Droning on about good will and patience

Posted
CHUCK VANDENBERG

I don't want to keep droning on about it this...see what I did there...but this past week was a true adventure. And a lesson in what a good community this is.

This idiot editor went out by himself in the field where, hopefully in 2021, there will be a new elementary school sitting. I have a new toy that I want to use to gather news photography from above. But obviously I need to train more on it.

It's a small drone that Kris Kringle put under the tree this year. It takes great video and pictures but you have to know what the sam-hell you're doing with the thing. There are some really seasoned pros with these things around Fort Madison.

I... am not one of those people.

Fort Madison coach Luke Rickelman had some athletes working out on the east slab at the middle school while I was buzzing this thing around in what is probably one of the largest open fields in city limits. But, needless to say, I got cocky and lost control of this thing at about 400 feet.

On what ended up being my last practice flight, I pushed my drone to new heights.

Ooooooo. Pretty!! I could see the freakin' river on my phone that I was using to navigate. But then a nervousness took over me. You're not supposed to fly them higher than 400 feet, but this model recommends 150 feet. Yeah....I think I broke both of those.

So I looked up into the sky. BIG MISTAKE! This thing looked like a dot of a sparrow against the light blue afternoon sky. "Ohhhh. Bring it down," I said to myself. There was a slight breeze out of the southwest that began to push my robot whirlybird toward the bluff.

"This isn't good." I have an emergency stop button that I could have hit, but I didn't want to risk crashing it on an unsuspecting motorist. Shortly after that, the dissent disappeared. I looked down at my video feed and saw branches and sky.

"Crud. Well that's gone," I thought, and a sick feeling came over me as I trodded up the field to the road and saw my drone hanging like a bat about 110 feet up in the air. The bluff goes straight up so, from the base of the tree, it was about 70 feet up.

I walked slowly to our Toyota FJ Cruiser, dubbed "the beast" and thought about how I was going to explain to the wife Santa's present wasn't coming home.

I had posted on Facebook that the Pen City Current News Drone had been lost in a tree and I needed ideas.

More than 60 tips came in from...'start climbing, Tarzan... to... get a shotgun!?, throw tennis balls, call the fire department, tie a weight around a rope and throw it over the limb...buy a new one?!...get a cat!!???'

A firefighter posted "give us a call". I did to get the daily record and they said "yeah, we think we can get it and we need to do some training on the ladder so meet us out there."

WHAT??!! Really...you're gonna go get my drone? The taxpayers are going to crucify all of us. But here they came, anchored the ladder truck and two firefighters navigated the bucket through the trees and came up 20 feet short. One firefighter wanted to blast it with a pulse of foam water. We decided to quit while we were ahead. I offered a donation to the department for their efforts. They said no.... it was great training for the ladder truck. I'm making a donation to the firefighter explorers.

I went back home depressed that it was going to be in the tree by itself overnight. Poor thing. Then Mayor Brad Randolph got in touch at 8:30 p.m. and said he had good flashlights and extender poles, and to meet him on Bluff Road.

We went out and climbed up the hill and after about 15 minutes found where it was. It's tough to see a black drone against a black sky. But he found it. After extending his pole out 50 feet and looking like he'd hooked a whale with these poles bending over, we leaned it against a branch and attached another swimming pool pole to the end and pushed it up. In about five seconds that pole gave way to the weight and bent like a straw.

"Uh.....I owe you a new pole," I said, thinking this is getting very expensive now. Buy a new one was starting to sound like a good idea.

"Nope," he said. "I've got another one."

"Hey, lets strap some sticks on there. They're dead and don't weigh as much." This was my idea, not the mayor's. MINE. So we start strapping up straight dead sticks and went after the thing again. The sticks which we put on top of the poles, started to bend and snapped as we pushed the pole up.

We both laughed a little and finally I convinced the mayor to leave. (I now have a deeper understanding of why we're still moving the depot - this guy doesn't give up easily). We stopped at his truck for a moment of brain storming. Almost at the same time we said "a bow". He said if someone had a bow... and I jumped in and said, I was just thinking I have a compound bow at home. Ideas started churning.

