Without question, one of the
very handiest things you can own when you live in a rural area is a
four-wheel-drive pickup. Your livestock, your income, even your
health and safety can all depend on your ability to stay mobile in all
weather, so having at least one 4WD vehicle can relieve you of a lot
of unnecessary stress.
Having said that, you'll find that
after a few weeks of enjoying your omnipotence over all sorts of terrain,
you’ll probably come to the conclusion that it is often nice NOT to need
4WD, especially for everyday events like trips to town, or up to the
highway to get your mail.
That’s when you start to pay
attention to the condition of your driveway and access roads.
Trust me, I know about this stuff.
When we first moved to this old
farm, the only access to pavement was by two miles of
county road. Actually, this wasn’t so bad, since even though this
road was rocky and full of pot-holes, the county was responsible for
maintaining it, so it never really got THAT bad.
However, it never got any shorter
either, and after a time, we began to eye an old log trail through the
back of our place that wound through some pretty formidable terrain, but
managed to access pavement in less than ¾ of a mile, since there is a
state highway that adjoins our back boundary.
One day, when a much-too-small
bulldozer became available to us, we reopened that crude, intermittent log
trail and converted it into a crude continuous log trail that took us all
the way from our back porch to the highway in less than half the distance,
with a fraction of the road dust and without having to drive past the
homes of any of our decidedly nosy neighbors.
We had those things during the
very finest of weather, that is.
The trouble was, we did the work
in early fall, and the winter that followed did not offer us up the very
finest weather on very many occasions.
The road wasn’t so bad for the
first quarter-mile, but then came a section where the old log trail had,
for a few hundred yards, crossed the fence over onto the neighbor’s
property, so we had to blaze a new trail along the base of a hill that was
perpendicular to the direction of the road.
It also sloped decidedly to one
side, the side with a barbed-wire fence along it’s edge.
This was okay, when it hadn’t
rained for several days, but when it was even slightly damp, the fresh red
clay that the bulldozer had exposed assumed all of the properties of axle
grease except color. Attempting to pass this section with a two-wheel-drive was
nothing short of madness. With 4WD, the situation was actually worse, because
now you could PROBABLY get across this stretch without sliding sideways
into the barbed-wire and over the edge of the embankment into the
neighbor’s field, so we had a tendency to take the chance.
Well, remarkably everyone lived through that
period, which lasted for a few winters due to our perpetual lack of funds and
our boundless, home-grown naiveté.
What I’d like to suggest to you is
that you don’t have to live with conditions like that.
If you have home roadway problems,
they probably can’t be fixed for free, but they can be cured, or greatly
alleviated, on a reasonably modest budget.
