lcherald.com

Roller coaster paper day

by Lucy Halverson

Wednesday. Paper day. I refer to Wednesday as paper day because that is the day the current week’s Herald, bundled into three large mail bags, is delivered to my office.

I was certainly surprised to open the mail bags last week and discover copies of the Sanborn Journal Weekly instead of the Lyman County Herald.

Once the initial shock started to wear off and I nixed the idea of sending the Journal out in place of the Herald, I called the printer to find out where my newspapers were. As I had guessed, a mix up in the mail room sent the Herald to Woonsocket and the Journal to Presho. With that determined, a plan was made to retrieve my 1200 copies of the Herald.

To speed things up, my helpers (my mother and mother-in-law) volunteered to ride with me to Lee’s Corner, located just a few miles east of Ft. Thompson, where we would meet a driver coming from Woonsocket with the newspapers. Surely we could label and stuff the newspapers for delivery in Reliance and Kennebec in the back of my mother-in-laws van as we drove back from Ft. Thompson. What I didn’t count on was a roller coaster ride down Highway 34.

As a group we discussed who was most likely to become car sick riding in the back seat. We also considered who was capable of reading (address labels) while riding in a vehicle. Unfortunately, I’ve been known to get car sick especially while reading in a moving vehicle, but since it was my newspaper I volunteered for back seat duty. I couldn’t very well let my mother, who I probably inherited my motion sickness from, ride in the back. And I couldn’t ask my mother–in-law to do it since it was her car; plus she was suffering from a bad head cold.

If you’ve never traveled Highway 34 east from Ft. Thompson in the back of a minivan you may not realize that the road is built much like a roller coaster. The hilly terrain of the Missouri River breaks allows for slow long inclines with fast steep descents and added shorter hills that give every roller coaster that fast up and down motion that apparently some people find thrilling.

By the time we reached Ft. Thompson I was nearly as sick as the last time I rode the tilt-a-whirl at the State Fair 25 years ago. Luckily for me, my companions, and the Herald readers, my mother-in-law got the van stopped before I lost my breakfast all over the backseat and the newspapers.

As we sat along the side of the road on Big Bend Dam, my stomach and head caught up with each other. Herald readers were just going to have to wait a little while longer for their newspaper as we finished stuffing and labeling the newspapers while parked.

I swore off carnival rides years ago, guess I’d better add roller coasters to that list.