Mud & Rocks

There were points where I just stopped and thought 

“I can’t possibility do this,” 

swiftly followed by the realization 

“But I have to. I have no choice.”

I’m at our farthest sites, four-hours away from home driving in good conditions any direction. It’s pouring rain. The roads are only going to get worse. My co-pilot doesn’t know how to drive. So it’s up to me to get us home. To navigate through the mud. And it’s not just any mud...

It’s that dark clay mud refuses to let your tires grab hold. The kind that sends you sliding from one side of the road to the other, that occasionally tries to turn you completely around. The kind that leaves you leaning on your horn, praying the children with get the heck out of your way because you really can’t control where this car is going and trying to break is pointless. The kind that tests your arm speed – just how quickly can you correct and recorrect your direction? The kind that would be fun to drive in if you weren’t terrified that you’ll slide too far to one side and end up sideways in a ditch. 

And they you end up in one of those gullys on the side of the road. Not a huge one, thank God. You’re still upright. But you’re stuck. And your non-driving co-pilot tells you that you need to get over to the right. You look and him and look at your steering wheel. The wheel is turned as far to the right as mechanically possible and we’re not moving anywhere close to the right. You get out. You get in. You pass your mud-coated loafers to your co-pilot and slip your bare foot back on the pedal. You throw it into the lowest gear, give it a bit of gas, and pray as the car finally crawls to the right… and now you’re playing this game of correcting and sliding once again, trying to balance the car between the ditches on either side of  you. The ditches that are getting steeper and steeper – the kind of ditches that you don’t have a prayer of getting out of.

And just as you start to think you can handle this, you come up to that spot. You new it was coming. It’s tough when the weather is good. It’s one of those “I can’t possibly do this” points. Where the road narrows to the point that a car can just barely keep two wheels on the ground. And half of that road is in a ditch about 2 feet deep, filled with water. And the other side is a cliff. So you’ve gotta go slow enough not to slide even an inch. And fast enough so you don’t get stuck in the mud. So you look. You breathe. You realize “But I have to. I have no choice.” And you go. But you don’t get the balance of speed quite right. You err on the side of going to slow and now you’re stuck… in the mud… with mere inches on each side of your tires. And you breathe. And you check that, yup, you’re already in the lowest gear and the 4WD has kicked in. And you rock. And you pray. And by the grace of God, you climb out of the mud and up the next hill. And you feel like an absolute champ. Until some guy who was watching (not helping) you this whole time, calls through the window, not to congratulate you, but to ask you for money. Sigh.

But it’s not all bad. The stretches of mud are occasionally interrupted by slopes of boulder fields. It’s kindda like a game of chess, where you have to think 10 steps ahead to figure out how you are going to get down without hearing that terrible sound of metal crunching against rock. Where once again you have to find the balance in speed – slow enough to avoid bottoming out against some boulder beneath you but fast enough to get over the boulder in front of you. Of course, you inevitability get it wrong. And you hear the crunch. And you get stuck. And you try to rock uphill and once again you pray, pray that that crunch wasn’t the fuel tank. And you watch the fuel gauge. Steady. Steady. One boulder field down. Seven more to go. Back to the mud.

Four maybe five hours later, after the road has turned into a river, after the wheels start to rattle with mud, after you’ve visited all your sites, after you admit to your co-pilot that you’ve never really driven in mud before (at least not this kind of mud), you arrive home. Alive. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Spiritually awakened (there was no way you did this without a troupe of driving angels!).

When do we go back to the field? Tomorrow?

 Mbuzi taking the rocks on a GOOD day.