The Little Nissan Who Could

The Little Nissan Who Could

Several years ago, when my son was younger, we decided we needed a new car. We couldn’t afford a new one, of course, so we found a really reliable used one, a little gray Nissan Sentra.

This Sentra was a 5-speed stickshift. Problem was, neither my husband nor I knew how to drive a stick shift.

“No problem,” said my Uncle Gene. “I’ll drive it home from the car dealership and then y’all can practice learning to drive it in the fields around the house.”

So we had a plan. We signed all the paperwork, and Johnny and Uncle Gene piled into our new used car.

Then we all found out that Uncle Gene didn’t know how to drive a stick shift either. I’m not sure why he said he could. Maybe it was some macho thing.

Mama and Jonathan (my son) and I followed behind them as we made our way home. It was the funniest thing we’ve seen, and thank God it was us right behind them, or someone would have surely rear-ended them with all the jerking and stalling out that they did.

That little car was a trouper, and made it home in spite of all the torment that Uncle Gene put it through on that half hour drive. It only took a few days and Johnny and I had both learned to shift gears smoothly and easily, and really enjoyed the way it felt to drive a stick shift.

But our days of fun in the Nissan were not over.

As I said, we had a lot of fields around our house. There were trails connecting one field to the other, and sometimes these little roads had deep ruts made by the tractors and farm equipment that had to go down them.

And in south Georgia, we always get a lot of rain in the late winter/early spring. I mean a LOT of rain. It was a typical time of year, and the puddles didn’t ever have time to soak into the ground before we’d get another week with no let-up in the rain. We’d gone through a couple of weeks like this, and the ground was saturated. And then one lazy weekend afternoon Johnny said, “Why don’t we take a ride back in the fields and see how everything is?”

So we loaded into the little gray Nissan (Johnny, Jonathan, and me), and we took off. It was actually a pretty day. The sun had finally come out, and the air was nice and fresh, so we rolled down the windows.

Since the roads were still kind of muddy, we took it slow. I was driving at first, and Johnny was watching out of the windows for different kinds of birds that were coming out. Jonathan was hopping from one back window to the other (this was before car seats were required) checking out all the new leaves and mud puddles along the way.

We turned down one section of the road that seemed a bit more muddy, and I looked at it for a minute, unsure.

“Oh, go ahead. It’ll be fine,” Johnny urged me.

And so, feeling a little like one of the Duke boys, I put the Nissan in gear and hit the gas. We were doing fine, and I had a bit more confidence in my driving abilities, so when we came to a section of the road that was totally underwater, I just slipped it into a higher gear, pushed the gas down farther to the floor, and straddled the ruts. We went right on through, with water sluicing up on either side. Jonathan loved it, and just clapped and cheered from the back seat.

I have to admit, for a minute I was worried when we went through it, but once you start something like that, there’s no turning back. So we made it to the other side and kept going to the next field. Once we got there, we got out of the car and all admired the mud that had splashed up the doors and back of the car.

Then Johnny said, “I want to drive back,” and he climbed in the driver’s seat.

Now normally Johnny is a very good driver. He’s safe, he knows how to drive on dirt roads without letting the sand pull him…but I think he felt that he had to prove something to me. After all, if a woman could make it through that little ocean puddle that covered the road, then surely he could make it back through.

But I think Johnny forget that once you drive through a puddle, it stirs things up and makes it a lot harder to drive in the mud. And the one thing I’ve never been able to get him to understand is that you STRADDLE the ruts. You do not ride in them. He just can’t get that in his head.

So, he stops just before the puddle ocean, eyes it, and then stares at me with an almost unholy gleam. “Y’all hold on!” he shouted.

Now if you know anything about rednecks, you know that these words are right up there with the famous “Y’all watch this.” I knew something bad was about to happen.

Jonathan and I barely had time to brace before we hit that water, going IN the ruts this time. Johnny fought with the steering wheel for a second, going steadily through, and then the car slowed…and slowed some more…

We could feel the wheels turning, but the car finally stopped, halfway through this puddle, and the engine shuddered and died.

We all sat there. I stared at the water outside my window, because it took several minutes for it to sink in. We were well and truly stuck in the mud.

Our silence was finally broken by Jonathan’s giggles, and we heard a splashing sound. We turned around and our son was sitting in the back seat, splashing in the water that had quickly seeped up into the car and come in the doors.

Yes, that’s how deep the puddle was.

I didn’t say a word to Johnny. I didn’t know WHAT to say. If I’d started talking, I’d have probably killed him. We both knew there was no way to dig the car out, and the two of us couldn’t push it, so we climbed out. The water was up to my waist. I stood there with the water settling around me, finally looked at him and asked, “Why didn’t you STRADDLE the ruts so you’d have a few more inches of dirt above the puddle? Why did you have to go right in the middle of it?”

He didn’t really have much of an answer. How can you defend sheer machismo? He finally said, “Well, I thought we could make it.”

We tugged Jonathan out of the car through the open windows, and slogged through the puddle. I couldn’t even look back at the car. We squished our way back down the roads to the house. On that day, it wasn’t funny. It was awful. Our car was stuck in the mud, and we didn’t know how to get it out and get it home.

The next day, one of the farmers who rented the fields came to us and said, “I saw your car. You want me to pull it out with a tractor?”

Of course, we did, and he did, and the little gray Nissan was towed to our house. We opened the doors and water poured out, all gray brown and nasty.

We left the windows down and the doors open for about a week, and kept checking on the car. The seats dried, though they were now stained. We finally decided to try to crank it. And you know what? That little car’s engine turned right over like nothing had ever happened to it.

We cleaned the interior and kept that little car for several years after that, even though water still sloshed in the side panels of the trunk whenever we’d hit the brakes.

And she earned a new name that day. She will always be referred to affectionately as our Nissub.