Why couldn't I have said no? Why couldn't I have come up with an excuse? Any excuse. Anything! But all I said was, "Ummm, sure. Wait- Where?" (mistake #1).
So here's the back story. Rach is selling houses in a community pretty close to our neighborhood. At some point in the future, the two neighborhoods are going to connect, but we're not quite there yet. So Rach wanted to go see how close the two roads were to connecting to each other. This meant we'd have to drive to the end of one road, then get out and walk through the woods to the other road. But it would be WAY too easy if it were just me and Racheal. So we decided to take Cole, Scarlett, Jaxon, Izzy, and Opossum with us (mistake #s 2-6).
We take my truck to the end of the road in our neighborhood, then get out to walk the rest of the way. When we let the dogs out of the truck, Rach said she heard a pit bull, and didn't want our dogs to get eaten. (She has got some amazing ears to be able to pick out dog breeds based on their barks. She really needs her own show on Animal Planet). Anyway, we left the dogs in the truck just in case. So Rach, Cole, Scarlett, Jax, and I start off through the thicket to get to the other side of the forest. The terrain wasn't terrible. There were some ditches, and some hills, and pretty thick bushes; but nothing too difficult for Scarlett to walk through, or for me to carry Jaxon through. Once we got through the 500 yards or so to the other side, we decided that I would run back through the woods, and drive my truck around to come pick everyone up (mistake #7). Because, you know, it'll be getting dark soon. I start running towards the truck, and as I'm running through the woods, I remember thinking to myself, "Huh. This is how horror movies get started."
After successfully making it back to my truck, I made the 10 minute drive around the neighborhood that the new road will be eliminating. And upon my arrival to where Rach and the kids were, Rach says, "What took you so long?" Okay, I know what you're thinking. Now that we have everyone all in the same place, including the dogs, and the truck, we can just pile in and go home, right? Well, then this wouldn't have been a proper adventure, now would it?
Rach wanted to drive the truck through the other side to see how much more of the new road still needed to be built (mistake #8). I expressed my concerns because of how wet the ground was, but she assured me that she had just walked through and it was a lot more firm than it looked. She said she would drive since she knew where the soft spots were, and what parts to avoid. Giddyup. Let's ride. After about 300 yards, we got to a point that was past where they had already walked. Rach told me to get out to see if the truck could make it through the next wet spot. So I hop out, and walk across some pretty solid ground before getting to what seemed like a tiny little puddle. I didn't want to get too muddy, so I didn't bother going ALL the way through the puddle (mistake #9) So I get back in the truck and say, "Oh, we got it. Just gun it." We get the front tires through, and just as we're about to get the back tires through, when we started spinning. Crap. Don't panic. We can get through it. We tried rocking it back and forth but no dice. At this point, it's starting to get pretty dark, and guess what? We have no flashlight (mistake #10). So Rach and I get out of the truck to go looking for pieces of wood and stuff to put underneath the tires. We ended up finding some stakes holding up a plastic fence. And as I'm crawling around by the tire trying to dig us out (with my bare hands since we didn't have a shovel - mistake #11), I quickly realize that we have discovered quick-mud. What's quick-mud, you ask? Well I'll tell you. Quick-mud is a lot like quicksand, but only if you add water and rocks. As I'm trying to dig us out, I notice that I keep sinking. My feet are plunging into the mud about two feet up my legs. I looked like a torso with 4 chocolate dipped banana limbs. So now it's dark. We're stuck. We have no flashlight. And it's getting cold. Rach starts calling people on the 1 cell phone that we have (mistake #12) whose battery is running dangerously low (mistake #13). I'm still trying to dig us out, the kids are asking a million questions, Rach is trying to get someone to help us, and I'm starting to get frustrated. So I'm knee deep in quick-mud by the back passenger tire, trying to explain to the kids what I'm using the wood for; getting really irritated at this point, and Jaxon leans out the window and says, "Here daddy. You can use my sticks. These will work." He had apparently collected some little sticks during our walk and had been playing with them in the truck. And just like that, I went from feeling angry to feeling about 2 inches tall. And here's where I have to credit the kids; if it weren't for them being there, I'm pretty sure Rach and I would've fought to the death out there. But since we had them with us (being ridiculously well behaved considering the circumstances), neither one of us could show any panic. We just had to accept things for what they were and try and get us out of the mess we were in. And for Rach and I not to argue during this whole situation has to be one of the most improbable things to happen in the history of mankind. Forget about walking on the moon, or Villanova over Georgetown, or Season 3 of Flava of Love. This is by far a bigger shocker.
