The Thing about Adventures

By Claire Erasmus

The thing about adventures is they’re only fun in hindsight.

Take last week, for example. My car broke down, which wouldn’t be too special, except it was in a ginormous mudhole. While it was raining. Actually, raining is too mild a description. This was a monsoon.

I stared out the windscreen, clean water pouring from above and muddy water rising from below. My swishing wipers fought to give me a clear view of the African bushveld. As though I would want to look at elephant and lion and buffalo and all sorts of other creatures known for their violent tendencies and general ill-will toward mankind while stuck in a monsoon.

Thankfully, this is the twenty-first century. We have technology. A quick look at my phone dashed that hope. No signal. I flung the useless device on the empty passenger seat.

My options were limited. Stay in the hole and someday get found petrified in mud, or try and get my car unstuck. Without becoming lunch. While the sky bucketed water down.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, then peered out the window. The mud wasn’t quite to my door. “Finally, something good.” I swung the door open.

And mud poured in.

I released a growl worthy of a lion, clenched my teeth, and stood in the muck. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.

I sloshed to the back of my car and rummaged through the trunk. One item you can’t go without in Africa is rope. A good length of sturdy cordage will get you out of most pickles.

All I had was a roll of cotton twine. Which wouldn’t be up to the task unless I twisted it a hundred times. I’d have better luck starting a fire in the rain and signaling for help.

By the time I worked out that my rope substitute wasn’t good enough, I was as wet as the world around me and more miserable than a soaked cat. This wasn’t the way I wanted to start my vacation. I slammed the trunk, squinting through the water streaming down my face, and tromped around my car.

That’s when my shoe came off. I stumbled in the shin-deep mud, thick wetness soaking into my sock and squishing between my toes.

“Oh, wonderful.” I thumped the car’s roof. As if all this was its fault.

I could always find logs or stones and pack them beneath the wheels. People did that when they got stuck, didn’t they? Of course, their cars were actually starting. But didn’t miracles still happen? That’s what Mom believes, anyway.

Worrying about the dead engine could wait. I eyed the thick bush. Blundering about looking for suitable tools with grumpy, wet animals who would either object to my intrusion or welcome me as lunch didn’t sound all that great.

Neither did sitting in my car waiting to become a mud-encrusted fossil.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered, then strode forward. With only one shoe. I wasn’t fishing for the other one, and the amount of sludge caking my foot was as good as a shoe by this stage.

A decent number of acacia trees were clumped in thickets close to the road, sparing me a long, miserable hike. Plenty of logs lay scattered beneath them. One large specimen stretched into the bush, and I smiled. “Finally, some good luck.” I pushed past a shrub and reached for it.

Something snorted.

Are you familiar with buffalo? Yes, they look like big cows. But trust me when I say they are not big cows. They are demons with horns. Big horns. Horns they use to kill lions who try to have them for lunch. Did I mention they’re big?

Apparently, a herd of these massive beasts had been hiding from the rain in the thicket I’d decided to raid for logs. They burst from the bush with snorts, grunts, and pounding hooves that shook the earth. Mud splattered everywhere. Trees shuddered and flung water off their leaves in all directions.

And me?

I did an excellent impersonation of a boulder and prayed I wouldn’t be speared. Becoming a mummy in the mudhole was sounding far more attractive.

One thing that is quite hard to appreciate when interacting with wild animals in proper conditions—which are you in a vehicle with large distances between you and them—is how fast they can move. Three panicked breaths after the bush exploded into demon-infested movement and the thicket was quiet once more. I hightailed it back to my stuck car. Only once the door was closed did I start breathing again. Now all I had to decide was how to leave my final words. The layer of mud on the floor suggested that my phone would suffer the fate of drowned technology, so using it wasn’t a great idea. Maybe I could leave an ink-and-paper note. Surely someone someday would be able to clean it up enough to decipher my words. That’s what happened in Titanic, right?

Except I’d rather have a miracle.

As it turns out, my mother was right. Those do still happen. Mine came in the form of a mechanic driving a 4×4 with a winch. And real rope. According to my savior, who happened to work for the lodge I was staying at, I didn’t need to worry about elephant and lion and buffalo. What I really should’ve worried about were the snakes. Apparently, there’s one whose venom will kill you in minutes and can strike a balloon twice before it pops. Apparently. They would have been hiding from the rain under logs and stones. Scaring a herd of buffalo and being caught in a stampede was the better option.

At the end of the day, the worst I suffered was losing a shoe and being unable to decide if the brown stains on my pants are all from the mud. Looking back, the whole episode is marvelously funny—depending on how you look at it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claire Erasmus is a copyeditor, proofreader, science tutor, and violin teacher who lives in South Africa but frequently visits other worlds through books. She adores the world of fiction and loves to explore Christian themes through writing, particularly fantasy. Claire also enjoys being in nature, especially if it involves hiking in the beautiful Drakensberg.

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