Old West Tales: Over the River and Through the Woods
Peter B. Steiger
12/02/97

One of our family traditions is to go to a live tree farm and cut
our own Christmas tree the first weekend after Thanksgiving each
year.  I guess this is my wife's answer to my complaints that every
time we use too much paper without recycling it, "we might as well
just cut down a tree of our own."

In Houston and Dallas, this project was pretty time-consuming
because all the tree farms are outside of the nearest small town.
That doesn't sound like such a big deal except that it takes about
8 hours just to drive from one side of Houston to the other, and
for the next 80 miles there are still large cities by normal
states' standards.  So there's a bit of a drive before you get to
the nearest small town.

This year, I knew it would be different - we're already living in
the least populated, most rural state in the galaxy, so I figured
there wouldn't be much more to finding a tree farm than driving to
the outskirts of town, which, in Cheyenne, takes about 18 seconds.

No, of course it wouldn't be that easy or I wouldn't have something
to write about.  Apparently the Christmas tree farmers' union got
together in a secret meeting and vowed to place their farms as far
away from wherever we were living as possible.  We STILL had to
drive to the nearest small town.

Ahhhh, you say, but Wyoming is full of small towns.  There are
places that manage to show up on the map with populations of less
than 10.  Yes, but there must be some state law requiring towns to
be at least a full gas tank apart from one another.  So we still
had to drive over an hour to get to the nearest Christmas tree
farm.

We had some car trouble on Saturday, so on Sunday we left my car at
the church so it would be a "closer" backup vehicle (by all of 15
miles out of the 87 ahead of us) in case Sylvia's car gave us more
trouble.  Off we went, the kids drawing up battle plans and
calculating odds for the inevitable back-seat fights while I read a
contemporary description of what Wyoming is like today.  Well, OK,
I'm reading Owen Wister's _The Virginian_, set 100 years ago, but
take my word for it - the state and the people haven't changed
much.

Lest anyone think this is just another 24-page complaint, I should
add that we saw some of the countryside that we haven't seen
before, and it was pretty impressive if you like the scenery in old
Roadrunner cartoons.  Towering mesas that look like God used a
lathe to shape the mountains into furniture legs, and equally vast
canyons rippling through the otherwise barren desertlike plains.
Either eastern Wyoming has some spectacular features or we took a
wrong turn and ended up driving through the Grand Canyon by
mistake... and I'm not ruling that possibility out.

Well, we got to Torrington and Sylvia told us to start watching for
a giant Santa Claus.  Yeah, right. I wasn't sure it was wise to
encourage these weird hallucinations of hers, but we started
watching the road while she buzzed along, muttering "I know there's
a giant Santa Claus here.  I just know it!"

You'll probably think I'm exaggerating when I say she kept this up
until we passed the sign saying "Welcome to Nebraska!" but I'm not.
Oh, well, I've never been to Nebraska before so it was a novelty to
see all of 24 feet of it before Sylvia screeched on the brakes,
whipped the car around, and headed off in the other direction.

By now our hunt for the giant Santa was getting desperate:  We had
left home just after lunch, sure that we'd have plenty of time to
get to Torrington, find a tree, and head back in time for the tree-
decorating festivities at the church that evening.  Now it was
getting late, and our giant Santa was nowhere to be found.

Clear on the opposite side of town we found him, laughing at our
navigational antics.  The site owners, unaware of our destructive
moods, unwittingly armed us with a sturdy saw and sent us driving
along the edge of their Christmas tree forest.

Of course on an adventure like this you don't just stop at the
first tree you see and cut it down.  We drove past several rows
of spruce and pine trees and down a side lane.  That's when things
started to get interesting.  Down the side lane we saw a truck head
off right into the middle of the trees, through a rough aisle
between the rows.  We took off after him... only to find that this
was NOT an actual road in the sense that it was safe for wheeled
vehicles.  Wherever there weren't deep holes, there were stumps
from trees cut in previous years.  The rest of the journey down
that aisle was helpful in dislodging several loose teeth, and the
car ceiling now has a nice pattern of dents in the shape of my head.

