Directions

It's interesting, living in the northern reaches of Vermont, the strange directions that you sometimes get. You hear them all the time; the police use them, Fire/EMS use them, the locals use them. Here are a few examples:

• Take a left at the old Cobb Store. (store closed several years ago)
• Take a left at that place that used to have all the greenhouses. (Strange, because everyone knows where that is.)

Then, there is always the places that some local just haphazardly calls something. For instance, I was recently speaking to a 9-1-1 operator that asked the caller where the location of an incident was. He called it Cold Harbor Mountain in Richford. Looking at a map, one cannot find a mountain with such a name. After some coaxing questions, the 9-1-1 operator (who fortunately lived in the area prior) discovered that is was Richford Mountain (which totally makes more sense). There is no harbor anywhere near this mountain, so who knows how the local came up with that name.

Another thing that you sometimes come across in emergency services is getting sent to strange places. One such call, that my co-worker at Cabin Fever spent one afternoon retelling, was definitely a little strange. They were dispatched to an unknown medical at an unknown location. Now, before all you folks start jumping out of your seats, the dispatcher had called the ambulance base directly beforehand, to warn them about such a dubious sounding run. It turned out, through further questioning, that the call was in-town, on a certain road, and the directions to it were: "Go through the narrow bridge, and the road will turn, and there will be a white house right in front of you."

I've also had the pleasure of dispatching some obscure locations. One time, not too long ago, I sent my fire department out on a run for a reported logging accident. Part of the directions given was to "turn left at the big oak tree."

Now, anyone who knows anything about the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, knows that there is a plethora of various types of trees, and they all are usually big. Fortunately, they were canceled enroute to the call, because it turned out that the reported "logging accident" was really barking dogs while rabbit hunting. I can definitely see how those two are mixed up!