Wizzy

When the car’s headlights flicker and go dark, I panic. “Shit!” I yell. The Moroccan girls in the back seat giggle and echo, “Shit! Shit!”

An insistent lorry is tailgating me. I lean forward and desperately try to follow the tail lights of the car in front. SLAM! We hit a deep pothole and muddy water splashes over the windshield. I fight the steering wheel so I don’t veer into the oncoming lane. Motorcycles with no lights whatsoever crawl on the verge like dark phantoms. People dart between the moving cars. And, it’s raining—raining so hard that with every stroke the windshield wipers fling a gallon onto the curbside pedestrians. What are all these people doing out in the pouring rain in the dark?

The guidebooks and travel websites are universal in their warning: IN KENYA, DO NOT DRIVE AT NIGHT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THE TRAFFIC FATALITY RATE SKYROCKETS WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN. They don’t mention how dangerous it is without headlights. In the pouring rain.

I can’t stop without causing an accident. The oncoming headlights are so blinding they drown out everything. Several of them urgently flick their highbeams at me as if to say, turn on your lights, idiot! The well-meaning glare makes matters worse. There is an electrical problem in my headlights. No matter how many times I frantically flip the switch off and on, they remain dark. Even in broad daylight, the lanes are frighteningly narrow, and here in Kenya they drive on the left, which only compounds my difficulties. Every oncoming set of headlights seems to be on a collision course.

We departed the Masai Mara in southern Kenya at nine this morning, trusting Google Maps that the drive to our central-Kenya homestay would be no longer than five hours. It’s now 7PM and pitch black and we’re hopelessly lost. Screw you, Google. I see a dark patch on the road verge and I flip on my turn signal hoping that it’s a place into which I can veer and stop. A matatu—one of the swarming microbuses that Kenyans use for public transit–veers between me and my objective and I hit another pothole. “Shit!” I cry, and from the backseat come more giggles.

I manage to get the car off the road. While I hyperventilate, my wife contacts our homestay host on WhatsApp. According to our booking confirmation, her name is Wizzy. She tells us to hold tight, stay put, and she’ll come find us and guide us back to her home. “It’ll take me twenty minutes to get there in this weather,” she explains.

We wait. Eventually, a small Mitsubishi SUV arrives and a woman leans out the window and gestures. The rain has lessened slightly, and I jump out of my car and run to her. “Follow me,” she says. “We’ll have to park your vehicle at the village police station, and I’ll carry you up to my house. Your car will never make it up my road.”

I look at my big Toyota RAV4 with its high ground clearance and knobby off-road tires, and then doubtfully consider the compact Mitsubishi. “Are you sure my car won’t make it?”

“Dead sure,” she says. “No way. Not in this rain.” Her voice becomes ominous. “Trust me. You’ll see.”

We follow her out of the town of Nanyuki and into the countryside, keeping the nose of my Toyota tucked almost into the rear bumper of her vehicle. Buddy-driving, I used to call it. With my headlights out, I’m totally relying on her. Problem is, following this close I can’t see the road directly in front of me, which means I can’t see the potholes. Every few seconds we hit a teeth-jarring hole that shudders the entire vehicle and tumbles the girls in the backseat. They are quiet now, finally seeming to have grasped the severity of the situation.

It is very dark once we leave the town. The Mitsubishi turns onto a dirt road, and after a kilometer or so we reach a small, dilapidated set of corrugated-tin buildings. Wizzy leans out of the window of her Mitsubishi and tells me that this is the police station and that I should park behind the largest of the structures. We transfer the luggage into the tight trunk of her car. Everybody gets wet. Wizzy warns us to be quiet, that the policemen are all asleep, but it is too late. A bobbing flashlight approaches from one of the smaller structures. Wizzy calls out to him. “I’ve texted the chief and told him that I’ll be parking one of my guest’s cars here until the rain stops.” The man nods, and retreats into the building. It seems that the police know Wizzy.

We crowd into the tiny red Mitsubishi. Wizzy is tall, with the commanding presence of a no-nonsense Kenyan farmer. She deep-clutches the Mitsubishi, and we lurch back onto the muddy road. “We’re just a kilometer or two away,” she explains, “But the road is very bad. I think we can make it, but I’ve never done it with five people in Fiona. We may be too heavy. This rain is very unusual.”

She calls her car Fiona. It is a replacement for another Mitsubishi which recently perished, which she tells us she had called Shrek due to its green color. She seems to be emotionally attached to the vehicle, as if the two of them have shared many adventures. With five anxious people in the car, the windows immediately fog into opaque gray. Wizzy uses her palm to clear the windshield in front of her, giving her a small porthole through which to see our path. I wonder why she doesn’t use the car’s window defroster, but she is deeply concentrating on driving and I don’t want to interrupt her.

She turns from the narrow mud track into an even narrower set of deep ruts. “Okay, here we are. It’s only half a kilometer more. Everyone, hold on.”

