The stump
Have you ever been to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri
in mid-February? The weather can be best described as spontaneous, at
best. Mother Nature must have been on her period or something because
she decided to give us one of the worst ice storms in the past decade
last Thursday, causing the entire post to shut down and my wife not
having to go to work. She woke me up out of my usual hangover state at
about 0600 saying she didn’t have to go to work and that “YAY IT’S A
FUCKEN SNOW DAY!!!” This was odd behavior since my wife is NOT a morning
person; like most non-morning people her ferocity and attitude
resembles the freshly awakened Kraken and this newly found glee
was….bewildering.
Wife: LET’S GO GET SLEDS AND MATERIALS TO MAKE SMORES!
ME : …….oh god, WHY?!…please kill me and/or give me hydration through whatever means necessary…
So after moseying around for about 2 hours we suit
up and head out to the PX, sliding around on the road trying not to
collide with stationary objects. We get to the PX and the entire
Wallmart sized parking lot is empty and the PX is obviously CLOSED. I of
course yell out “LETS DO SOME FUCKEN DONUTS!!” The old lady gives me
one of her sideways questioning looks and complies. After we have our 2
minutes of sliding around on the ice we start heading out of the parking
lot and she says “Oh FUCK!” There is an expensive looking SUV waiting
by the exit we are headed to, almost as if they were going to stop us
and ask us WTF we were doing. This wouldn’t be a big deal, BUT we are on
the cop factory that is FT Leonard Wood so for all we know it could
have been a General or Command Sergeant Major waiting to ask us “WHY THE
FUCK WE THOUGHT IT WAS OK TO DO DONUTS IN THEIR PARKING LOT?!” So we
immediately braked, dropped it in reverse and went out the other exit
and headed to the conglomerate known as Wallmart.
Everyone
knows that Wallmart is like the post office in terms of it always being
open no matter the weather, not the whole “shoot everyone since the
mail NEVER stops thing”. We get to Wallyworld and it is the usual crowd
of average Americans and drug addicts caveated with the land beast that
requires a scooter to get around. The staff is its usual unhelpful self
when we ask for the location of their sleds, so we spend about an hour
wandering around the labyrinth that is Wallmart until we randomly
stumble upon some plastic sledding discs hidden like Easter eggs in the
gardening section. After we add the wintery treasures to our basket, we
come upon the cookie section and I see a pack of “Golden Oreos”. This
displeases me immediately, making an Oreo not black and white should be a
crime against god, and I displayed this opinion via yelling loudly “WTF
IS THIS?! Why in fucks sake would they make this freak albino Oreo? The
only possible reason I could think of this being appealing to anyone, is if the clan is having a meeting and they want to really hit home with the whole whites only
thing.” Some random dude in the isle with us laughs out loud which only
feeds my audible humor; my wife retorts with her usual “you’re
ridiculous!” tone of voice and comments, and I of course ignore her the
best I can, which is a hard feat since we are holding hands.
Now, I am the kind of
person who deals with low blood sugar as well as a person deals with
having a bear trap on their genitals, sooooooo of course being awakened
from my hangover-slumber with zero food or hydration in my body, I was
not in the best of moods. Of course this Wallmart doesn’t have a
McDonald’s, but instead a Subway… like every other person who watches
daytime TV I know that Subway has been advertising their “5 dollar foot
long for any samich in this month.” Fun fact: I FUCKING LOVE SUBWAY.
Hence when I sprinted to it and discovered the banner displaying their
5$ foot long, WITH FUCKING FINE PRINT stating that it was on offer only
available when the planets align and the sun happens to eclipse the
moon, I was rather upset. The smell of cooking chicken flesh grabs my
attention and draws me to the deli where the cook who gave off the vibe
of “old, creepy, and eats/cooks people like he does the chicken he is
selling.” My low blood sugar self doesn’t care. I don’t care so much
that I can’t even remember what happened after that; the next thing I
know me and the wife are driving in the ice storm and I say
“I
literally would step on a human baby for some Taco bell right about
now.”
Since my wife Is a good person she naturally scoffs at me and says
“well, there is a fuckin Taco bell RIGHT there..” I basically grab the
steering wheel and yank it towards T-bell. Next thing I know I am
wolfing down some cheesy gordita crunches and trying to get out my ID to
get on post, ignoring the gate guards judging stares as I inhale my
delicacy like a starving cat eating its dead owners face.
It is now about 10ish
in the morning. The ice storm is raging outside and I am watching it
since I have never really seen anything like it before. Our dogs had
escaped our fence enclosure the week before, so like our furrowed brow
ancestors, I searched the area behind our house for rocks or whatever
large objects I could patch up the hole with, and came upon a large
stump about 100 meters from our house. My artistic/ manly side
immediately took over and told me that “I MUST HAVE THIS.” visions of
turning this wood into manly outside barbeque art rush my brain and I
inspect my newly found treasure. I am mainly inspecting it for things
that I am used to finding under a stump like, 6 foot rattlesnakes, big
ass poisonous spiders or a family of field mice; upon finding none of
these things I drop into dead lift position and literally rip the stump
out of the ground. No, that is not exaggeration, years of lifting
tractor tires in Crossfit style workouts has trained me for this EXACT
scenario. However, once I have invaded my neighbors personal space and
successfully ripped this stump out of the ground, I now have to figure
out how I am going to move 500 pounds of dead wood conjoined with clay
and rocks to my backyard. Obviously I try to drag it like an
uncooperative dog, and am met with a little thing called physics and
lack of strength. Expletives are shouted without a single fuck given
while the neighbors stare out their windows in wonder. I consider
shouting “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?” but instead I feebly try to move
the stump but only amount to about flipping it a measly 5 feet in 20
minutes.
