Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The Day Her Car Was Weeded

You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything in a while. This is because exciting things rarely, if ever, happen in my life. It makes a terrible story, which is why I don't write about it.

But today, I have a story.

And not just a "story". A Story. An Adventure Story, featuring such fantastic plot devices as a long journey, dense fog, a crochet needle, and obnoxious weeds.

The story starts on Monday morning when Zara wakes up feeling depressed and not knowing why. Sometimes Zara gets irrationally angry and frustrated with life. She is so miserable she actually chose to leave her staff work party far too early simply because she couldn't stand to be around people. (Before this, though, she'd found herself a book and started reading, much to the disgust of her colleagues who were all getting drunk downstairs.)

Tuesday is no better. In fact, it's much worse. In a way, it feels like she's two people - there is normal Zara, who is functioning much the same as usual, though with noticably much less energy and enthusiasm ("flat" is the adjective someone used to describe her). The other Zara is shrieking like a madwoman inside her head, keeping up a constant furious stream of insults, expletives, and generally negative commentary on every single action Normal Zara and everyone around her is doing. Work that evening goes something like this:

Normal Zara asks a customer whether she might possibly take their order, an unnaturally wide smile stretched painfully across her face.
Crazy Zara shrieks a very angry name inside of Zara's head, though whether she's directing it at the customer or Normal Zara is unclear.
The customer hems and haws over whether to order steak or pork and asks for a recomendation.
Normal Zara replies that the pork is much more delicious.
Crazy Zara goes on an angry rant with the main points being that, a), Zara is a vegetarian and promoting any form of meat makes her a liar and a hypocrite and b), the customer is a sadistic evil bastard for wanting to eat meat in the first place. She is very impolite in her choice of adjectives.
Later on, Tom-the-Manager asks Zara how everything's going. "All good?" he asks.
"Yep," mumbles Normal Zara, somewhat unnormally unenthusiastic for her. Usually she practically skips with glee and uses words like "Awesome!" and "Fantastic!".
"Cool," says Tom-the-Manager, and stalks off.
Crazy Zara erupts at this innocuous statement and reflects on all the many ways she would like to rip out his liver, force it down his throat and choke him on it, while flaying his ridiculously fluffy beard off his face and using his blood to repaint the ladies' bathroom.

And so the night wore on.

Sitting in her car after work, Crazy Zara seizes control of Zara's body. She shrieks and cries and hits her head on her steering wheel, all the while shouting, "Why? Why?" But neither Crazy Zara nor Normal Zara know the answer because they don't even understand the question.

***

On Wednesday Zara decides to try to make herself feel better. She sleeps in, makes herself pancakes, knits, and watches endless episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Nothing works.

Work that day is a repeat of Tuesday. Zara has had enough. She spontaneously decides to go on a road trip to the one place in the world where she has only happy memories of - a little-known, decidedly ugly beach near Tapora, a village perhaps fifty people in the world have heard of. Her grandparents used to take her fishing there during the summer when she was a kid. Zara often says that she considers fish to be highly-evolved plants and therefore justifies her eating them. In truth, whenever she eats fish, she is reminded of the love of her grandparents and the happy times she spent with them. She loves this beach. She feels as though everything there was a gift especially for her - the mudflats, the mangroves, the crabs that scuttle anxiously away over the sand, the jellyfish stranded across the receeding tideline (a most unwelcome gift, that), the many types of shellfish to be dug for, the mullet that leap out of the water as the sun goes down, the grass that feels for some reason much pricklier than anywhere else, the black swans that honk obnoxiously to each other in the shallow water, the public garden made out of driftwood and beach-scavenged items... somehow, the existence of these things seems much more significant here than anywhere else. If there is any one place that could ever make her feel happy, it is here.

Zara decides to make an expedition of it. She goes home and gets those items she thinks she might need - blanket and pillow, her crochet and writing pad, and a few other extra goodies. She sets out.

She's driving a bit too fast. She's feeling reckless and wants to do something mad. She copes well enough on the wider, better-travelled road from Auckland to Hellensville. After that, though, the road gets steadily windier and narrower. Heavy fog has set in and visibility is low. This does not dissuade her, although she slows down a bit once she turns off onto the road to Tapora. Tapora is such a nowhere place that parts of the road aren't even sealed. They definately don't have any recommended speed signs as you go around corners, which she had relied on earlier to help navigate some of the trickier corners.

