Drivers of four-wheel drive trucks have been taught bad habits.
I blame truck advertisements.
I got a phone call Friday evening asking for help. A former tenant was at my farm. He was stuck in mud.
Regular readers know I own a farm. I have grown melons on it for 60 years. I am putting in a vineyard.. A farm road goes the length of my farm, from the county road to the Rogue River, almost a mile. The caller had come back to the property to take a look at the river at high flow in the current rain.
This is the start of the road.
A driver of a passenger sedan might look at this road, notice the rain and light snow coming down, and think twice. Maybe the road is not passable; the car might get stuck. But the driver of a four-wheel drive SUV or truck looks at it differently. The driver sits high in the seat, commanding the view. He has seen countless times on TV what a vehicle like his can do. He can go anywhere. He can defeat that road. After all, isn't that what he is paying for?
Halfway down the road, the water table is higher and the road surface got softer. The existing ruts collect rain, so they had gotten larger and softer. The road was worse.
A sedan driver who got this far would likely stop and turn back. They would barely have made it to here. Their vehicles would have been sliding and fishtailing. Their tires would have been spinning and kicking up mud. If they had looked in the rear-view mirror, they would see they had been leaving deep tracks.
A driver of a 4WD drive truck looks at it differently. He owns a performance vehicle. They smash over and through obstacles. They dig right through mud. He has a destination to get to. Forge on!
Then, if the road becomes totally impassable, go off-road. After all, it's anoff-roadvehicle. A newly-planted grass field is available.
The former tenant's Dodge Ram 2500 truck gets lousy fuel mileage, but he is proud of his rig. He should be. It is large and powerful. It can do anything and go anywhere. In this case it got as far as the ruts at the top of the photo.
In his telephone call for help he said he had thought first of calling Triple-A. I asked that he not call a tow truck, not yet. Let me try first, I said. A tow company would send a heavy truck, which would have meant deeper ruts on the road and even deeper ruts if the tow truck got onto the field. My John Deere tractor is lighter than any tow truck, but it has very low gearing, which gives it power to pull heavy things. More important is that it has huge tractor tires with thick tread designed both for traction and to avoid compacting the ground.
I was able to pull him out.
The driver was apologetic. I tried to be forgiving. Getting stuck is part of life working around a farm. So is getting people un-stuck.
In tomorrow's post I will show why I think the driver drove down this road. He had been infected by TV ads with very bad, very stupid, very dangerous ideas of invincibility and entitlement. The ads normalize reckless driving, excessive speed, and disrespect for the rural land they travel over. Four-wheel drive truck owners have a machine-over-nature idea in their heads, and they have the machine.
For today I will leave with this:
1. Four-wheel drive means you can get stuck farther from the road.
2. Driving on wet ground leaves ruts. Driving on dry ground kicks up dust. Driving fast scares livestock. Driving across creeks and waterways silts up the stream bed and injures wildlife.
3. When you are driving off-road, you are driving on land that was not designed for a vehicle. Don't vandalize it by how you drive on it. If you wouldn't think of dumping garbage on that land, maybe you shouldn't be driving on it either.
4. Real environmentalists, sportsmen, outdoor-enthusiasts, and nature-lovers are gentle with the land they are driving on.
Tomorrow: A close look at some truck ads. A 4WD truck is a bucking bronco. Ride 'em cowboy! Yee-haw!
Thank you Peter for exposing the absurdity of the auto industrie's 4-wheel drive commercials; it's destruction to otherwise rational thinking and the environment.
My dad used to disparage 4wheel drive vehicles by saying they were the perfect vehicle to get stuck in