 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday July 9, 2001 Volume III Number 28 |
FOCUS - Foundation of Sand
You can have all the power you need - a high performance engine, efficient carburetion, open exhaust, proper fuel mixture and a machined crankshaft, transmission and differential – a perfect power train. You can deliver torqued-up power to the rear wheels, but without traction, you aren’t going anywhere.
You may slip and slide, and spin and whine, and burn up fuel and smoke the rubber. But with all the sound and fury, you’re axle deep. And stuck. You might as well be in neutral.
It happens in snow and ice. Or on a slimy boat ramp. Or in slippery adobe mud. Or on a sandy beach. Or in the dry silt of a river bottom.
Traction is grip. It’s where the rubber meets the road. It means control. If you have traction, you’ll pull ahead. Make the turn. Come to a safe stop. Without it, well, you may as well cast your fate to the wind.
* * * * * *
Last week, Kevin and I got a rare Sunday afternoon to ourselves.
The girls were busy with a wedding shower. We’ve been sprucing up the house, trying to get it ready for the onslaught of visitors next month. So we decided to make a trip to the valley floor and gather up some river rock to enhance the garden.
Southern California is really a desert. The Pacific Ocean brings some moisture, and moderates the harsh extremes. But in summertime, the climate is hot and dry.
This year is no exception.
After lunch, we stopped by a rock quarry at the bottom of that valley, and encountered a trucker repairing his rig out in the shop. “Nope, the place is closed on Sunday,” he said. “If you want some of that rock you’ll have to come back tomorrow and talk to the foreman.”
We thanked him, and headed out for the gate.
As we made a turn, we noticed an old bridge crossing the dry river bottom, and a road off to the side. I turned to Kev and said, “Hey, should we go down there and see if we can find some of that rock on our own?”
“Will anyone mind?”
“Well… all they can do is tell us to leave,” I said. And Kev turned the truck over the bridge and down the dusty unpaved road.
Midwesterners laugh at us for calling them rivers. Rivers, to them, contain flowing water. Currents. But here in our world, a good part of the year, there is no water in the river. We sometimes call these meandering streams a “wash,” which is more descriptive. You can see where water has been; it leaves a trail. But this time of year, the bed usually is as dry as dust.
Through the centuries, for perhaps millennia upon millennia, rain has gathered over the hundreds of square miles inside the mountains and the hills building into streams and rivers then into torrents rolling toward the valley floor, and along the way boulders and rocks have tumbled down from the heights, bumping and grinding from the pull of gravity and the push of flowing currents, giving the rough granite smooth surfaces, from the size of oblong tennis balls to softballs to basketballs to beach balls, and even larger, littering the wash with chunks of granite smoothed out into stones made perfect for garden borders.
As Kevin and I crossed the bridge and looked up the valley floor, our eyes widened. It was a gardener’s dream. River rock in abundance, in every color in the rainbow. All of ‘em, looking for a home.
Kevin’s pickup truck stands high off the ground. It looks like four wheel drive, but isn’t. Down the unpaved side road, down to a hidden turnabout, a narrow trail dropped down into the riverbed, where some daring drivers, judging from the tracks left behind, had ventured down into the riverbed for some clandestine, and probably illegal, “off-roading.”
The rocks lay out there in the distance, just waiting for retrieval, and as Kevin pulled his truck right up to the edge, he asked, “Dad, should I go any further?”
I opened the door, walked ahead, down the trail, looked at the tracks up and down the river left by others who had come before, and said, “No problem, Kev. C’mon down.” And with that, I motioned him with my hand, waving it in a circle that any driver, or pilot for that matter, would recognize as the signal that said, “All Clear. Move on ahead.”
Gingerly, he put his machine into first gear, eased on the accelerator, and released the clutch, rolling forward. Then, as he hit the edge and the front end of his truck dropped over the steep slope, he disengaged the clutch and leaned on the brake, descending into the gray river bottom. As he rolled down, he gave it more gas, and accelerated onto the river floor. That’s when it occurred to the two of us that this might well have been a monumental mistake. An unfortunate error in judgment. A clear violation of common sense.
Kev felt the wheels dropping into the soft silt of the river bottom, and instinctively gunned the engine, spinning his oversized tires and kicking up the dust. The forward motion continued, and he managed to pull forward about twenty feet or so. I watched, and then asked myself… “is this thing a four wheel drive?” And of course, I knew the answer. No. “Posi-traction?” Probably not.
Kev looked at me, and without saying a word, I discerned his thoughts… I could read his mind. “DAD… what were you THINKING?? WHY did you guide me DOWN HERE? Into this SINKING SAND? HOW are we going to get this truck OUT OF HERE?”
Well, I was thinking. But by this time, I was thinking not so much about that beautiful river rock laying all around my feet. I was pondering the same questions that dominated Kevin’s thoughts.
That innocent looking river bottom consists of some of the driest, lightest silt known to humankind. As Kevin moved forward in his truck, the tires broke through the delicate crust and pushed the fluffy sand into a heap, effectively stopping the truck in its deepening tracks, and as the resistance on the front tires increased, the back tires began to slip and spin ineffectually, kicking up a cloud of river-bottom, and causing a father and son to wonder how an innocent outing might become so annoyingly derailed, and if, perhaps, we might just be imagining this awful predicament.
Kevin shut down the engine, and jumped out of his air-conditioned cab. We both walked around the truck, and inspected each of the four tires hoping somehow to find an easy solution.
