Tag Archive for 'new years'

I've thought for awhile about what I should write about in my first post of the new year. I could discuss Christmas in Arkansas or my family's celebration in North Carolina. I might talk about the books I've read (Pride and Prejudice and Shadow Puppets), the shows I've watched (mainly House), the movies I've watched (Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Solaris, I,Robot), or the games I've played (backgammon, 10,000, or LOTR Trivial Pursuit). Or there's always the frustrations of those graduate school applications and online systems that don't do what they're supposed to when you need them to. But all of that aside, there's one thing I must share. It's 27 December 2005 and my family and I are in the rental car, driving from The Middle Of Nowhere, Twenty Miles From Any Form Of Civilization™ to the airport. (Incidentally, the name of the airport is Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, but for some reason that remains unfathomable to me, it's typically called the Fayetteville airport. Here's the bit I don't get: the airport is in Benton County. Fayetteville is not. The crews that fly there are completely unaware of the fact that the place they have landed is not Fayetteville, Arkansas. I swear that I will never understand this.) We're somewhere between Hunstville and Springdale, zooming down the two-lane highway. As we go past, we get only a glimpse, but this, ladies and gentlemen, is a sight that screams redneck more than a car on ciderblocks in the front yard and an unnatural obsession with duct tape ever will. The chassis of a car was sitting on the front lawn, which was naturally strewn with many items that the rest of the world would term junk. Several men were standing around the chassis--as I was going by at 50 mph, I didn't get much of a look at them, but you can use your imaginations here. Hanging above the chassis and the men was the swinging red body that comprised the remainder of the vehicle. There was nothing really odd about the scene until you realized how the car body was hanging there. It was winched up in a tree. Yes, the car was hanging from a tree branch. I almost had my dad turn around so that we could get a picture. It was just that incredible. People love to ask me where I'm from, not out of some kind of perverse desire to pain me, but because it's a pretty standard question that's supposed to have an easy answer. I don't have an easy answer. And with people from my state of birth hanging car bodies from tree branches, I can't say that they're getting any kind of advantage over my other answer options. I would be a very, very different person today, I imagine, if we hadn't left Arkansas when I was thirteen and barely been back since. I'd still like to think that I would have never gone near a car winched into a tree, though.