E1: La Mula and the Namibia Flood

La Mula and the Namibia Flood
Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours | Vehicle Story: La Mula

NARRATOR: Somewhere on Earth, a volcano is smoking. A market smells of a hundred spices. A little plane is climbing higher than the clouds. You can see it. You can learn about it. Every place is real... and it is all out there. Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you. Passport ready?

NARRATOR: This is a Vehicle Story. Today: La Mula. Registration LAM-001-VE. Track: Land.

NARRATOR: The Fleet Registry lists La Mula as a four by four, heavily modified. Some of the modifications are intentional. Her name means The Mule. Stubborn. Reliable. Goes anywhere. Never thanks you. Lobster Bob named her the first time she refused to start. That was in the Sahara. This story is about the day she refused to stop.

NARRATOR: The place today is Kaokoland, in the north-west of Namibia, in the oldest desert on Earth. Roughly nineteen degrees south, thirteen degrees east. The Namib desert has been dry for around fifty-five million years. And here is the fact to carry to school: some rivers in Namibia are dry for years at a time. They look like sandy roads. Then rain falls on mountains far away, and the river arrives, under a blue sky, with no rain anywhere in sight. A child can hold that at dinner tonight.

NARRATOR: On the morning of this story, Lobster Bob drove La Mula down into one of those dry riverbeds. The sand was flat and firm. The sky was blue in every direction. He had checked the weather where he was. He had not checked the weather sixty kilometres away, on the mountains, where it had rained two days before.

NARRATOR: Halfway across, La Mula's engine note stayed exactly the same. Everything else changed.

NARRATOR: First came the sound. A low hiss, like wind, except the air was still. Then the birds left the trees along the bank, all at once, in one direction. Then, up the riverbed, the sand began to shine.

NARRATOR: The water arrived the way a door closes. First it was a shine on the sand. Then it was around La Mula's wheels. Then it was at her doors, brown and fast, carrying branches that knocked against her sides like someone asking to be let in. Lobster Bob gripped the wheel. He pointed her at the far bank. He pressed the pedal down and kept it there.

NARRATOR: La Mula did not hesitate. She did not slide. Her wheels bit through the water and found the sand underneath, and she climbed, engine steady, water pouring off her bonnet, up the far bank and out, onto dry ground, into the sunshine, as if this were an ordinary thing to do before lunch.

LOBSTER BOB: The rain fell on mountains I never saw, two days before I got there. I never saw a cloud. The water still found me.

NARRATOR: They sat on the bank, the two of them, and watched the river run. It ran for about an hour. Then it slowed, and sank, and stopped. By evening the riverbed was damp sand. By the next morning it looked like a sandy road again, as if nothing had happened. The desert is fifty-five million years old. The flood lasted one hour. Both of those things are true.

LOBSTER BOB: I rate La Mula nine out of ten. The missing point is for the Namibia incident. She is unaware of the deduction and she would not care.

NARRATOR: Lobster Bob came out of that riverbed significantly more humble than he went in. La Mula came out the same as she went in, except wet. The flood did not change her engine note. Nothing ever has.

LOBSTER BOB: She is not beautiful. She is not fast. She has never once cared what I think. In this way she is the most honest vehicle I have ever owned.

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NARRATOR: Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.

LOBSTER BOB: You are the missing passenger, mijo. Passport ready? The world is not going to wait forever.