, salt-of-the-earth man (ironic, no?), but this guy did everything ass-backwards when he went out to Bonneville.

For the past 40 years, there has been a mining operation going on near the Bonneville racecourses, where the miners collect the water runoff from the flats and direct it into huge setlling ponds, collecting potash from it. Then the salt would just sit there, when it should have been sitting out on the racecourses, building up a foot and a half thick. At one point, there were just a couple of inches of salt on the Flats. That's nowhere near enough to have Speed Week. That's the recipe for Stuck in the Mud Week.

Salt, when it has been wetted and allowed to dry, forms a surface very similar to concrete, or maybe plaster of paris. Anyone who went to Southmoor while they still had the Upper Field is familiar with this--it was dirt, but practically concrete. Out on the Slat Flats, though, the mud underneath the salt is frikkin' quicksand, just about. We can't have vehicles breaking through to that at five miles an hour, let alone 200.

Starting in 1997, Save the Salt was started; a program where the water from the holding tanks would be pumped back out over the Flats. In other words, they been repaving.

Of course, if rain hits right before Speed Week or the salt pumping hasn't deposited enough, the courses and the whole shebang have to be moved somewhere else.

You standin' on unstable ground, boy.

Here's the story of Boyd Coddington's visit in 2007, as published on the Bonneville website, http://www.saltflats.com/

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Bonneville can be a tough place.
As you may have heard, at SpeedWeek 2007, Boyd Coddington star of TV’s American Hotrod show had a very tough couple of days. Boyd and his wife Jo were running a beautiful roadster, hoping for a class record, with a full TVcrew recording their racing efforts. As you will read, things went from bad to much much worse for the Coddington crew.
Ron Christenson (long time USFRA volunteer) was working the Speedweek 2007 Event in his usual position as Radio Announcer on 1610 AM radio announcing the event. He captured these photos and this inside story from his ringside seat.

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Photos and Narrative by Ron Christensen

Thursday afternoon the Boyd Coddington race team, complete with a film crew for Speed TV's "American Hotrodder" was heading from the starting line to the 3- Mile after Jo Coddington (Boyd's wife) had just spun their roadster at about 180- MPH (and come really close to backing into the Timing Slips stand at great speed.) The motorhome headed for the return road just as it was supposed to do. Unfortunately it broke through the thin salt (the SpeedWeek tracks had to be relocated to a risky area after the rains a couple of weeks before the event). We normally wouldn't have been driving in this area as it is quite a distance east of the usual location of the track.

With the "American Hotrodder" film crew shooting away, the Coddington group tried to get the motorhome free but it had sunk in up to the axle and even with lots of digging it would not budge. So they called a tow truck to come and pull them out. The mood of the Coddington crew was sort of giddy . . . the seriousness of the predicament hadn't seem to have sunk in nearly as well as the motorhome had. They were all standing around laughing and drinking beers, having a great time.
Two vehicles (a very large wrecker and a flatbed) arrived about two hours later like the Lone Ranger and Tonto to the rescue . . . . The Coddington crew was certain it would be out of there in minutes and heading back to the casino in Wendover for dinner, gambling and more beers! Plans didn't quite work out as hoped as both rescue vehicles promptly got stuck not far from the motorhome. It should have been obvious that if the motorhome broke through, a big heavy wrecker didn't stand a chance. So there were now three stuck vehicles. The wrecker crews were heard to say something like "We'll just get 'Big Blue' in here . . . no problem!" More beers came out and the party continued.

At about 6:00 PM, I had to leave the salt about that time to go to the workers dinner at the Nugget and a party at an old friend's home in Wendover.
When I returned at about 10:30 p.m. to my radio trailer to spend the night I noticed there were lights in the area of the motorhome so I drove over there. Things had gone from bad to critical at the scene. The Coddington crew's mood had made a 180 degree change from when I left. They looked very sullen and an air of gloom hung over the group. I then surveyed the scene. "Big Blue" (the wrecker that would save the day) had arrived after I left and had been trying to pull the big yellow wrecker from the nice soft mud into which it had become so comfortable. The yellow wrecker which had been sitting so peacefully with the salt surface firmly against the undercarriage when I left was now at about a 40 degree angle with mud coming up about 6 feet to the door of the cab on the left side. It was wedged firmly into the landscape with its right side tires about a foot off the ground and about 100 feet of 4-foot deep trench indicating where Big Blue had dragged it in an attempt to free it from the clutches of the desert.

