Mud Soup

Driving is an adventure here, to say the least.

The roads are at approximately 45° angles for unrelenting distances, and even the gentle sections don’t go easy on you with their boulders and giant potholes (local legend has it that every pothole is a dead cow that fell onto the road and was buried where it lay by apathetic farmers with no sense of social consciousness).

Today en route home from the feria, I was travelling light. Just myself in the car, drumming the wheel with the window down and a guava-laced breeze blowing through, enjoying the independence and the liberty of driving a beat up old flatbed up a beat up old mountain.

However, travelling light means that I do not have 5 volunteers in the back of my truck; I do not have any newly-filled canisters of gas; I do not have large bags of cement; which means that there is not any weight sitting on those back tires.

What this means is that if it should so happen that the 4WD is out, those back wheels are going to start turning and turning in place, because there is no weight sitting on top of them to push them down and give them traction against the ground.

And hills become a whole new kind of challenge.

So I left the feria with my cheese and my yoghurt (staples), feeling very pleased with my independent flat-bed-driving self. And then I hit the first hill. I made it about 3/4 of the way up, and felt the wheels start to spin in place. I put the car in neutral and rolled back down. Take two. Repeat. Take three. Repeat. I switched from H4 to L4 (it’s an automatic), and put the truck in low. By now a neighbor and his wife had pulled up behind me, and got out to come check on me. I let him hop into the driver’s seat. We tried twice more, and on the second try he got it up the hill. He went back to his car, I kept on going in mine. It survived the next hill. Then the next.

Just as I was daring to feel confident again, I hit hill number 4. The wheels began to spin in place again. Bill and Beth, my kindly neighbors, caught up to me again just as a crew of tico bikers came whizzing around the corner above me. They stopped to make sure I could get up. I couldn’t. One tico left his bike and came over to check. “Tiene quatro por quatro?” he asked me, and so I got to learn the Spanish term for 4WD. A small linguistic victory in the face of a much larger vehicular defeat. I told him that yes, en teoría I had it, but that it didn’t seem to be working. He agreed with my assessment. He stood outside the car, looking first at it and then at the hill, then stood back and directed me, somehow, magically, on a path up the hill that allowed the car to get its grip. Hill number 4 conquered.

This time I didn’t let my confidence gain too much traction (hah!), and was prepared when the car let out yet again on the final driveway. Bill and Beth, who had been following me all this time, came to my rescue for a second time; but to no avail. The car simply would not climb the final stretch to the garage. And then…. I noticed that giant pile of lumber that’s been sitting down the road for the last few weeks, which Tom mentioned we ought to move up to the bodega. I figured that now was really just about as good a time as any, as we had a flat-bed that desperately needed weight sitting right there next to the pile of wood. So we loaded her up, popped her back to L4 and into low, and voilà. The truck floated right up that driveway, powered by those beleaguered back wheels that had tried and tried and tried and simply hadn’t had the weight to work.

So the question: to pay to fix the 4WD? Or to simply weigh down the flat-bed with volunteers or gas canisters or sacks of cement? The latter is certainly a cheaper option, and I suspect that it would be more in keeping with the tico way to load up the back and let that be an adequate substitute for 4WD…

But one wonderful thing that I took away from this little adventure was that there is a great deal of kindness in this community. People will stop for a total stranger, as those tico bikers did, to help them out. And wonderful neighbors like Bill and Beth will leave the dry, hill-competent haven of their car and labor out in the rain to help their neighbor move huge pieces of lumber, just to help out. This is a place where kind people live, and the kind of community that I am delighted to be a part of.