Respect the mud

I don’t have enough respect for mud. This thought occurred to me late on Christmas Day as I felt the Freelander slipping down the slope, its backside fishtailing out until all four wheels came to a rest of a bank of sodden grass. “Oh”, I said. “I wasn’t expecting that.” Behind us, tyre tracks were gouged into thick mud as treacherous as quicksand. Perhaps, it also occurred to me, it would have been good if I’d had my lesson at the Land Rover Experience earlier this month. A bit of 4×4 nous would have come in handy just then.

Was I going to get away with this, the way I’d managed to get away with my carelessness in the Eastern Cape? Or would I face the shame of having to call up one of the rangers to interrupt his Christmas to come and rescue some dumb tourist?

I hadn’t expected the roads on the farm to be this bad. All I wanted was to find a cellphone signal strong enough to download mail and upload a Facebook status sufficiently Christmassy to avoid online ignominy. Also, I was suffering from a mild bout of cabin fever. Earlier that afternoon we had watched a grim purple wall of cloud sail in from the south-east (you can see a picture of it here) and marvelled as hailstones, some of them the size of golf balls, clattered on to the deck like dice thrown into a roulette wheel. Later, when the rain dwindled to a drizzle and the light began to fade, I thought it would be an idea to take the Freelander for a spin, metaphorically speaking. My cousin and his girlfriend and my brother came along for the ride.

There we sat in a pleasantly dry, leather-upholstered cell, watching the impala shake themselves like wet dogs. I judged it unwise to cross a stream rushing down what was usually a dry riverbed, and instead followed a road parallel to the river. Naturally, it was this road that turned into a quagmire. Sitting there on the spongy grass, I wondered how I was going to get us out of there. To our left, the Klaserie River lurked in the reeds. To the right, a steep slope, and in front a river of grass culminating in a muddy rut almost as steep as the one we’d just slid down.

My brother turned the dial on the centre console to “muddy ruts”. “Keep a steady speed,” my cousin coached me. “The trick is you keep constant cadence and you let the car find its path.” My foot on the accelerator was angled with the delicacy of an 18th century courtesan dancing the minuet. Please please please nice Land Rover get us out of this. I felt the wheels slip this way and that and the seconds seemed to stretch into aeons until the car hauled us up and on to a flat surface. I should have used this opportunity to head straight back to camp, but we wanted to go game viewing and the riverbed was relatively dry, so on we went, courting more trouble.

We passed tetchy old buffalo bulls and more sopping wet bokkies before I ended up in another muddy rut, a road steadily morphing into a donga. These were the sort of conditions I should be encountering for the first time in suburban Kyalami, not in big five country as lightning ripped through the darkening sky. “I’ve had enough,” I said to my brother. “Your turn to drive.”

It occurred to me that at least we were in a Faraday Cage.

My brother paced around the mud, sussing out the best route out of trouble, and took the wheel. I felt better watching his nervousness — well, not so much nervousness as the intense focus that comes from knowing you are just this side of being in the dwang — knowing that it wasn’t just me, that the sensation of a car sliding around, resisting control, is unnerving. The wheels slipped on the glutinous surface, and for a moment it looked like we’d be stuck in the donga, but the tyres gripped heroically and the Freelander got us out of there. Oh, glory be, Land Rover and its Muddy Ruts setting had compensated for our cluelessness.

We laughed with relief as we headed the rest of the way home. I never did get to find a cellphone signal strong enough to update my status. But I do have a new respect for mud.