Pushing past obstacles

The name of the road should have given us a clue.
But we were clueless.
It was about a week ago. We were in southern New Hampshire for a family vacation at a rustic cabin that has been in my wife’s family for nearly 100 years.
The major attraction this summer was getting to spend more time with our new grandson; and when his mother asked for a little time off so she could get some work done, grandmother and grandfather quickly agreed.
It started with a trip to a playground near the public beach at the lake. We tried out the swings and explored the picnic area, then took a walk around some wetlands with the baby in his stroller.
That’s when we made our fateful decision.
We’ve always wanted to take a drive all the way around the lake. The road shows on most maps, but we’d never checked it out.
The name should have given us a clue: Brimstone Corner Road.
In retrospect, that sounds appropriately ominous.
But at the time, it looked like a harmless jaunt.
The baby was asleep and continued to snooze when we transferred him to the car seat. Connie rode with him in the back seat of her Honda CRV while I drove.
All went well at first. It was a dirt road, not a crushed stone road like in the Midwest but literally dirt, granite bedrock, and pine needles. But it was flat and passable.
We tooled along, checking out the Girl Scout camp on our left and a few cabins and remote camps on our right.
This part of New England was all cleared at one point for farming, but the fields yielded more rocks than crops and the farmland returned to forest several generations ago. All that remains are stone walls marking property lines from abandoned farms that are now thick woods.
And there are bears in these woods.
The land to our left sloped down toward the lake; the trees to our right climbed up a steep hillside.
And then the road changed.
At one point, near an old farmhouse that may or may not have been deserted, the flat, graded surface became more like a rough lane leading back around a bend. There were two tracks for our wheels, which seemed good enough.
About half a mile further, the road had changed again. And there was literally no going back.
Forest and stone walls squeezed in from both sides, and the road ahead of us looked more and more like a creekbed than a route that should be traveled.
By now, we knew we’d made a tremendous mistake. But we also knew there was nothing to do but keep going. There was no place to turn around, and it would have been impossible to navigate the rocks and boulders in reverse.
So we pushed on.
The CRV rocked and bucked as we crept along. I struggled to make out the safest route through the stones in the dappled sunlight. And if the rocks weren’t enough, there were also fallen trees across our path that had to be negotiated.
It had been a wet spring, and my biggest fear — along with a flat tire, a punctured gas tank, and other assorted mechanical difficulties — was that we might get stuck in the mud. Once or twice we had to ford through water without knowing its depth.
But we kept going.
Finally, with both of us running out of expletives and exhausted from kicking ourselves for taking this road, the surface smoothed out. We were still in the backwoods, but we saw signs of civilization.
Ahead of us, trotting along without a care in the world, were a couple of wild turkeys. I identified with the one on the left.
And our grandson? He slept through the whole thing, rocked to sleep by an unplanned bit of off-roading through the wilderness.[[In-content Ad]]