DRIVING
at

If you thought you were brave enough to live at the Barn, you had to first face... The Driveway from Hell! Actually, you also had to face it just to visit, unless you were one of the people who elected to walk, carpool, or not visit on account of The Beast.

The driveway was so bad at times that we gave names to a few different sections. The most notorious was "The Ice Swamp", a flat section near the landlord's house where the landlord's pond would drain across the driveway in what was at times a small stream, freezing into icy, slushy pools up to a foot deep. It appeared to us that the stream had originally flowed underneath the driveway through a pipe, and that frost heaves or repeated wear had shifted the pipe too high for its job. The whole situation seemed to be a mystery to the landlords, and one that caught them by surprise every year.

Another part of the driveway bad enough to earn a name was "The Glacier", the not-too-steep hill between the landlord's house and the Barn. Despite the slight incline, the hill became impassible at times from the combination of a 90 degree turn at the base and a solid sheet of ice on the driveway. Going down was not always much easier: the sharp right turn at the base (with a steep dropoff into a gully to the left) was the spot where a good portion of the 180 degree skids on the driveway happened.

The very worst part of the driveway in terms of driving difficulty had no name, but if we'd assigned one it would probably have been something like "Terror Hill". The steepest part of the driveway was the part that connected (upwards) with the main road, and ice and snow could make it almost impossible to get traction in the winter. Seasoned Barn drivers soon discovered that speed was the only way to negotiate the hill in bad weather, leading to wobbly 30 mph charges up the slippery slope. The truly key skill was stopping, or at least slowing down, at the very crest without either sliding backwards, getting stuck, or shooting into the road.

This is the former Ice Swamp, as it melts away in spring. You can see the stream flowing in the foreground.

Fred chops up ice in hopes that the Ice Swamp will melt faster.