When I got back home I was in for an unpleasant surprise. The smell was still there, and that made me uncomfortable. I wondered if I had a bad tank of gas—which does happen—but for whatever reason, the odor remained although perhaps a little fainter. It was much less in the bedroom but on Saturday morning, I knew I wasn’t going to keep breathing air like that. I decided to drive down to the pasture and call Valley Propane. I left a message for Raymond and then called Mike to see if he could come and help me drag the hundred pound tank from the cabin (this would let me see if the new tank was bad), and he said he could come over in a few hours. I tried to turn around, but the snow was too deep and slippery, so I drove up to the hay barn where Mike’s tractor had flattened the snow. However, as I started up the hill, my truck slid off to the side and I barely was able to get back on the plowed road. That had never happened before and it meant that the road was getting slicker. I backed up, built up some speed and bouncing from side to side made it to the top. I stopped there just to steady myself for a minute, but when I started up again, my truck again began to slide off the road. Dropping into the ravine in my hollow, thirty feet at most, was scary but sliding off at the hay barn would mean a plunge of at least fifty feet into the North Fork of the Roanoke River. I stopped again to calm myself and then cautiously backed up until I was on the road again. Moving forward very slowly kept me on the road but now I had to turn around. The snow was crisscrossed with Mike’s tractor tire marks but it still looked troubling. I gunned the truck and by spinning it around I was able to complete my turn and get back on the road. This was too much. I was fearful to go back down the hay barn hill but I really had no choice. Fortunately, my truck handled that well, but once I got back on level ground, I realized I had to get out of the hollow for now. There were a half dozen rutted areas in the first pasture filled with water and large chunks of ice and the biggest one, near the main gate was getting to a point where I wasn’t sure I could get through it many more times without damaging my truck and perhaps getting stuck. Then there was the smell in the house. To add to that more snow was expected on Monday and Tuesday. I called Mike and told him not to come up, that I was leaving for the next five days at least. He was still willing to come but I didn’t want to fight the snow and ice any longer.
Driving back to the house proved uneventful and in an hour I had everything packed for an extended stay at the Microtel, at least five days. I just wanted to be in a safe place and not worry about getting home for a while. I had had to deal with an icy road since December 19th. This was by far the worst winter I had ever had in the hollow, the worst since I had come to Radford in 1986.
By driving very carefully I made it to the Sisson gate and my entire body relaxed. Just then Raymond called and he said that since my main tank had fifteen percent in it, he thought the smell was from the vent free heater and that it needed to be cleaned or fixed. When I had had the heater serviced in the fall, the repairman had told me that when he came the next fall he wanted to change the pilot assembly, so Raymond’s idea made sense. I told him I would get back to him after the snow ended and see if I could get up there myself with one of his men or get Mike to bring him up. For now, though, I was headed for the Microtel and I didn’t have to go back for at least a week.