I told him I would think about that plan and maybe come back in the morning. I thanked him over and over and we went our separate ways. When I got home, I pulled the bow from the closet and set it out for the next day. I went back to my phone and the mayor had texted saying, "let's go back with the bow".

Geesh! "No. I've taken enough of your time. I'll try again tomorrow."

In the early morning I got up and grabbed a big ball of twine, a utility cutter, and the bow and arrows and headed back to get my drone that I abandoned to the wild of the night.

I texted the mayor and said I was headed out with the bow, arrows, and some twine. He texted back immediately, "use fishing line".

Whatever. This is a compound bow, it can shoot twine for cryin' out loud. Doug Hoenig from Hoenig's Tree Service messaged me saying he had some poles, apparently specific to drone hunting, and would stop by. He took a look and headed back to get his poles. 30 minutes later I was on my way to Shopko for fishing line. Apparently my daughter's compound bow wasn't powerful enough to carry twine 70 feet. Whatever.

I don't like fishing line. I don't like Christmas lights. If it tangles, I hate it. I have no patience for that. After about 20 shots at this tree branch and having fishing line tangled in leaves, my boots, socks, my hat, my underwear, and every freakin' stick that laid on the ground, I started to yell out loud. There was filament everywhere. It felt like I was in a bad scene from a Harry Potter movie and I began to get claustrophobic.

After cutting and retying arrows a couple dozen times, I found a plastic flower pot, put the spool of string flat in the pot, and said, "Screw it, two more times and I'm outta here."

One shot. Clean into the cloudless sky, over the branch, and the arrow softly succumbed to the theory of gravity and pivoted heading downward. I ran for cover tripping over....everything, and the sleek, black arrow came to rest dangling fortuitously about 10 feet away. I choked back the tears that began to well up.

I pulled myself together, took a breath and got my physics about me. Now....tie the twine thoroughly to the fishing line and pull it... ever so gently, carefully, over the branch. I got the twine tied on and went to the arrow and started to gently pull. I had work gloves on, I didn't need a fish line cutting a groove in my hand.

That vexxing 30lb test snagged every bud and twig protruding from every tree within three miles. After about 15 minutes of telling myself to breathe, I freed the line all the way up and gently started to pull. SNAG! Freakinfrackrumbstupidsonof....... I stopped...breathed slowly and gently pulled on the string again. Looking at the ground, I pulled harder and harder waiting for the filament to give. And it did, but gently...not the snap I've so often felt fishing southeast Iowa ponds. I looked up and saw the twine clear up by the drone.

I continued to pull and pray... pull and pray... as the twine came gently down to my outstretched hand. Glorious music was heard in the background and a ray of sunlight burst upon my sweat-glistened face. I think I looked like Edward Cullen.

I fell to my knees holding the twine..shaking with fatigue and the emotion of human perseverance. I had a hallucination of sorts as an image of the wife with hands folded resting softly at her cheeks on her slightly tilted head as her man had overcome nature, and the wild of the woods - and gravity! I had rescued our robot from the watchful eye of the hawks of Iowa and the impending Thursday rain showers.

I slowly moved..as if dancing in the woods...and grabbed the upward trending twine and put it together with the downward trending twine and gave three hard yanks and the drone came tumbling out of the branch and fell softly to the earth - all things restored, including my testosterone.

I sat on the nearest log, pulled out my phone and made a video to commemorate the wonder of it all. You can view it on our Facebook page.

My drone now sits atop the cat tower in our living room. I look at it often. It wants to play. I think not....

Yet.

Speaking of lofty endeavors, Pen City Current is partnering with Radio Keokuk to drop a wider net over news and sports in Lee County. We're very excited about the possibilities of this partnership for our readers and our advertisers, but that's Beside the Point

beside the point, community, editorial, fort madison, iowa, Mayor Randolph, Pen City Current

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