Pilatzkie's Grader

Sleepy Hollow Lane is a private road with no municipal services. With no formal local cottage association to look after road maintenance, the potholes tend to take over the road. Some residents liked the idea of this built-in traffic calming which slowed down the aggressive drivers and the noisy rattling on the road did alert us that company was coming. Eventually, a neighbour would take action.

Sometimes a temporary fix, with a load of gravel and many helping hands, would delay the inevitable, but every ten years or so, heavy equipment is brought in to do a proper job of repairing the potholes.

One such time was in August of 1995 when Joe Foran and Don O’Bireck arranged for Ken Pilatzkie, a local contractor, to gravel and grade our lane. He hauled in the gravel with his own truck and arranged for the township grader to spread it. Our cottage was the last one in the so-called developed part of Sleepy Hollow Lane so the grader had to turn around in our driveway. We had not started our summer vacation yet so we were not there to witness the comedy of errors that resulted. We arrived to find a big muddy hole in the swampy area across the lane and several deep ruts in our driveway. To add insult to injury, when Don came by to collect our share of the cost, he suggested we pay extra because we used the whole length of the lane and he only used the first part.

We learned that the grader operator had misjudged the firmness of the land across the road and backed onto it, immediately sinking to his axel and getting hopelessly mired in the muck. (sounds like a title for a country song). A call to Pilatzkie brought help in the form of a big front-end loader with which they tried to drag the grader out of the mud. Our driveway only had a few inches of gravel on the surface so the loader was soon digging its massive wheels into the sand below causing a couple of trenches a foot or more deep along the length of our driveway. We called Pilatzkie who brought some gravel fill to fill the holes so we now had a nice firm drive-way. Note that the pictures of the equipment are just shown for illustration and are not the original guilty machines.

End of story? Not quite.

The original owner of our cottage was a handyman who did not let building codes stand in the way of home improvement. He had installed two posts on either side of the drive-way equipped with lights that were operated from inside the cottage. When Pilatzkie’s grader tore up our driveway, it also tore up the underground wires to the lights. When I went to investigate, I found that the underground wiring was just below the sod with no conduit for protection. Shuddering to think about all the times that we had stood in puddles of water above these wires, I knew they had to go. We had to sacrifice the drive-way lights and pull up the wire.

The wire came up quite easily until I came to the roots of a big spruce tree. Being tired and frustrated, I was not inclined to get a shovel and dig through the roots, so I wrapped the wire around my left hand and gave it a mighty heave. Something gave, but not the wire or the roots. I was looking at two fingers on my left hand that were bent back at a very unnatural angle. I popped the dislocated joints back into place, got a shovel and finished the wire extraction, which was now a one-handed job.

The next day my wife started her latest project, which was building a shed from plans she had found in Cottage Life magazine. She was the lead carpenter with help from her 80-year-old father and one-handed husband. I had not told her about my injury and managed to help with just my thumb and two fingers on my left hand in working order.

Two weeks later, back home in Ottawa, my hand seemed to be back to normal except that I noticed that my little finger kept snagging on my pocket when I tried to reach into it. Still later, I found that I could not bend my little finger at the last joint. A visit to the doctor confirmed that I had broken a tendon. Surgery was scheduled for a plastic surgeon to do tendon repair a couple of weeks later.

Not having been in a hospital for thirty-five years, and being unaware of the procedures, I had enjoyed a big spaghetti dinner and went for the surgery at 7 p.m. on the scheduled day. The less than impressed surgical team sent me home and rescheduled the surgery, this time with the fasting rules clearly explained. When I finally made it to the operating room, the surgeon started an incision at the first joint of my little finger and finally located the loose end of my tendon which had retracted to a spot near the heel of my hand. He stretched it back into place, sewed my hand up and sent me home.

The next day I had to drive to Cornwall for a conference and noticed my reaction-time was severely impaired so I drove with extra care and arrived safely. I found that my hand ached unless it was propped up shoulder high so I sat through the presentations with my hand resting on a pillow, seemingly asking to be excused.

The surgeon did an excellent repair job, and, after some intense physiotherapy, my hand was back to normal.

We have finally reached the end of the cascading calamities in the story of Pilatzkie’s grader.