The dragging had only gotten it deeper into the mud. And to make matters even worse, Big Blue had gotten itself in about the same situation, sinking into the mud about 4 feet as it attempted to pull the yellow wrecker free. And in a last ditch effort to get the motorhome out it had managed to damage its boom winch and a tow cable was now stretched tight like a huge steel guitar string between it and the motorhome. The damaged winch would not release and they could not remove the cable. It was about 3 feet above the salt and about 1050 feet long which created quite a hazard. One of the Coddington crewmen had borrowed some orange cones from the race course return road to mark off the cable so no one would drive into it. Unfortunately one of their own crew drove their mini van right into it as he attempted to drive between the cones!

I struggled not to laugh at this comedy as it unfolded. Another pair of cables stretched between Big Blue and the yellow wrecker. Big Blue was sitting at an odd angle with its right rear wheels buried firmly in the mud. It looked a dog cleaning its backside on the carpet. Somehow they had managed to free the flatbed which they had backed in to try to free Big Blue and it too had become stuck again, this time much worse than before. The three rescue vehicles were in a nice tidy row, half buried and held in the firm grip of the clay-like mud that lies just below the surface of the salt. The scene resembled some sort of elephant hunt with three slain carcasses lying dead on the playa. The motorhome sat unmoved in the same spot it had found itself in when it started this fiasco, no doubt chuckling to itself at the mess it had created!

The muddied and sullen Coddington crew divided up and some of them stayed in the motorhome while another group left in the mini van with a fresh cable burn on its nose. It was pitch black out with no moon and they had no idea how to find their way back to the access road. I explained that they just needed to drive to the dike behind the starting line then follow it around until they encountered the row of cones that marked the route to the access road. I returned to my radio position at the starting line where I started to prepare the Cherokee Hotel for the night. I watched as the Coddington crew left in the mini van and drove past the starting lines then proceeded to head off in a northerly direction instead of following the dike to the west as I suggested. I could imagine them driving off into the darkness and getting stuck in the muddy area towards the mountains. A perfect end to their evening!

I decided to rescue them from another disaster and I chased them down in the Jeep then guided them to the coned route to the access road. They still had the water hazard at the end of the access road to negotiate. I explained that they MUST keep the relocated row of cones to the immediate right of their vehicle at all times as there were now 3 to 4 foot deep holes hidden under the surface of the water if they ventured off the marked path. I returned to my trailer and wished them luck.

The next morning the scene at the motorhome was revealed in all its glory! You can see the carnage in the photos. I wonder how or if they will "replace their divots." About 10:00 a.m. ANOTHER huge wrecker arrived. This one was even bigger than the big yellow one and it was equipped with a third axel on the back. They carefully backed it up and removed the motorhome, the flatbed, then "Big Blue." When I finally left they were still working on pulling the big yellow wrecker.

Your friends at the USFRA encourage you to be careful out there. Bonneville can be a very tough place!

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These folks have obviously never lived in real snow country. Treat the mud like deep snow, respect it, and it might not swallow your truck. Trouble is, unlike snow, mud doesn't go away by July. I mentioned a while back that if you get stuck in Colorado, wait and we'll dig you out, it's what we live for in the wintertime. Well, that and summer. That's really what we're doing, filling time while we wait for summer. Anyway, after all of this, we coulda gotten these boys out of that jam, without the huge three-axle wrecker and all the to-do. Of course, the mountain contingent might not dig 'em out, they were just so daggum stupid. But you can't just throw big iron at a break-through problem, just like you can't just floor it on the salt. One'll eat your truck, and the other will eat your tires.

Merry racing!

The proper way to drive

If you're offroading on an impromptu cross-country road trip, the proper way to drive is, contrary to what that jumpy man with the clipboard told you when you were 16, actually with one foot on the gas, the other on the wheel, no shirt on, and the entire upper half of your body out the window. Even if you're driving a damned Prius, this gets you cred.

Like this man.

