Case of the Mondays

Next time I have a case of the Mondays, I'll always remember this Monday's experience driving back from interviews in a rural market to put things in perspective. We completed our interviews for the day in record time and were poised to make it back to Saint Louis in time for dinner when the approaching rainstorm arrived.

We had driven a solid 2+ hours to arrive at the market that morning. The last hour of the journey required a 4x4 truck (or a quatre-quatre en francais), as the road became more of a well-worn path than an actual road. In the rain, the mayor of the town where the market was held was worried we'd have trouble getting back, as the flat terrain collected water wherever it fell and there was very little drainage.

In a display of Senegalese hospitality, the mayor housed us under his roof while the rains passed. He hoped we'd stay long enough for the trucks that transport market-goers (and thus know well where the way is least treacherous) started their next outgoing journey. It was a good, sensible option for us, since we were relatively unfamiliar with the area, but everyone was tempted by the thought of having a normal dinner at a normal time. We didn't want to wait, so we struck out on our own, promising to move slowly and carefully through the waterlogged landscape.

We navigated around as many massive puddles as we could, but contiguous dry land was hard to come by. Charging through standing water was necessary at times, but we had no way of knowing how deep the water was upon approach. We navigated successfully through several puddles, but our luck ran out pretty quickly. We navigated around a seemingly small puddle when the quatre-quatre sunk heavily into the mud.

A collective groan preceded the removal of shoes and socks and the rolling up of pants. We all got out of the car to assess the situation. The right side of the vehicle was up to its undercarriage in sloppy mud. We had no tools to speak of and the last village we passed had been several kilometers ago. We set to spooning mud away from the wheels with our hands and tearing branches off near by shrubs to set them under the wheels for traction. One member of the field team set out on foot to find a local village. We worked on the branch traction strategy for over an hour with no success, so we gave up and waited for word from the village.

Someone in the village was able to recruit men and boys from different households to come to our rescue. They brought 10 guys, two shovels and two metal planks for traction. They dug us out of the mud like Minnesotans commonly dig themselves out of snowbanks in winter. They dug a trench to drain the water away from the wheels, then dug out the wheels, then the undercarriage. It was like they'd done this before. After an hour excavating the sunk quatre-quatre, they placed the metal planks under the rear wheels. As the driver got behind the wheel, the army of rescuers assumed the pushing position and this happened:  

So we didn't make it home in time for dinner after all. But we enjoyed the most spectacular sunset on the drive back, punctuated with plenty of standing water that we didn't get stuck in (but we sent someone out ahead of the vehicle to scope out the depth and identify the best routes through the water). And perhaps most important of all, we didn't have to spend the night in the sunk quatre-quatre in the middle of the countryside.