Held hostage by worn-out electronics

I punched the numbers into the electronic keypad, the same ones I had put in every morning for 10 years. Without fail, each of those mornings, the tiny red light at the top of the keypad would begin blinking rapidly, the signal to turn the handle and open the door.

When the light failed to blink, I thought little of it, having misdialed the combination plenty of times. On the second attempt, and after punching the numbers in carefully, the absence of the blinking light began to concern me. In nearly fanatical fashion, I had replaced the battery with more frequency than required, but I replaced it again and again, with no blinking light.

Short of issues related to the life of a gundog, I am not given to panic, but this was the first time I could not get into my gun safe. I panicked. It felt like lightning bolted through my head, as I considered the options I had to get it open.

I sent a friend a message asking if he had any C-4 or det cord (also called detonation or primer cord that is rope-like and burns at around 29,000 feet per second) laying around. I was kidding, but my friend didn’t think I was and suggested I find another option, one that wouldn’t blow up my safe and shop.

Panic will drive one to irrational thought and, if unchecked, bad behavior. I took a deep breath, thinking great, this is what will send my heart over the edge and get me the surgery I needed. Funny how one thing leads to another with the mind. Mine took me to the fall of 1974, standing in front of the open hood of my 1966 Chevy station wagon, the original SUV.

That old car was my first set of wheels and what a great hunting rig it was. My hunting buddies and I would load it up with gear and guns and take that beast anywhere. It had a three-speed manual transmission with the gear shifter on the steering column. Its body color was what you would imagine in a bad batch of split pea soup. It was not, as they say, a chick magnet, but we all loved that damned old car.

On the day my mind flashed back to, we were trying to get back to a lake along an old seismic trail that always had moose living in the vicinity. It was late in the season, and rain had filled the low areas of the trail.

The way we negotiated difficult terrain was simple — just go fast and let the momentum carry us through the bad spots. The muddy wave the big car made looked like one might crash into on a Cook Inlet beach during a storm, but we easily made it across the small pond and stalled out.

Laughing, we popped the hood and removed the distributor cap, dried the insides out with a T-shirt and put it back in place. In a few moments we had the old tank started and we were on our way. That was the beauty of those days. There was hardly anything that might happen that we couldn’t fix on the spot.

Standing in the shop, held hostage by the electronics of the gun safe, I thought to myself, if it were my 2016 truck stalled on the other side of that pond, I wouldn’t have a clue how to get it going, just as I had no clue how to, short of blowing it up or taking a cutting torch to it, get into the safe.

I know, “Well why didn’t you think about that before you locked up your guns?” From time to time, I had thought about the possibility that the system would fail. It isn’t reasonable to think anything mechanical, even as simple as a keypad, will work forever.

But I never pursued the thought. As in so many things, I chose, by simplemindedness, to forget about it and hope it would be ok.

Now I wondered, what if this was the morning I was scheduled to leave on a once–in–a-lifetime trip to Africa for Cape buffalo, and my Africa rifle is in the safe. Or, a sheep hunt, or take your pick. It is an awful place to be and I suspect if you have read this far, some of you might wonder how to resolve such a tragedy.

With the safe being as old as it was, I had no expectation that the manufacturer would feel obligated to assist me. Nevertheless, I contacted them and of course had to leave a message, which given the state of the country, left me with little expectation to ever hear from them again.

In the meantime, I contacted professional locksmiths and found that there isn’t a way to “pick” these things. They could get into the safe, but not without destroying it in the process. Well, I thought, I can do that.

I did hear back from the safe folks, and the first thing we had to do was establish that I was the owner. Fortunately, I had registered the safe, and thus, they were willing to help. Had I not, they would have no way to know if it wasn’t a stolen item I was trying to get into. So, register your safe if you haven’t already.

After enduring the litany of questions, like “Did you change the battery, or are you sure you have the right combination,” the manufacturer determined a new keypad would solve the problem, and assured me they would send detailed instructions on how to replace it. They also assured me it would arrive in time to get the safe open for a late-season duck hunt that Rigby had conned us into planning.

Shortly after that call, I had the opportunity to have the heart surgery I had been waiting to schedule, which would mean no duck hunt. Rigby forgave me, and I went into the surgery fretting over not being home when the new keypad would arrive.

I get that might seem silly to some folks, but when a major part of your life revolves around what is behind the door of the gun safe, being locked out it is a huge stressor.

One of the first things I did after arriving home from the hospital was to install the new keypad, and with incredible relief, open the safe.

I can tell you, if there were a gun safe the equivalent of that 1966 Chevy station wagon, I would have one.