The truck idled on a one-lane road with doubletrack dirt lines barely visible, steep ditches on both sides, and forest beyond that. My wife stood by the pond-sized puddle in front of us with a sapling in her hand and poked the water for depth. I saw visions of the leech scene from Stand by Me, where the boys take two steps and then fall in up to their necks. The sapling test seemed promising, so she waved me on, and I slowly approached a point of no return.
I looked at the mud ruts left behind by other off-roaders and picked what looked like the safest line through—just as the front end dipped, I felt contact with the front skid plate and stopped, staring down the scooped hood at the water below. I had two choices: to go forward in a place with no cell service, with no recovery tools, and two kids strapped into the back seat on their first off-roading adventure.
Or I could reverse my way back down the one-lane road I’d just traversed. This would also involve a potential round-two of a battle with a wild turkey mother whose babies I’d come to close to (The bright orange paint job, called Solar Octane, must have blown their turkey minds.) One thing was certain: Because of the ditches on either side, a…