The inevitable happens. She takes a corner too fast. Her tires skid on the gravel and suddenly she is swerving wildly. She veers off the road, somehow managing to drive along the side of a very large, steep bank - at least a 50 degree angle. She is convinced the car is going to flip, that she's going to continue to roll down the bank and she's going to hit her head and break her neck and die and her can of drink is going to go flying over all her crochet - but she bounces, her car flies up into the air and crash lands into a two metre high clump of kikuyu grass, narrowly missing an ancient cabbage tree and a small stream at the bottom of the bank.

Zara spends approximately a third of a second marvelling that she is alive. Her predominant thought is of how embarassing this is. She fires up her engine, puts on the four wheel drive mode and tries to power on up the slope. How terrible. Apparently her gigantic off-roader isn't very good at keeping off-road because no matter how hard she tries, her car will not move. Eventually she gives up, turns off the motor, sits back, and laughs heartily.

For someone who up until recently was very depressed, she can see only the good side of the situation. How awesome is this? She's stuck in a ditch on a deserted road in the middle of the night, her car will not move, she can't get reception on her phone, but HEY! It's a new experience and totally fun! She decides to wait until early morning when hopefully some local farmer will come by to tug her out. Until then, she might as well get some sleep. But first she decides to calm down by crocheting a little. The image of a young woman crocheting at one in the morning inside of a giant vehicle parked half-way down a steep bank in one of the most abandoned roads in New Zealand strangely appeals to Zara and she laughs heartily. She is enjoying herself immensely and she suddenly realises that her depression is cured. This only serves to make her feel more awesome.

Eventually she sleeps, curled up in a ball in the back seat with the seatbelt digging into her.

***

At around five-thirty in the morning traffic starts to drive by. A logging truck stops and checks to see if Zara is still alive. He looks slighly stunned as a ridiculously over-cheerful young woman excitedly and happily informs him, that, actually, everything is amazing, and they both exclaim in awe over the path of destruction Zara's car made, revealed in the light of the logging truck's headlamps. He can't pull her out, but does inform her that the rest of the logging crew were to be around shortly. Zara hops back into her car and crochets as she awaits rescue.

Five men in utes and one park ranger later, Zara finds herself back on the road - but not without mishap. The towrope the first man drove all the way home in his ute to fetch snapped as he tried to pull me out. Thankfully, the park ranger had a special cable thingy and that worked much better. Unfortunately, the entire underside of Zara's car is now covered in grass. People always complain about kikuyu. Farmers don't like it because it takes over the paddocks they craze their livestock in. Gardeners don't like it because it invades their gardens and leaves it a giant, weedy mess. There are endless horror stories of people who have tried and failed to remove kikuyu from their gardens - it's so difficult, it's nigh impossible. What you don't generally hear about kikuyu is how hard it is to remove from cars. The first man in the ute - name of Daniel - very kindly spends a good hour and a half trying to pull all the grass out from her car. It was twisted all around the drive shaft which - apparently - is a bad thing and can't just be left. He has to use a hand saw to slice it off. But he succeeds after much pain and effort, and Zara is left in awe of friendly Kiwi men and humanity in general. This man is now three hours late for work and it's his daughter's fifth birthday, and here he is helping some useless city girl weed her car and being wonderfully good-natured about it.

Zara plans to courier a pack of beer to him. She figures it's safer than driving and delivering it herself.


***

And that, dear friends, is the end of my story.

I stopped by in Wellsford to see my dad and tell him the story. I accosted him outside his work and said, "HI! Guess what! I have a totally awesome story to tell you!"
He looked apprehensive. "You're engaged?"
"Er... no."
He looked positively fearful. "You're pregnant?"
"No!"
"Well, what, then?"
"I just crashed my car! -" and he put his head in his hands and he wept. But not literally. Because that would be weird.

2 comments:

  1. This was a most enjoyable read. Thank you for putting yourself in danger to bring me this story.

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  2. That was a fantastic story, and further reminds me that I never want to get in your car again... for a while.

    P.s. When I first read this I thought the title was "The Day her Cat Was Weeded." It sounded rather horrific. The whole way through I was waiting for some mention of a cat which never came.

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