Then Kevin looked up at his dad, me, once more, with the look of astonished disbelief in his eyes. And I, now sheepish, muttered something about how assessing blame would clearly be a waste of useful energy, and how we needed to turn our attention towards intelligent problem solving, and that perhaps with the sheer force of intention, we might achieve the impossible, and find a way of escape from the grip of river-bottom silt.
By this time, the sweltering heat took its toll. I began to sweat. As did Kev. We pushed and pulled. To no avail. Then we searched up and down the riverbed, looking for something that might give those two power wheels traction, but mostly we hoped that some little river-bottom relic might trigger the realization of a creative alternative that would save the day.
As we searched, we talked. “WHAT are all these TRACKS doing down here?” Well, if vehicles have made it in and out of the river, they must have been FOUR WHEELERS with ALL WHEEL DRIVE and BALLON TIRES and a shifter that’ll kick in on the fly. “DAD, IF we are lucky enough to find SOMEONE who will come down here, how in the world will THEIR TRUCK get the TRACTION it needs to PULL my truck OUT?” “Since the cell phone doesn’t get a signal, I wonder how far we’ll need to walk to find a pay phone?” “If we leave my truck here overnight, will my CD stereo still be in the dash when we get back?” These were very deep questions to ponder on a Sunday afternoon gone afoul.
I said, “Let’s keep lookin’, Kev.”
Across the river, we found what looked like a hundred year old walking bridge spanning the banks on either side. It was suspended under a pair of cables, and may well have served as a model for the Golden Gate. The two bolted two-by-twelves that made up the floor of the foot-bridge were rusted and weathered badly and on either end large signs warned “ABSOLULTELY NO ENTRY.” Towards the center, three or four sections had long since disappeared leaving a stretch in the center of the bridge wide open, pieces of lumber and steel dangling. And just below, we found a ten-foot flat board, weathered and dry, but, we both thought at once, might make a perfect short one-wheel roadway on the flimsy silt.
And give that truck traction.
It did.
But then we learned that posi-traction is an option worth paying for. With traction on one side on the old rugged board, all the power was transferred to the opposite rear wheel, and the spinning covered the two of us, now soaked in sweat mixed with a layer or two of river-bottom silt and sand, covered our hair and arms and faces and necks and open toe sandals. Grimy and gritty, we called it quits and started the long walk out of the river, up the bank, down the forbidden unpaved road back out to the bridge and across back toward the highway.
As we walked, we looked at one another and wondered out load what my wife and Kevin’s mother would say. We could both hear her voice. And then we prayed. We told God (as if He didn’t know) that we had tried everything, and we needed His help because we had basically run out of ideas. And then we walked along the highway across the bridge and as though we had discovered gold in those California hills, we squealed out loud together “THERE’S ANOTHER ROAD. ANOTHER WAY OUT.”
Up until that moment, we tried EVERYTHING to back the truck out the way we came in. But this alternate route allowed us to consider FORWARD motion, along the river-bottom, under the low highway bridge, up the far side a couple hundred yards to the pavement above.
One more time, we looked at each other, faces now streaked with silty sweat. “Ya think we can do it?” We walked the route, noting the hardness of the surface and the height of the bridge below.
“I think YOU should drive, Dad,” Kevin said. And I was surprised that he had any confidence left in my ability to do much of anything.
I took my seat behind the wheel. Revved up the truck. Kevin took his place at the rear of the truck bed on the bumper. I called out “READY?” Kev answered, “READY.” I hit the accelerator, easy-does-it, and Kevin pushed. In the rear view mirror, I could see the veins popping out of Kevin’s gritty sweat soaked neck. The truck began to move. Forward.
Kevin’s grunting shove turned into a run as the truck picked up speed over the river-bottom. Through the side mirrors, I saw sand flying from both rear wheel wells. But we were moving. And accelerating. I was headed straight for the low bridge. Because we checked the height, I knew we’d make it. To slow down would be to get stuck… again. So I just kept the pedal to the metal, swerving back and forth, engine whining, as I spotted Kevin, arms held high jumping and screaming, “GO DAD, GO!” Instinctively, I ducked as I pulled under the bridge (for no valid reason), and then peeled around a boulder picking up speed for the bank and I hit it hard. The front end banged upward, and without reservation, I floored it. Up the bank I flew, like slo-mo, airborne over the ridge on to high, hard ground, landing with a crash.
Bouncing on the suspension, I pulled out onto the highway over to the shoulder, and jumped out to the street and Kevin came behind in a full run. We ran toward each other and jumped high in a double high five and a belly laugh and a long dirty hug out there in the sun-baked valley outside the riverbed.
And in the desert we call Southern California, we felt a cool breeze.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. It’s summertime. You are a leader.
Sometimes, you say, “Yeah, let’s go for it,” and sometime later, you wish you hadn’t. You’re stuck. Traction is gone. Your wheels are spinning. The to-do list in your Day-Timer vanishes like a puff of smoke. You’re goin’ nowhere.
When I was young, they taught me that a wise man builds his house upon a rock. The foolish man builds his house upon the sand. The foolish man thinks he can drive his truck across the sand. He thinks it’s a shortcut. The quick and cheap way to load up on river rock for the garden. But instead of gathering decorative accents for the landscaping, you spend the rest of the day just trying to GET OUT.
Before you commit, think about the condition of the river-bottom. Before you venture out on a side trip, do your homework. Your due diligence. Your personal feasibility study.
Go ahead. Take risks. But take reasonable risks.
And if you do get into trouble, forget about the blame game. Put your efforts into problem solving. Solutions. Fix it. Don’t sit around pointing fingers. It’ll get you nowhere.
And when you put it in gear, be sure you have traction.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
|
|