And with that, we are off. Wizzy guns the engine and the tires vomit mud and we careen into the ruts. I can’t see through the opaque windshield so I use my hand to smear the condensation. In front of us, the viscous goo is at least a foot deep, maybe more, and there’s a treacherous ditch on one side. The car starts fishtailing, until we are sliding sideways, perpendicular to the tracks. Wizzy fights the wheel, but we coast with a jar into the dirt bank. I’m certain that she’ll give up, but instead she sets her jaw and guns the engine, and we skid against the bank for several feet. I wonder what kind of damage she’s doing to the vehicle, but she doesn’t seem to care. The car fishtails again, and she spins the steering wheel into the direction of the slide. The Mitsubishi seems completely out of control, floating sideways as if the undercarriage is surfing on top of the sea of greasy mud.

Wizzy reaches down and shifts the gear selector. “Whoops,” she says with an almost gleeful grin, “I forget to put Fiona into four-wheel drive!” She’s enjoying this, I realize (she will later inform us that she left Britain because life there was “boring”).

The rain is stopping, and I can see farther up the road. My heart drops. A sea of colloidal mud, punctuated with ragged, basketball-sized rocks that float like land mines. There is a narrow bridge ahead, unprotected by railings. Beneath the bridge a small creek has escaped its banks and has become a raging brown torrent. Wizzy guns the car over the bridge and I immediately see that the road on the other side is completely submerged for twenty feet. Water surges across the roadbed in angry waves. To me, it looks dangerously deep, but Wizzy plows into it without hesitation. Somehow the vehicle isn’t swept away, and neither is the engine submerged, even though a quantity of water sheets across the car’s hood.

We emerge from the flood and start to climb a shallow incline. “Here’s the tricky part,” Wizzy admits, and for the first time I hear real concern in her voice. The road climbs steadily. There are more big rocks in the mud tracks. We seesaw and fishtail in the mud, the engine roaring, the stench of wet exhaust filling the cockpit. Wizzy once again wipes the windshield. “I think we got water in our tailpipes,” she announces. Once again the car spins in a smooth motion, and I think we may turn all the way backwards. Wizzy makes a grunting noise and I see that we are headed sideways for the deep ditch. At the last moment she deftly corrects the slide, but we hit a large rock and sideswipe into the high opposing bank.

Jeanne and I had joked earlier about how driving in Kenya is like playing a videogame. Level One is simply dodging the potholes and pedestrians. Level Two is driving in Nairobi traffic (while simultaneously dodging potholes and pedestrians). The levels increase through navigating traffic circles, driving in the rain, driving at night, driving at night without headlights, and now this, the ultimate level of the Kenyan automobile videogame: Wizzy’s driveway.

The mud isn’t really mud. It’s a thick watery suspension of powdery particles upon which the car slides as if it were ice. The wheels spin and eventually lose purchase all together, and we grind once again into the bank. Wizzy stops, scowling, and lets out an apocalyptic sigh. “I don’t think Fiona will make it up the hill with all this weight. Everybody out. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”

I lean out the window. The mud looks knee deep. The rain has stopped and the full moon is suddenly visible. The landscape around me is surreal. There is a tree next to the road that looks like a house-sized candelabra. I tell the girls to take off their shoes, but they don’t understand.  They climb out of the vehicle and squeal when their feet sink into the mud. I direct them up onto a knoll next to the road, afraid that when Wizzy tries to move the now-lightened car, it might inadvertently swerve at us. As soon as we are safely away, she guns the engine. Mud flies, and Fiona breaks away from the bank. At the head of an arcing spray of mud, the vehicle careens up the hill, fishtailing madly, spewing exhaust that floats in the moonlight like a defiant afterthought.

We trudge up the hill, our bloodstreams filled with the adrenalin of the experience, laughing. The night is silent now that Wizzy has crested the hill. I can see her brake lights beckoning at the top. Fortunately, there is a path alongside the road where the mud is only ankle deep. Both my feet quickly become heavy mud-globs that are difficult to lift. Jeanne and I both encourage the girls, though with the language barrier it is difficult to know what they are thinking. They aren’t complaining. They seem to understand that the current predicament is a part of a larger adventure. I wonder how they will describe this experience to their friends back in Morocco.

The night air is warm and moist and heavy with unfamiliar African scents. The moonlight turns the mud to quicksilver. Eventually we make it to the top of the hill, where a man waits to open the gates to Wizzy’s farmhouse. In the moonlight the sturdy stone structure, half of which is buried beneath a monstrous mound of flowering vines, looks like something out of a classic nineteenth-century British novel. It is homey in a way that a normal house with a regular driveway could never be. It is a refuge after a difficult struggle.

We walk past the stables. I nod at Fiona, who is mud-covered and steaming like a horse after a race. Wizzy had been right. I would have never made it up the mud-track in our rented Toyota. The lights gleam yellow from the farmhouse windows. A trio of large dogs greet us, jumping on us and spreading more mud on our clothes. Wizzy proclaims that she will start a pot of tea. As we pull off our muck-encased footwear and wash our feet and legs on the edge of the deep stone porch, surrounded by big wet friendly dogs, I smile. It is plainly obvious why Wizzy loves Kenya.