Now a new chapter has opened in the Saga of Chinaberry Lane. (No one knows why it’s called Chinaberry; there are no Chinaberry trees nearby, any more than there are azalea bushes by my house, although the post office in their infinite insanity decided to call our little lane “Azalea View.” But I digress.)
The last few seasons here have been unusually wet – we’ve seen thunderstorms, rain showers, snowstorms, or ice at least once every couple of weeks. In mid-December, we got over a foot of snow in the space of twelve hours, which set off a chain of events that has resulted in the dirt road going from the pavement to my house – about a third of a mile – dissolving into mud. One of our well-meaning neighbors decided to scrape it over the weekend, which had the unintended effect of spreading the mud from one end of the road all the way down the entire length of it.
So, for the last three weeks, I have been learning how to drive in mud. I’ve managed relatively well in snow and ice; mud was a new experience. After I had struggled with alarming scraping sounds from the bottom of the car and a less-than-stable driving surface for several days, Brian finally had enough of my ignorance and snapped, “Keep the wheels straight! Whatever you do, keep the fucking wheels straight!” Coming from a man who has lost his license for a year, this might be laughable, but once he explained the theory I was appropriately terrified, enough to take him seriously. Apparently, if you have the wheels turned to one side or the other while the car is actually still going forward, you run a very high risk of busting your CV joint, which he explained to me as being essentially the front axle (or one half of it). In other words, you’re fucked.
It makes very little sense on paper – to have a car’s wheels turned one way while the car itself is still moving forward. I understand the converse of that, having slid on ice before, but this concept was new to me and I didn’t get it. Until I had to drive through mud, repeatedly, at least two, and sometimes as many as six times a day, depending on our schedules.
To drive in mud, you have to do several things simultaneously. You have to look ahead to see where the ruts are leading you and try not to let them force you into large objects, such as houses, trees, and other cars. You have to keep your eyes open, instead of closing them tightly when you hear the awful grinding noise of your car hitting bottom. You have to keep the pedal down even when you think you’re losing control of the car or about to be stuck, otherwise you really will stop. And if you stop in a mud pit, you’re dead.
Side effects of this complex process can include intense and unpleasant adrenaline rushes and temporary attacks of Tourette’s syndrome, when it seems as though every profanity is absolutely necessary to keep you moving forward. This is problematic when you have an impressionable six-year-old in the car with you, although to Aeryn’s credit, she seems to understand that those awful words are not to EVER be repeated. Especially at school.
I have been toying with the experience as a metaphor for writing – specifically, for writing Sanctuary. It’s so easy to get bogged down and misdirected by things that are outside of my control, and by my own mental processes, which are having a grand old time juggling characters and back stories and plot, even though I haven’t asked them to, and frankly, life would be a lot easier in my head if they’d stop that shit. Traitorous bastards. At least the setting hasn’t changed, and the essential characters and plot points are still there, which is heartening.
Then there’s the illusion of stasis, or even of backsliding – where it feels like I’m not going anywhere, and that all I’m doing is, as Stephen King says, “shoveling shit from a sitting position.” It brings to mind my efforts to learn the fiddle a couple of years ago. I would practice almost daily, for around an hour, even though for days at a time the sounds I made should have attracted male cats for miles around in hopes of getting a little pussy. Then, when I was just about ready to give up and stop wasting my time, I would take what felt like a huge step forward – suddenly my fingers would hit the strings without conscious direction, the bow would sound true, and the Rocky Road to Dublin would finally click. It was enough to keep me going.
It’s a cycle. I tell myself this every day – on days when the writing is flowing well and on days when it’s blocked completely. I am always moving forward, even if it doesn’t feel like I’m making any progress at all. Sitting, typing, working, brainstorming, plotting, whatever I’m doing, even if I don’t use it later, is progress – and as Laraine Herring likes to say, “Nothing is wasted.” Not even if I think it is.
So what do you do when you’re trying to get through what seems like an impassable mudpit, where the substrate of the road changes daily, depending on the weather, the underlying rock (or lack thereof), and the driving decisions that other assholes have made since the last time you drove the road?
You keep the wheels straight, and you lay the pedal down.
And, hey, if you get stuck – as I did yesterday morning – you call for backup. Because sometimes there’s no way you can get out of the shit on your own. Sometimes you just need a shovel, and a push.
~andi
