Steering through mud season

A friend remarked recently that he’s encountered “frost heaves deep enough to swallow a Hybrid” on local roads. By necessity, I drive a minivan, which is significantly harder to consume than a Prius. But that’s a great bit of imagery, and I think any of us who travels the roads this time of year can relate to the challenge of steering through the potholes and frost heaves of spring, or, as we so fondly call it, Mud Season.

My own road, which turns from rough pavement to narrow dirt one sharp turn before our driveway, is worse this year than I’ve ever seen it. The paved – and I use that term loosely, for there’s more sand and crumbling than pavement at this point – section of the road has decayed to a series of kitchen sink- and bathtub-sized potholes that fill with water and connect to form a virtual minefield for drivers. I’ve accepted that it takes an extra few minutes now to maneuver the half-mile from our house to the state highway at the end of our road.

Even that highway is no guaranteed easy travel route. A few weeks back we had to go the long – and bumpy – route home after a sinkhole large enough to swallow a minivan opened up in the middle of the road. The highway crew got in there and patched it up quickly, but there’s now a wide strip of gravel the breadth of the road where there should be pavement.

Going down the hill from home is out of the question for me. My husband likes the challenge of steering through slippery, gooey troughs of mud bordered on each side by ditches that are easily deep enough to swallow a hybrid or a minivan. But he drives a pickup these days and has the option of 4-wheel drive. I, on the other hand, chauffeur a gaggle of sometimes-rowdy children in a front-wheel drive minivan. I’m leaving the snow tires on until after mud season; I figure I need all the extra traction I can get.

The muddy ruts act like a vortex, sucking cars in so that there’s no exit until the ruts peter out to washboarded gravel. Last year the town road crew, in an effort to make the road passable in mud season, dropped a load of large stones on the two worst sections of the road, which happened to be directly above and just below our driveway. The stones filled in the ruts, alright, but made for an excruciatingly jarring drive. I can’t imagine it was much fun for the guys who dropped them there, either, as they had to dig the stones out to grade the road a month later.

The other morning we woke to a fresh layer of spring snow, just enough white to provide a superficial cover on the road and turn that half-mile stretch into a game of memory: zig hard here, zag gently there, watch out for the dip straight ahead. At least on the road to my daughter’s preschool the frost heaves are obvious. Forget hybrids, these monsters look as if they’ve swallowed a VW bus. The swollen pavement lurches to the right, then swoops to the left – right through a pothole, of course.

I keep thinking I ought to wash my car, but what would be the point? It would just get covered in mud again the next time I left the driveway. Our house is currently surrounded by a mud moat. The kids don’t seem to mind. They’ve hauled the sandbox toys out of the garage and gone to work digging through the top layer of sand – the bottom is still frozen solid. To get to the sandbox – or the garage – they have to traipse through muddy puddles. To get anywhere, they have to traipse through muddy puddles.

And so the house is filled with muddy snow boots, muddy muck boots, muddy snow pants and jackets, and muddy paw prints from the dog. Ah, well. It’s mud season, that time of year where the weather is anything but predictable, and we’re guaranteed our fair share of bumps in the road. Just get out the hose and the broom and make mud pies. After all, black fly and tick season will be here soon enough.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the April 5, 2013 edition of the Record Littleton.