In any event, we finally pulled over near a likely-looking prospect
and had a closer look. It turned out to be much too big, but as long
as we were out of the car we went ahead and walked among the trees
looking for that perfect tree (as everyone knows, out of 768,000
trees on the lot there's only one that's really right for you).

Well, that bunch of trees didn't have what we wanted so we went
across the road to look at the other trees nearby.  That's when
I screamed the first of many screams of pain.

This is as good a place to explain our choices of footwear.  I
don't know what the others were thinking, but since I couldn't find
my one pair of boots, I wasn't about to tear up my only intact pair
of sneakers tramping around a forest so I grabbed an old pair of
sneakers full of holes that I meant to throw out weeks ago.  I mean
I was going to throw out the sneakers, not the holes.  What none of
us were expecting was the Invasion of the Burrs.  You know those
little round balls of spikes that stick to your clothes?  These
weren't the tiny, soft spikes that are a nuisance but easy to
remove.  These were hard, huge balls with spikes that must have
been made of sharpened steel.  There were millions of them in this
part of the field, and every one of them went for the holes in my
shoes.  Some of them even went THROUGH the soles of my shoes and I
ended up hopping around, grabbing my feet in pain and wailing in my
misery.  Soon Sylvia joined the chorus.  The kids had better sense
than we did; Daniel had on a sturdy pair of boots and Irene was
wearing her tough leather shoes.

We quickly abandoned our search in that area and hobbled back to
the car, where we spent the better part of 17 hours picking burrs
off our clothes and shoes.  I never did finish.  Sylvia finally got
in the car and started driving slowly along, while I sat like a
grotesque hood ornament, scraping acres of burrs out of my shoes
and muttering curses as we drove past astonished families.  I guess
that's not quite the Christmas parade they were expecting.

We came to the sudden realization that the trees right alongside
the road are just as good as the ones hidden deeper in the grove,
so in the now-fading light of the evening we stopped next to the
first thing that vaguely resembled a tree and I went after it with
the saw... or rather I tried to.  By luck, we had found one that
was actually quite full all the way around - so full I couldn't
FIND the trunk to begin cutting.  With my fresh memory of the
painful attack of the burrs, I covered as much exposed flesh as I
could and crawled in among the branches.  I must have displaced
several major ecosystems in my struggle, but eventually I found
what must have been the trunk and began hacking away, only
sometimes ripping through flesh and clothing with the saw.

It's great to finally have a house big enough that we can get a
huge tree to put in the living room.  It's great that we found a
huge tree that was so fully packed with branches.  What a shame we
had only the trunk of an '88 Celebrity in which to carry this tree
home for the next 97 miles.  Well, Sylvia and I managed to wedge
the tree in at least enough that it could stay put long enough to
get it to the checkout stand.  As we pulled up, I couldn't help but
notice that all the other cars were out ahead of us, and I'm pretty
sure one of the tree lot attendants was saying to his partner, "Can
you believe there are still some idiots out there looking for a
tree in the dark?  Oh, hello..." this last directed at me as we
drove our back-heavy car up to the place where they measure your
tree and stuff it into a sack (I was half expecting him to ask
"plastic or paper?")

It was a treat watching these guys take our tree, about 19 feet
tall and 15 feet wide, and stuff it through this contraption that
squeezes it into a string wrapper 4 inches in diameter. I'm still
convinced they have some kind of teleport into another dimension.
Anyway, it made it possible for me to stuff most of the tree into
the trunk and lash the trunk lid down over it before I limped back
to the car, still picking the last few burrs out of my body.

Well, it was late but at least we had a good tree and there was
nothing to stop us from getting home.  We might even manage to
catch the last half of the tree-decorating party at the church.
We barrelled off into the night, admiring the lights on the houses
we passed and singing every verse of every Christmas carol.

