A Visit to the Cabin

       

    The summer I turned 16 Uncle David, Aunt Melba and my cousins Laurie and Howard came down from Oregon for a visit.  Grandma and Grandpa were up at the cabin, so they decided to drive up to see them there.  Laurie and I were the same age, and although we never saw each other we were friends.  So they invited me to come up to the cabin with them.

            Aunt Melba didn’t really enjoy the trip very much.  Once we got on the dirt road she began complaining, and she about had a fit when we drove over Fisherman’s point.  Uncle David had a really nice car, but it was very big.  At Fisherman's Point the road is extremely narrow, and it seemed like the passenger side of the car was scraping the hillside, while the driver’s side was almost hanging over the side of the cliff. 

"You're too close to the mountain," she complained, until Uncle David pointed out that he was driving right on the edge of the cliff as it was.  Then Aunt Melba moaned about him being to close to the edge.  It would have been funny if I hadn't been sitting on the driver’s side of the car, looking down into nothing but space, and wondering if there really was enough road under our left tires to keep us up on the mountain.

That night Laurie and I slept on the old fold-down couch in the main room of grandma and grandpa’s cabin.  It wasn’t very comfortable, and we had a hard time getting to sleep.  All night long we were awakened by the sound of mice running back and forth on the tin roof above our heads. 

            “It sounded like the mice were having motorcycle races up there,” Aunt Melba declared, the next morning.  "There must have been a whole army of them on the roof!"

            Later that afternoon we were pounded by a thunderstorm as we drove back home to Mesa. 

I had never heard such loud thunder, and lightening seemed to be striking all around us.  I was really frightened as we drove through the pouring rain, but this time Aunt Melba wasn’t even worried.

            “A car is the safest place you can be in a lightening storm,” she assured us.  “If lightening hits a car it will travel right through to the tires which are made of rubber, so it won’t hurt anything.  Just make sure you don’t touch any metal if we get struck.”

            I felt a little better after that, but I wasn’t sure how you knew what was metal and what wasn’t in a car.   Could you touch the door?  The door handle?  The steering wheel?