01 July 2011 Over the Top. Really.

There are many phrases you can use when telling a story which sound benign, but are really quite ominous to those in the know.  For instance, “it seemed like a good idea at the time” is fun, while “alcohol may have been involved” is almost always a herald of woe in a tale.  Then of course is my personal favorite “It was a plan that couldn’t fail”.  SO….

It was a plan that could not fail.  Amy & wanted to move a bunch of big trash (not house trash) to the bottom of the hill for pickup tomorrow and figured the easiest way to do this was to load it on the tram.  The normal procedure for moving the car to the top of the tram is to have a person at the top use arm signals to indicate to the operator at the bottom when the car is in position.  This does not work for us as Amy is too short to see her arms from the bottom, but I didn’t let this stop me.  I armed both of us with portable VHF radios and told Amy to say, “stop stop” when the car was at the top.  Thinking all was well, I went to the bottom, fired up the donkey engine, and sent the car on it’s way up.

Now people who use radios professionally develop a “radio voice”, that is usually their normal voice pitched an octave or two lower; in fact it’s a running joke on the ships to compare who has the most exaggerated radio voice.  When concocting the plan with the tram I forgot two important things 1) Amy doesn’t have a radio voice and 2) Radio voice actually helps the sound travel through the mic and promotes clarity on the receiving side.  What this meant to us is I did not hear Amy say, “stop stop”.  In fact my first indication anything was wrong was when the engine bogged down fierce; I immediately de-clutched the engine and heard Amy screaming “STOP STOP YOU BETTER COME UP HERE!!”

At this point you probably all want some pictures.  Keep wanting.  I am willing to make my shame public with one thousand words, but not one picture.  Try to visualize this scene: I reached the top to see the beautiful blue expanse of the Atlantic stretching out before me, with the tram car pulled over the edge of the tracks, resting on the framework for the pulleys, in a crooked, unhealthy fashion.  The guard railing had been torn off of the platform and was laying nearby, Amy was standing off to the side trying to reduce her already small stature further, Darcy Dog was tied to a post & working himself into a seizure of barking and excitement, with a small clutch of tourists pointing and whispering amongst themselves. 

Surveying this, and knowing this wonderful scene existed only because of my talent & skill, I reflected that I could laugh or cry, so I might as well laugh.  Step one was to assure Amy I was not mad, step two calm the hound down, then convince the tourists that while not usual operation, I had encountered these problems before & was quite capable of fixing it myself (“Nothing to see here, move along, move along”).  The last step was to find the longest, biggest piece of pipe I could lift, and use it as a 12’ pinch bar to lever the tramcar back up onto the tracks. 

Believe it or not, within twenty minutes we were back in business, with the car rolling merrily down the track, bearing a full load of trash, with nothing damaged aside from my pride.  And the lesson here?  I don’t know if a big enough lever can move the world, but it can make your humiliation less obvious.  Until you write about it in a blog, that is