I'll spare the details of our joyous return trip and instead
introduce a quick math lesson.  The tree farm was about 6 miles
outside Torrington, which is about 85 miles from Cheyenne, and
we're 10 miles south of Cheyenne.  Let's see... 85+6+10=101.
101 miles * 2 = 202 miles for the round trip.  Now, Sylvia's tank
holds about 12 gallons, and gets maybe 15 miles to the gallon (I
said we were having car trouble, remember?).

Somewhere in the middle of a "Fa la la", Sylvia stopped singing and
got real quiet.  I said something like "I wonder how long the party
will last?"  She said "I wonder how much farther it is to Cheyenne."

Back in April when we ran low on gas at 4:30 AM between small towns
in Colorado, I took the wheel and drove on faith that we'd make it
to a town with gas stations before our 1/8th of a tank ran out.
I'm convinced that a constant stream of prayer did the job.  Once
again I turned my eyes and thoughts heavenward for help - we were a
good 30 miles from Cheyenne and had past the nearest town at least
20 miles back.  We made it another 10 miles before the car stopped
halfway up a steep hill, and that was that.

That's when it started getting really, really cold.

It was also dinnertime, and all we could find to eat was a
nearly-empty tin of salted cashews and a nearly-empty tin of
cookies.  As if that weren't bad enough, I had finished my last
Diet Coke several miles earlier.

Now what, I started to wonder, and that's when I got an answer to
all the messages I had been leaving on God's answering machine.
"You again?  What, you want I should get out and push like I did
last time?  Look, you've got a cell phone in one hand and the AAA
card in another.  Let THEM handle it this time."

What a relief!  We owe Sylvia's dad a big favor - we had been
meaning to get AAA for years but never got around to it, and he
got tired of waiting and just signed us up himself before we moved.
Now the only problem was getting through to them when there was a
big hill between us and Cheyenne.  Sylvia got through and managed
to tell them our location before we got cut off again, so she sent
me trudging up the hill to see if I could get a better connection.
On my way up the phone started ringing.  They were calling us back!
I fumbled for the phone to answer it, but quickly ran into several
more complications in rapid succession:  (1) I didn't have a clue
how to answer the phone; (2) Even if I did I couldn't hit the
buttons correctly through glove fingers the size of Montana;
(3) Even if I knew which buttons to press and could press them
accurately, I couldn't SEE the stupid things because the light on
the phone kept going out and I couldn't even see my hands, much
less the phone, much less any buttons on it.

Somehow I managed to pound the one button that I knew would take
the phone off the hook - the SEND button.  Wouldn't you know, that
breaks the current connection and starts dialing?  That wasn't in
itself all bad, since the last number dialed was to AAA, but
somehow between trying to answer the incoming call and punching
SEND and walking back down that hill, I got cross-connected with
some kind of party line.  For several minutes we all yelled "Hello?
Hello?" back and forth at each other until I gave up and hit the
END button.

Well, Sylvia got things straightened out - that's why I keep her
around - and we sat there in the dark, gradually adding more and
more layers of clothing as we got colder.  Every pair of headlights
that came over the hill we wondered if it could be the AAA guys.

Just about the time we finished off the last of the cashews, one
pair of headlights slowed down and suddenly was joined by
alternating red and blue lights.  The truck turned around and
parked behind us, and Sylvia had a nice chat with the AAA guy who
had 2 gallons of joy juice.  The whole thing cost us exactly $3,
which sure beats the $942 it would cost to have the car towed in.

Not surprisingly, we didn't have the energy to go back to the
church where we "conveniently" left my car; we pulled in to the
nearest restaurant and gorged ourselves, then headed home and
straight to bed.

We're home safe and sound, the car has a full tank of gas, and the
Christmas tree is still in its little rope baggie waiting for me to
find the tree stand in the 117 boxes we still haven't unpacked from
the move.