Obviously brute force will only take
me so far, so I stomp through the ice, dragging about a bucket of it
inside and onto my carpet while doing so. I equip some 550 cord and my
large Buck knife into my pockets and tell my wife “I’m doing MAN stuff
outside!” well, more grunt it than anything, to be honest. I wrap the
1/8 inch wide 550 cord around the massive stump and try to pull it like a
cave man would a fresh carcass back to his cave, but with zero
movement. Of course I try this same process over and over and over again
until my hands ache from the strain and just throw the rope on the
ground and head back inside for plan “C”.
ME: Where’s your keys?!
WIFE: the fuck should I know? I think that I left them on the counter, and what do you need my keys for?”
I explain briefly that
I am trying to drag a stump from the woods behind our house so I can
transform it into a badass side table for our future BBQ area. She is
supportive of my endeavor and tells me that “it’s my project and she
won’t judge me.” I say something I can’t remember and grab my freshly
bought sledding disc and some tow straps and drop her aged rav4
into low and drive through my neighbor’s side yard into the woods
behind my house. Have you ever tried to do something that requires
backing up into an object when it is ice storming outside? It’s safe to
say that I had to stop and get out to make sure it was “just right” at
least 7 times. After inching up to the stump, I finally hook it and
slowly start dragging…..then….SNAP! After about 3 feet of dragging, the
FUCKING tow strap ripped, the scene from bad boys 2 plays in my head
were Martin Lawrence says: “shit just got real.”
I yell more obscenities at the inanimate object and re-wrap it with an
extra strap and start slowly tugging it with the
truck…slowly…slower….EVEN SLOWER…and finally I make it as close as I can
to my back yard without having to plow through my
neighbor’s house.
The cursed stump is still about 20 feet from my
backyard so I try to drag it He-man style into the yard (if a truck can
do it, I surely can!) 2 problems instantly arise: 1) the stump is still
about 500 pounds. And 2) it is now an uphill drag into the yard. A
mixture of testosterone and genetic inclination to manual labor fuel my
urge to succeed; I get a good 10 feet until my body tells me that its
had enough of this pursuit. I consider just lighting it on fire and
burning it for its sin of pissing me off, whilst drinking a good scotch
and watching it burn from the comfort of my house; I decide that the
fire department throwing elegant terms like arson, or destruction of
property at me wouldn’t quite be worth it.
5 days go by. It was a “back day” caveated with
some Crossfit style exercises for cardio, so I was feeling pretty pumped
when I got home around 0800 from the gym. As routine, I let my dogs out
to piss and bark to wake up the neighbors, and there it still was,
taunting me, my white whale, The Stump.
“GIRLS! INSIDE! CAGE!” They give me a confused
puppy look, heads turned slightly with a small whimper. Back when I was
still living in CA I had to always cut our own firewood since we had one
of those old 1940’s style heating ovens in our living room; being the
clumsy 13-19 year old that I was, I would ALWAYS break our
axes/sledgehammers. After getting my ass chewed by my old man about 40
times I got creative and made my own, it was like an ax and a
sledgehammer had a baby for the head, and for the shaft it was just a
solid steel rectangular bar that I slid the head over and bolted in with
some washers and lug nuts; My old Operation Sergeant Major called it a
“maul”. Anyways, I rushed to my man cave and grabbed it, along with a
hatchet and some heavy duty gloves; I felt like the dad from the shining
and probably had the same insane look on my face as I started to hack
at it.
There is a street about 50 yards from
where I was doing this with a house that always has a woman sitting
outside, smoking I assume, or maybe just trying to get some peace and
quiet from her kids; she was out there as I was hacking at the stump and
grunting like Mel Gibson upon seeking vengeance for his freshly slain
son in the Patriot. This goes on for about 10 minutes
before my hands give out and I decide to try and fit it on my wife’s
sled disc. I flip it over onto the disc and hear a crack. I hope/pray
that it was just the stump, it budges about 8 inches and I just say fuck
it and flip it towards the house, covering myself in mud and sleet in
the process. I look down and see my wife’s disc cracked into about 6
pieces, I sigh and throw the sled at the trash, pick up my maul and
whack the side of the stump. Instant regret is what follows
that decision, my ill-conceived action causes a piece of the perfectly
flat and round top to chip off now making the stump top about 5/6th of its former size.
I drop my maul in the snow, shocked in utter
disbelief and frozen in indecision of what to do next. The “arson” thing
started to rapidly gain favoritism in my mind until I looked down at
the stump and noticed that with the right paint, I could make it look
like a big ass squid eyeball or some shit. I flip it two more times and
my blood sugar and low glycogen levels insist that I stop and go consume
3000 calories of raw meat and beer. The stump is still out there, I
can’t tell if I am waiting for it to get lighter or if I’m waiting to
get stronger.
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