Stuck in the mud

by Doug Crowe
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 9:16 AM MDT

I was fooling around in the back country the other day and got stuck. The two-track road I was following had a mud hole that turned out to be deeper than anticipated, and I bogged down.

After a minute or two of rocking back and forth and spinning my wheels, I put the truck in four-wheel drive and drove right out of it. I didn't even have to get out and slosh through a foot of goo to lock in the hubs.

Nowadays, you can do that by remaining in the nice warm, dry, clean cab and moving a little lever with your finger.

This got me to thinking about the days of my youth (back in the Pleistocene), when I first began to roam the Wyoming outback in my own automobile. I didn't have a truck then. None of the band of nondescript weirdos I hung around with had a truck.

We had beat up old cars, which required more or less constant maintenance just to keep them running. Anyone at NCHS with a new vehicle automatically was labeled a wimp and a mama's boy, since there was no way they could have purchased such a ride with money they made themselves.

My pride and joy was a 1949 Ford. It was 8 years old when I purchased it for the princely sum of $300. I haven't had a vehicle since that I loved as much as that old beater.

It was perfect. I would fondle it and polish it and drive it between the A&W drive-in on the west edge of town to The Brig drive-in on the east edge, back and forth, again and again, Monday through Friday, looking for girls and/or drag races. On the weekends, I'd take the thing to the country and beat the crap out of it.

The most common injury inflicted was broken springs. I can recall replacing at least five times (all scavenged from junk yards). Next, in terms of frequency, were cracked oil pans. Everyone I knew carried jugs of waste oil scrounged from local filling stations.

That way, when you bashed a hole in the pan and its contents leaked out, you could have your buddy sit on the fender with a jug and dribble in waste oil in an effort to get home before the engine seized up.

Coupled with these common injuries were destroyed shock absorbers (which were a waste of time to replace), cracked windshields (which were a waste of money to replace), flat tires (which were fixed and replaced in the field since we seldom had a spare).

And, on at least two occasions, bumpers were knocked completely off and carried home in the back seat.

Sometimes the trauma inflicted would be such that the vehicle was rendered immobile. And mechanical trauma was not the only cause of immobility. Often the problem was an inability to extricate the car from mud, or snow, or sand, or water (or some combination thereof).

The result would be a Wyoming variation of the Bataan Death March. The worst I recall was from Bates Hole Reservoir to the Medicine Bow highway through wet snow and a 40 mile per hour wind.

Today, these things, which were physically and/or psychologically painful at the time, I look back upon with nostalgia. Somehow, it just doesn't seem right that now all one needs do to resolve such situations is flip the four-wheel drive lever or get on a cell phone and call for help.

I think today's kids are missing out on a real learning experience. Or maybe I'm just getting senile.

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