According to him, Priuses have enough ground clearance that if you're not all uptight and greener-than-thou about it, they make okay off-road vehicles. Plus, having your Prius towed out of a boulderfield five states from where you live is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This one made it through that trail okay, though, apparently.

Now I want to put a Chevy truck IFS with a four inch lift under a Prius, weld on a skidplate, do a mini-tub, put on 20-inch beadlocks with offroad tires, and take that to the next offroad competition just to see if it works. This comes from the same place as my desire to put a 426 Hemi in a Geo Metro, with Positraction rear and a four-speed close-ratio box and watch Corvette guys embarrass themselves.

I think I need professional help with this. I'm not sure whether that should be psycholog-i-mica-tal or someone to hold things in place while I weld. I'll get back to you on that.

The space toilet is broken

And I find this absolutely hilarious. I'm familiar with the havoc that a broken toilet can wreak upon and earthbound family. I wonder what the plumbing bill is to fix a toilet thousands of miles up in space? I tell you what, though, if you can get your toilet fixed any time of any day here on earth if you call the right company, they ought to be able to fix the space toilet.

Small Town Southern Man

Alan Jackson's video would be embedded here if embedding weren't disabled for it. Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUhaqUHGeQU

I just got back from my cousins' graduation party. Four of 'em graduated this year, and two of them (the closest two) were among the first third-generation of graduates from the school. Of course, "party" in our family is code for "pig roast and a keg." Since it was Frontier Days, there was not a CO2 cartridge to be found within literally 50 miles of Colorado Springs, not even for a beer deliveryman's family, so one of the boys got one in Lamar and drove in with it. If they hadn't found one, I'm pretty sure someone would have either shot a hole in the keg or attached the shop air compressor to it.

I always forget how much I love being out in the sticks with the ranchers until I go back. The spaces are big, the buildings small, the trucks required and the roads undivided or dirt. Life is a hell of a lot more simple. The high school had its biggest graduating class ever with 58 graduates. They had all been going to school together since they started school. Peyton is a small town. I also noticed that my family are all very short, since it was the first time I'd seen 'em since elementary school. They're good people.

More tornado fun!

First of all, all ya'll Coloradans, remember that twister up Ute Pass a while back? When I saw the news about that I didn't believe it at first, until they showed the section of Highway 24 that goes past Scenic Acres and our cabin. Then the praying and frantic calling began, but it didn't hit anything me or my dad grew up with.

Alex C. commented with a really funny story about a friend of her brother's. Apparently he was in his dorm room in Washington D.C. when his friends decided to play a joke on him. They told him a tornado was coming and he flipped out, turning on the shower for some reason and hiding in the closet. They found him later. I assume he got them back worse later.

Back in the mid-late '60s a dust devil went through the Palmer High baseball field. It came through the backstop, over home plate and the pitcher's mound, and exited the field between first and second base, in the middle of a game. All the guys, including my dad, decided to se what it was like andrushed into the dust devil. It was windy.

Also, if you're ever in Cascade, don't buy anything at the Swis Miss. Neighborly feud over a cross burning.

Brainstorming and more serious storms

You've probably heard about the tornadoes yesterday in northern Colorado. One of them wiped out the Kodak plant in what I believe is officially Windsor. My cousin's husband works at the Budweiser can plant less than half a mile from there, in Milliken. Severe winds hit their house, and the family hid in the closet, since they apparently have no basement. Go figure. No major damage reported. The really criminal thing, though, was that the managers at the can plant did not even inform the workers that there was severe weather outside or that they were under a tornado warning, and the tornado could be seen decimating the Kodak plant. They waited until the shift was over, and mentioned causually "Oh, yeah, we nearly got hit by a tornado earlier. Have a nice day." They weren't given the opportunity to take shelter, nor did they even know that their families were in severe danger. As you can imagine, the workers were pissed off.

Milliken was without power or phone service for several hours. When our call finally got through, we learned what happened.

Lemme tell you about the process of making aluminum cans. In order to finish them, they must be cleaned with hydroflouric acid. This is evil stuff. Unlike most acids, HF does not cause burns to the skin. It penetrates through the skin without you even necessarily knowing that you have any on you, and binds to the minerals in your bones and blood. Imagine your bones dissolving from the inside out. That's what this will do if you get too much on you. The first aid is to cut off the blood supply so that it doesn't spread through your body, and then to apply a calcium cream to hopefully bind most of the HF. The toxins from dissolving your bone, though, can kill flesh in and of themselves, and the combined effect is similar to a snakebite and frostbite, where you have flesh dying, severe pain, tenderness, and swelling.... all from the inside out.

