My Name is Mud

As of yesterday afternoon I have enacted a new policy at the non-profit agency where I am employed – the Executive Director and I are no longer allowed to travel together without a driver/navigator or a damn good Global Positioning System. He and I have the reputation of being the two in the office with absolutely no sense of direction or “homing skills.” The first time we attended a national conference in Washington, D.C. we flew into Baltimore and took the train to D.C. – not a brilliant plan! That was almost ten years ago and I still have nightmares of roaming the city hauling a week’s worth of luggage. Since that first auspicious trip there have been others. We got lost in Boston on a walking tour of community gardens, and in Dallas looking for a restaurant. We’ve even lost our way in hotel corridors searching for conference rooms.

I was forced to implement the new work travel policy yesterday after a series of unfortunate events involving a drive to a small town approximately fifty miles from our office. We were scheduled to pick up a used vehicle, which had been donated to my program, at a ranch in the middle of nowhere. My boss had detailed written directions so I felt comfortable traveling with him. I only made one disparaging remark about our inaptitude as we left the building. Had our excursion been part of a novel, my comment, “Dear God, I can’t believe anyone is letting us leave together,” would have been called foreshadowing.

All went well until we reached the small town which was to be one of our landmarks. The town was so small we weren’t exactly sure if we had driven through it or if we had just passed a cluster of homes on the side of the road. The next instruction was to look for a utility substation, turn right, and drive three miles until the road came to a dead-end. When we saw a smattering of what appeared to be electrical equipment we turned onto a dirt road. Due to rare precipitation received in our normally drought inflicted area, the dirt road was now a mud road. Thinking we could traverse the slippery street and reach our destination (after all, why would anyone direct us down this road if it were impassable?) we continued on in the compact car.

I must give my boss credit – he skillfully maneuvered approximately two miles of slime before landing us in a ditch. Under the watchful big brown eyes of a herd of cattle, we buried the car up to the axle in mud while trying to free it by spinning the tires alternating between drive and reverse. Not a good plan. After contemplating lassoing a cow to pull us out, we had no choice but to call our eighty-something year old benefactor to report our predicament. We gave him our location and awaited our rescue. We waited, and waited, and waited. Another cell phone call verified my worst fear – not only were we axle deep in a muddy ditch with curious cows surrounding us, we were lost as well. We had not driven through the small town, we had not found the utility substation, and we were certainly on the wrong road.

To make this extremely long and mud-splattered story a tad bit shorter I will not give the dirty details of being pulled out of the mud, not once, but a total of four times, before we made it off of that road. It took two four-wheel drive pickup trucks, a John Deere tractor, and several lengths of heavy chain to get us back onto a paved road. We followed the octogenarian driver of one of the pickups to his ranch with mud flinging in our wake the entire twenty miles. (Read: we were twenty miles off course!). We picked up the donated vehicle and made our way back to town, careful to stay on paved roads.

I found a bit of irony in driving back a ¾-ton four-wheel drive Suburban that would have come in handy on our earlier adventure.