Off-roading, four-wheelin,’ overland camping, touring, rock crawling, desert running: you name any kind of “off-highway” driving and it is in vogue. In the pandemic, outdoor recreation was one of the only ways spend-happy Americans could safely vacation, and the hangover is evident in the 37-inch tire-and-LED-headlight addiction plaguing a suburb near you.
Yet overlanders seem to believe that any excuse to modify a car and take it off the paved road is a good one. And it’s hard to disagree when so much natural beauty is locked behind a little bit of ground clearance. Amazon, Temu and TikTok Shop all hound you with deals for parts that cost as much as snacks. It was more than my psyche could bear. I had to cash in.
There are countless guides on the internet for recovering yourself if you get stuck off-roading. A core part of this hobby is making a major mistake and fixing it right then and there in the middle of nowhere (provided you spent the loot on the solution beforehand and bolted it to your vehicle.) Whether you have a hi-lift jack, a bottle jack, a winch, traction boards or a friend, there is a way to get home.
To that I say one word: Boring.
If everyone is making the same content – the same guide – then nobody stands out. Where’s the intrigue in getting home safe?
With this in mind, last semester I set out in my RWD 2010 Ford Explorer XLT to make the ubiquitous guide on how to get stuck off road. I had everything I needed. No 4WD. No lockable hubs or differential to speak of. No jack, save for the one from the factory. No winch. Radial tires.
My only recovery gear was Amazon traction boards tacked on to my roof rack and my friend, Finn, who I dragged into my shenanigans. No other vehicle joined us. The stage was set to get stuck – add in an atmospheric river and one whole hour of past off-roading experience, and we were set.
At first, it seemed like I would have no material to write about. The first open “trail” we found was the parking lot for a hiking trail. While rocky, it was no issue for my rig and it gave us an inflated sense of confidence for what came next.
We then turned down another offshoot from Highway 166 and met what should have been our first clue to turn around: cows! We, unknowingly, had turned onto private property – not an outdoor recreation area as we’d thought. We did light mudding: another boost to our confidence. The first time we bogged down, careful throttle application and the rear traction control clawed us out.
Little did we know, that was magic – more of a fluke than a baseline. Back on the paved road, we noticed another offshoot. “One more?” “Yeahhhhhhhh.” A fatal error of hubris. Amongst the list of famous last words, nestled between “Are you recording?” and “Let’s get Buzzballs!” is “Just one more.”
Sometimes in life you make a decision because you feel like it’s what you have to do, not because it’s what you want to do. During this misadventure, I was attending Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. This was the lone CSU that had accepted me, and rather than rot in Santa Rosa for another who-knows-how-long, I figured I’d better buckle down and chase that degree. What I failed to account for was that I, personally, had to be alive and present to finish that degree. I didn’t just get to blow through it in a fugue state, but rather had to viscerally experience each and every day.
I lived alone in a studio apartment. It was sunny every day. The ocean was a 30-minute drive away. The school had thriving business, engineering and agriculture programs. Frats practically ruled the city. At all times of the
It simply was not my scene. That alone nagged me to no end. I attended to a school that I had been (inexplicably) wary of since middle school and I saw it through because, in my mind, I had no good reason to deny it. In fact, I owed this institution my attendance because they had the good grace to accept me. Imagine the prestige.
Yet I found no matter how many organizations I joined, how much intramural softball I played, how many hours I spent loafing in the radio studio: I felt awful. I could barely leave my bed by Thanksgiving break.
The truth is that you don’t owe any university anything. Intrapersonal relationships with instructors, classmates, family, friends, your community: these things are forever. These are lasting. The nameless and faceless institutions that seek to control us are owed nothing. A nation-state, a university, a church. Anything with massive sums of money attached to making its gears turn has a corrupt core. I debased and depressed myself at the altar of expectation like an ascetic monk in hopes that deliberate suffering would somehow free me. It didn’t. Much like my stupid car, I was stuck in the mud, and the rain was only coming harder.
We goosed it as hard as we could up a dirt road towards, unbeknownst to us, a locked gate. We never saw that gate because we barely got halfway up the road. Our speed ensured that we buried the boat in mud, beaching ourselves on the air dam, splash guard and the frame of the vehicle itself. Wisely, I opted not to pack a shovel.
Finn and I spent most of our energy finding rocks to stack and gently attempting to dig out the car to no avail. After several hours, we had a cartoonishly stranded SUV with two bright orange traction boards wedged beneath the back tires and a smattering of stones placed with zero finesse. It was cold, it was raining and we hadn’t seen another car the entire time. Better yet, AAA was not coming to save us. Our options were calling members of the off-road club at Cal Poly or camping in the car until the rain stopped.
On the horizon, through the dumping rain and dark night, we saw a white glow. Whether the lord had finally arrived to rapture us or a nuclear warhead had detonated, something good was on the way. To our joy, it was a neighbor in a Ford Fusion. She was out searching for her dog and said she “did this all the time with my husband back in the day.”
A seasoned four-wheeler, she was not looking to shoot us for trespassing and was in fact so sympathetic to our increasingly helpless situation that she had already called the property owner (whoops) and went on to bring us blankets, coffee, tea and quesadillas. Within the hour, the farmer returned from the city, analyzed that our situation was worth $200 of his time and rescued us with relative ease via tractor.
It was embarrassing all around. To recap: we were stuck on his land with a 2WD soccer mom car attempting mudding seasoned vets would avoid, I was $200 in the hole for an avoidable situation, the rain reached a fever pitch just in time for our windy descent home and every single piece of our clothing had adopted an earth tone. The worst part? I had to be grateful to a Dodge RAM owner. I was lucky enough to pick the funniest person I know to suffer with, so the ride home was far from silent.
I did not yet know that I would drop out of Cal Poly. That took another month or so. The moment my family offered me the choice, I fled home. But in a much more real sense, I knew already that it wasn’t the place for me. Despite the charming faculty, I couldn’t bring myself to attend classes; I had friends in the newsroom who I struggled to connect with outside, I didn’t go out: I was alone. I knew when I graduated high school that waiting until I was sure of what I wanted to do was better than rushing into something. It’s why I attended Santa Rosa Junior College in the first place, and why I’m back. It was tough to relearn that lesson, but I’m immensely grateful for the educational safety net this college provides.
I’m not sure what lies beyond the horizon for me or where I’ll find myself next semester, but I’m out of the mud and have a clearer idea of what I want out of life. I’ve figured out what kind of community I value, where I want to live and what kind of terrain my car can handle: all extremely valuable lessons for the future. Paramount amongst these myriad lessons was the understanding that I don’t owe anyone my suffering. Making major life decisions based solely on the rationale that, “I have no reason not to” is a hazardous line of logic to follow. “Because we might as well,” is not a good enough reason to attempt an off-road obstacle. When you have a feeling in your gut before you take that turn into the sludge, the hungerlike pang asking “are you sure?” just might be worth listening to.