So we get in touch with our friends Steve and Wayne, who drop everything they were doing to come help us. And thank God, because things were getting bleak. It's now 10 o'clock, it's cold, I lost my shoes in the quick-mud, the forest is starting to make noises, the truck has now sunk into the quick-mud past the exhaust, and we're about an hour away from deciding who we're going to eat first. I run out to go meet Steve and Wayne by the road, and Steve wisely decides not to drive his much heavier truck out to where we were stuck. Instead, we walk back over to the rapidly sinking truck, grab Rach, the kids and the dogs, and get the hell out of dodge. So we all pile into Steve's truck as if we were trying to make it across the border, all 7 people and 3 dogs. It really did feel like a coast guard rescue. We had all kind of dipped into a state of shock. On our way home, Cole asked very Oliver Twist-ish if we could stop and get something to eat, "Please, sir, Can we have some McDonalds?" I had left my wallet in my other mud-legs, and Rach didn't have her's either, but Wayne said, "That's okay. I have mine." Cole mistook this for gloating, as if we were going to go to McDonalds and watch Wayne eat, and said, "Well, Can you please buy us some food then?"
We successfully get the kids back home by about 11:15. I wash most of the quick-mud off. And Wayne, Steve, and I head over to Steve's dad's house to get a bunch of chain and a farm tractor. Steve kept saying the whole time that he had a tractor, and I must say that I was skeptical. You see, I'm what you would call 'city folk'. To me, a tractor means a riding lawnmower. But to Steve, a tractor means 'big giant farm tractor'. But the next dilemma we had was getting the tractor from Steve's dad's house to the big giant hole in the mud where our truck used to be (a bit of an exaggeration, but work with me). Steve gets the tractor out to the street, we drape all of the chains on it, and guess what? The tractor won't start. So now we're jump starting a farm tractor at 12:30 on a Saturday night. Success. As Steve's riding away on the tractor, Wayne and I joke about how silly we're going to look following the tractor along side the 2 miles of highway (including passing a police station) we had to go to get to Rach's neighborhood. But slowly and steady, we make it to where the road ended. And just as we're getting out of the truck, we see flashing lights behind us. That's just great. Busssted. So as the cop walks up, I laugh and say, "Officer, boy do I have a story for you." So I proceed to tell him about how my wife works in the community, and she was driving back to see what kind of progress was being made, and we got stuck. As soon as I said, "My wife, Racheal--" he cut me off and said, "Oh, Racheal? Yea, she's crazy. Yall do what yall need to do." (He didn't actually say that, but I'm pretty sure that's what he was thinking.) Anyway, he let us go after telling us he thought we stole the tractor, and we made it safely to what was left of the truck. By this time, I had to actually dig out the mud from around the back of the truck just to get the trailer hitch on it. That's how much the truck had sunk. So, with Steve pulling me on the tractor, I gunned it in reverse, and barely, just barely made it out of there. My tires were smoking, kicking up quick-mud all over the place, and left a set of 4 foot tall ruts getting back to dry land.
By the time we got Steve and his tractor home, it was after 1 0'clock in the morning. I've got little cuts and bruises all over my arms and hands from the rocks in the quick-mud, my truck looks like the inside of a Mardi Gras Port-o-John, and I think I contracted some sort of viral worms from walking shoeless in the quick-mud. And all of this because I couldn't come up with a better answer to, "Hey, you wanna go on an adventure?" On second thought, maybe I'm not too bright.
There's a dirty tire and an unnecessary finger in this picture
Mistake #9 - "She said she would drive since she knew where the soft spots were, and what parts to avoid. Giddyup." Just sayin...
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