Living here in the North Georgia Mountains is peaceful, but like most things in life the seclusion we enjoy comes with a few tradeoffs. One example is grocery shopping. Oh, we have grocery stores, but reaching one involves more than a quick trip down the block. In fact, we don't have blocks, just miles of twisting roads, which makes the closest grocery store a fifteen-minute drive—one-way. For this reason, and the price of fuel, we keep a well-stocked pantry.
And there are other problems, like the quality of our telephone service. It's a step above earlier versions of communication—you know, like smoke signals or two tin cans and a piece of string—but to combat the frequent outages we invested in a cell phone. Now when we need to make a call and our regular telephone is on the fritz, all we have to do is take this palm-sized gadget and climb the rise behind our place. Once on the crest, and at a point midway between a stunted poplar and a lightning scarred pine, we get a good signal from the microwave tower atop the mountain to the east of us. Of course on days when the regular phone is out and it's also raining or snowing, the slope is too treacherous to climb, so we rethink the need to make any calls at all.
How about our electric service? Well, we call it Hit-and-Miss. During calm weather we usually enjoy uninterrupted service. Add a little wind, however, and the situation gets dicey. Throw in an ice storm and electric lines are dashed quicker than New Year's Resolutions. The result? Power can be out for days.
After our last ice storm, a howling affair that took out electric service for a week, a flatland peddler came through selling generators. When he wheeled his pink Caddy into our place, I tried to explain I had a generator, but this Speed Tongue was already revved up and into his spiel. And it didn't take but a moment to realize if I hurled adjectives and adverbs as this hawker was doing with his pitch, I'd still be looking for a job as a writer. So I decided to have some fun. Did I mention we don't get much entertainment up here either?
Ironically, the unit he wanted to sell me was much like the one I owned, except for the price. When I questioned this, he defended his once-in-a-lifetime offer by again reciting the glowing attributes for the product. Clearly, this man was the epitome of the salesman's creed: If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with BS.
Shifting weight to one foot and scratching my chin, I said, "Maybe we can do some tradeoffs."
With that gotcha twinkle in his eyes, he said, "Go ahead, Cousin. I got a sharp pencil."
"Well," I said, "it's a big sacrifice, but how about a unit with a standard, five-gallon fuel tank instead of the revolutionary, extra-large, five-gallon fuel tank?"
He muttered something, scribbled on his note pad, and was still avoiding my eyes as I pressed on. "And how 'bout the engine? I reckon it would save a bundle by going with a standard 12 HP engine instead of splurging on the extra powerful 12 HP engine. Right?"
He added some rock kicking to the muttering and scribbling.
On a roll now, I said, "And how about all that extra output of the generator? That's a real extravagance. All I need is 7500 watts. What in the world would I do with 7500 dynamic watts?"
Mr. Peddler slid back into his car and reached for his cell phone. "Hmmm," he said, "I'd be glad to call the company, but I don't have a signal."
I turned and was pointing out the trail through the pasture and up to the crest when he drove away. My wife poked her head out the door and said, "Who was that little weasel?"
I mimicked the peddler's rock kickin' and said, "Just an ol' boy who thought I was born at night."
"Well, that's what your momma always said."
"Yep, during an ice storm as she told it, but bless her heart it wasn't last night."
Bob Burdick is the author of The Margaret Ellen, Tread Not on Me, and Stories Along The Way, a short-story collection that won the Royal Palm Book Award.
