Garage Rodeo

“Dave! Did you hear that? Can you feel the earth shaking?”

“It sounds like a spooked, slobbering horse,” Dave remarked nervously as he looked around the edge of the building we were standing next to. “Cripes! It’s getting louder. It’s coming this way!”

Bounding into view, tongue flopping out the side of her mouth, long hair covering her eyes, yipping gleefully was Mopsey, my sister Tricia’s English Sheepdog. She stopped and stood with her head up sniffing the air not more than twenty feet from us. It was obvious that the mop of hair over her eyes was preventing her from seeing us.

“Hey Mops, we’re over here,” I yelled.

“Huh?” she grunted, and she pranced over and buried her head in my lap for a back scratch.

Technically, Mopsey was just her nickname. Her full registered name was Lady Hairyhead Mopsalena; a name possibly given by the breeder to a grand champion, a dog at the top of her breed. The problem with naming dogs at birth is you can’t really be sure what they will grow up to be. Had the breeder known, the dog would have been called Lady Barksalot because Mopsey hated being locked in her kennel and protested the imprisonment by barking day and night. It was common in the early morning hours for me to raise the upstairs bedroom window and yell, “Mopsey, shut up!”

But this story isn’t about Mopsey.

Today, Dave and I were tasked with the job of tearing down an old wooden single-car garage that was on the property behind my mom’s home. The property, at the time, was inhabited by Elwood K Wayson, or “Swede”, as the locals called him.

Swede was my adopted grandfather. He was a woodsman, a spar pole setter, a lineman for the power company, a hunter/fisherman, and a man who imbibed on far too many bottles of Canadian Mist Whiskey. When my mom purchased his homes and property with the understanding that he could live in his home until he died, rent free, she also filled his bank account with a balance he had never seen before. Now Swede had the ability to buy whatever he wanted. And buy he did from the local gun store and the Montgomery Ward catalog. But it was the combination of catalog buying while being drunk on Canadian Mist that got him in trouble.

Swede wanted a 12’×18′ metal garage, so he bought one from the catalog. It came, and not having anywhere to erect it, it lay on the floor of his living room in its box. Then, a few years later, under the influence of the Mist and forgetting what was in the box in his living room, he ordered the exact same metal garage again. So now he had two which he had no idea what to do with.

But this story isn’t about Swede.

The old wooden garage was falling down. Mom wanted it torn down and replaced with one of the two metal garages in Swede’s living room. Dave was an all-around handyman and one of my best friends. Mom had hired him for many small jobs around Swede’s house. Today we were trying to decide the quickest way to tear the old structure down.

Dave, by the way, was in on many of my adventures, all of which ended in disaster.

There was that time that we took his car out to the airport one snowy night, and I had him pull me in my inner tube down the taxiway behind his car with a long rope.  He got me swinging side-to-side and I hit a signpost. When he got out to check on me, I was covered with snow so deep that it looked like he had been towing an igloo. Luckily, I was so frozen, I hardly even felt the goose egg on my forehead. Oh, I’ve got a million stories.

“Well, my suggestion would be to take the roof off first. Then we can use a sledgehammer and bust the walls down. There is nothing salvageable in that building,” Dave said.

“Or,” I said. “If it’s so unstable, we could just wrap a tow strap around one of the roof rafters, attach the other end to Swede’s Dodge Ram trailer hitch, put the truck in four-wheel drive, and pull it down. We take what we can’t burn to the dump and burn the rest. Easy peasy! And, just to make it exciting, I’m going to climb up on the peak and ride the garage to the ground while you pull it over. Garage Rodeo.”

“Garage rodeo?” Dave asked with a questioning look on his face.

“Yeah. What could go wrong?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, you might end up with a rafter up your backside,” he smirked.

“No! It will be fun. Let’s do it,” I assured him with a great deal of confidence.

We located a long strap and attached it to a rafter at the front of the garage. The other end was attached to the hitch on Swede’s pickup. Then, we rounded up the audience. I brought a lawn chair out onto the front yard and helped Swede out of the house to give him a front row seat. He sat with a glass of the Mist in hand. My sister Tricia came over with the camera to record the event in case there was a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for “riding a building to the ground.” My mom even came out with sobbing pleas for me not to do it. It was very much like Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon. Lastly, I dropped the tailgate and Mopsey jumped in the bed for a ringside seat. I knew she was having a good time by the way she was grinning, and her tongue was dripping slobber all over the truck bed.

Then, climbing a ladder, I mounted the garage and straddled the peak like a rodeo rider straddling a brahma bull.

“Pull her down Dave,” I yelled. Mopsey barked with enthusiasm. I screamed, “Yee, haw!” and swung my hand in the air.

Dave, with the Dodge in four-wheel drive, revved the engine and put the transmission in low gear. The truck moved forward, the strap tightened, the tires spun in the gravel and the garage leaped off the old foundation and onto the driveway. But instead of collapsing in a big pile, it stayed intact.

To the casual motorist traveling down Marine Drive that day, it must have been quite a sight: a pickup pulling a garage down a driveway with someone straddling the peak waving his arms like a bronco buster while a shaggy English Sheepdog happily barked in the back bed having the time of her life.

In the end, it was a lot like Evel Knievel’s jump. A real fizzle.

We ended up tearing the structure down the hard way. Then, we spent a week putting together a metal building for a new garage. In the end, Swede was very happy for two reasons: first he had a new house for his Dodge, and second, he had one less boxed garage in his living room.

And that’s what this story is about!

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