For what it’s worth, today is national “Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day.” I can’t think of a better way to spend a fall day than that unless, of course, it is snowing. Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day is one of the fall rituals around here. Another is the annual effort to bring some kind of order to my garage before winter sets in. I could easily lose half the house and never miss it, and mine is a pretty small house. On the other hand, I could add two more garage bays and fill them instantly.
It’s not like I’m really deprived of covered storage. There are enough unused farm outbuildings around my place to stash a lot of junk. But they aren’t in the right location, and some of them get snowed in during the winter so there isn’t access without a whole lot of effort. I want my stuff close to the house and readily available, just in case I need one of three old broken bikes in deepest, darkest February.
I already have what would seem like ample garage space for one person. There is one bay attached to the house. It’s narrow, but deep, and can absorb the Jetta and a whole lot of stuff in the back. The annoying thing is that, if it were about three feet deeper, I could park something else in there, end to end. But it isn’t three feet deeper and I can’t get the car to be three feet shorter. Then there is the detached garage, a double-wide. So with three places to park, I ought to be able to rent a couple spaces out to neighbors with boats in the front yard. No such luck. When you live in the same house for 25 years, junk happens.
After years of putting up with the discomforts and inefficiencies of driving a four-wheel-drive truck, I finally got smart and bought a fuel-efficient car for everyday use. I kept the truck and have that for the really stormy days when I need to be in line for the first chair at the resort. There are days when a high-clearance 4×4 is really necessary where I live, but there are really only a few of them each winter. The rest of the time, I’m a lot happier driving the Jetta, which cranks out 50 miles to the gallon most of the time.
So that ought to leave one garage bay open for the junk. But there is the VW camper that I seldom use but can’t bring myself to sell. Like the crazy lady who hoards cats, I’ve got vehicles everywhere. I can’t help it.
The process this winter is more complicated than usual because I made a change in the snowplow situation. After 23 years, it is time to put the Dodge out to pasture. It was kind of a heap when I bought it. Then I pushed snow with it for 23 years. Somebody with better mechanical skills than me could milk a few more years out of it, or the transmission could fall out on the ground tomorrow. (The high bid on eBay is $315 – get it while you’ve got the chance.) I decided to replace it with a tractor with a blower and front-end loader.
So none of the usual garage strategies are working. The new tractor is a diesel, and will need to be inside where I can plug in the engine-block heater. Then there’s the Farmall, which I spent the summer restoring. If it would fit up the stairs, I’d have that in the bedroom. But it’s got to get under cover someplace too. On paper, I can get both tractors and the VW bus in the garage. On paper, the tractors kind of nest like spoons. On paper it all worked.
But on paper, you don’t have to open the car door. After moving a ton of crap from one garage to the other, tearing out shelves and reinstalling them in the other garage, and generally getting things so “organized” that it’s easier to drive to Home Depot to buy a new tub of nails than find the nails I know are in there someplace, it isn’t quite working. If I want to get the van out of the garage, I have to move two tractors or crawl in through the rear hatch. Early in the process, it was clear that the truck was going to live outside.
I had big plans to reduce the overall quantity of stuff in the garages and really thin it out. I had the truck backed up to the door, ready to load it full of stuff to take to the recycling center. That didn’t happen. In the end, there was a bag of aluminum cans. The rest of it somehow all got packed back in there. The mass of crap isn’t reduced at all, but I managed to get the density up. It’s stacked higher and packed tightly.
There are still about 15 pairs of old skis, with bindings missing or broken, edges blown out, and absolutely beyond use. I don’t know why I hang on to them. They will never be used, and aren’t even usable by somebody just learning to ski, given the rusted-out bindings. Logic said, “Throw them in the truck for a trip to the dump.” But each time I lugged a pair of worthless skis (or in one case, a single ski) from one garage to the other, I remembered epic days on them, or breakthroughs when I finally figured out the telemark turn, and, well, you just can’t haul that to the dump. So there’s a little niche between the huge rear wheels of the Farmall that is filled with old skis.
I doubt I can locate a screwdriver in my newly arranged life, but I know exactly where the Tua Big Easys with the blown-out edges are.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.