My cousin's husband once had an extremely dilute HF solution (less than 0.005%) drip a drop onto his hand while he was rinsing some racks. He didn't think anything of it until half an hour later, when it felt like someone had smashed his hand with a nine pound sledge. Since it was dilute and it was too late for the cream, he had to suffer that pain for almost a week while his body eliminated the toxins and repaired the damage.

Now imagine this stuff flying through the air at 200 miles an hour. Damn straight you're scared.

This Budweiser can plant employes almost a thousand people per shift. Let's disregard all the people downwind. If that plant had been hit during production, which came within a hair's bredth of happening, imagine now having all that uncontained acid in the air, with all these people near it. That's not something I would wish on my worst enemy.

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Now here's the brainstorm part. I've got a third of a gallon of gasoline that has thermally degraded too much to use in an engine, but is still basically gas. I need to get rid of it. I've thought of a few ideas, but I'm sure there's a better way. How would you get rid of it?

You might be a redneck

If you hide under your trailer when there's a tornado warning, you might be a redneck.

If you have a truck that couold haul that trailer across a boulder fieled at 70 miles an hour without flinching, but you hide under the trailer anyway, you are a redneck.

If the amount of CDs you take with you on vacation is measured in gallons, you might be a redneck.

If you have ever oiled your boots with 10w-30 because you had it laying around, you might be a redneck.

If your lawnmower always starts on the first kick, you might be a redneck.

Hispanics have large, close-knit families. So do white trash. If we know any family at all, we know 300 relatives. As far as we're concerned, if your third-cousin's brother-in-law married an Osmond, the Osmonds are now your family and are entitled to come to your annual pig roasts. If your great aunt's grand-daughter is graduating from high school, you are invited and will think nothing of driving 250 miles round trip to get there.

I like flowers and I'm okay with that.

Not as in, show up at my door with flowers, ladies. Show up at my door with an El Camino for sale, and we'll talk. I'm talking about plant-wise, flowers are very good plants to have. It's often observed that rednecks rarely have any grass. That's true. But, frankly, I couldn't turn my lawn completely dirt if I dug it up and shipped away all the plants. With the eception of where I spilled mineral spirits that time, and the one corner that the power company poisoned, plants love our property. Back when we owned a cabin in Cascade, plants loved that, too. You'd be amazed how quickly trees and grass and God-knows-what would sprout after a rain, even if the property next door couldn't get jack shit to grow.

My theory is that this unintentional green thumb is because I'm not picky about plants. Thistle? Bring it on, but stay on the property line, please. Wild rose? Upwind and not near where I'm walking, but stick around. Crocus? Where have crocus not sprouted lately? Grass? Only if it wants to be there all on its own. Elm? If it doesn't sprout in the middle of an open space, it gets to stay, but no bigger than a shrub, please. Lilac? Everywhere it wants to be. That odd, low grass that looks like rosemary and blooms an incredible blue? Great! Dandelions? Yes please. Mushrooms? How'd they get enough water? Let 'em stay, keep the dogs away.

If it's green and wants to live there all on its own, it's a good plant and can stay. Clover? Sure. Weeds? They never need watered. Dirt turns to mud, mud gets on cars, the cars rust. I don't have time for bare dirt.

Anything that flowers is especially welcome in my yard. King Iris are amazingly purple, huge, and fragrant. My preferred cologne may be eau de unleaded, but when I'm not working on that, the sweet smell of flowers is a welcome event in my yard.

I'm also not ashamed to leave my grass clippings in the lawn (for something that doesn't get watered except by rain in a place that's almost desert, you would not believe the amount of grass that grows here) and let those clippings turn brown and decompose. Saves me money on fertilizer and all the effort of raking it. Plus, it must keep water in the soil or something.

Life will find a way. Ignore your yard long enough and green things will move in with no effort on your part. Even if it's poison ivy, just stay on the concrete and it'll keep would-be trespassers away. Even grass will get used to it... well, mine has.