This year, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, I spent the first portion of our trip yelling, "There goes the 1%!" at the crazy drivers (mostly with California license plates) in downtown Ketchum. I did this from the safety of our own car, where no one could actually hear me, and from the pedestrian crosswalks whenever a car, with its windows completely rolled up, tried to run me over. I say "in solidarity" meaning that it was my way of showing support without actually doing anything.
Then, on the afternoon of our anniversary, December 20, 2011, Dan and I were rescued by the 1%.
Dan had left his skis at Galena Lodge after a morning of cross-country skiing. Neither one of us had realized this until we were halfway back to Ketchum via Highway 75. As soon as the way was clear, Dan made a nice, neat U-turn. Or we thought it was neat until he hit a patch of ice, which must have been invisible to the naked eye. We ended up trapped in a snowbank on the side of the road. I should say I ended up in a snowbank because it was the passenger side that was actually trapped by the snow. Dan flipped on the four-wheel drive and tried to gun it out of the ditch but to no avail. We were stuck.
"Should I crawl to the other side? You know, distribute the weight?" I asked.
Dan looked at my five-foot-two-and-a-half frame.
"I don't think it would make much difference."
I have never worried about getting stuck because I am a proud, card-carrying member of AAA. I have been ever since my mother sent me off to college and somehow predicted that I would need several rescues (mostly due to the dome light in my '93 Hyundai Excel being left on overnight). But alas, there was no cell service in the Sawtooths on December 20, 2011.
Dan decided he would walk down to the Sawtooth National Recreational Area (SNRA) Headquarters to make a phone call.
"Do you want to go or just stay here?" he asked me.
Recollections of news stories about husbands and wives splitting up and disappearing and/or dying in the snow-capped mountains, followed by visions of a crazy man murdering me flooded my mind.
"I'll go with you, but I'm not sure how to get out of the car."
Did I mention I was almost sitting parallel with ground? That is how tilted the car was, by the way. If I had opened the door, I probably would have been suffocated by snow. (Dan just accused me of exaggerating. I just informed him that hyperbole is a common literary device.)
As I unbuckled my seat belt and crawled across to the driver's side, a Blaine County Parks and Recreation vehicle drove up, and the gracious worker offered to head to SNRA and call AAA for us. She couldn't give us a ride because she had too many dogs in her pickup. (I love Idaho.)
We were in the midst of giving her our information when a few vacationers stopped. Pretty soon, we had four different groups of people who were willing to help us. One even had a tow rope, and another had a CB.
The men set to work attaching the tow rope.
"So what's the best way to go about doing this?" Dan asked, always the engineer.
"I'm not sure. This is the first time I've ever had to use it," the gentleman said, crouching down by his vehicle's hitch.
Within a matter of minutes, we were out of the snow bank. My liberal side hates to admit it, but I was grateful for SUVs that day, despite all the damage they do to our environment (although, our 4x4 didn't do us much good).
Dan and I shook the vacationers' and recreation worker's hands, thanking them profusely.
"Next time, I won't let him do a U-turn on the highway," I said to our saviors with a nervous laugh and a wave goodbye.
And we were back on our way down Highway 75. The whole ordeal only took forty minutes, all because a handful of friendly northwestern vacationers were willing to stop and help a couple of desperate thirty-somethings.
Dan spent the rest of the day deep in thought, his brow furrowed.
"Don't feel bad," I said. "I do stupid stuff all the time. And nobody treated us like we were stupid. They just acted like getting stuck is par for the course for people who play in the mountains."
I waited. Dan sighed but didn't respond.
"I wasn't very witty or sarcastic," I continued. "In fact, we both stayed surprisingly calm. Maybe I should have been funnier. Maybe I should have made more jokes about being rescued by the 1%."
"Thank you for being a good wife," Dan finally said.
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