A Cornishman in Africa: The trouble with puddles.

Rain in England is wet, cold, monotonous, grey and generally miserable. Over here it is different for a start it does not happen every day, in fact it happens so infrequently that you really look forward to it, a concept that never crossed the lonely planes of my mind when I lived in Cornwall.

I have been back here this trip for seven months now and not so much as a drop has fallen, well I lie a little there I have witnessed drops but that is all they were, not enough to make the ground wet all over, you could still walk between the drops on the ground without touching them. But in about 6 days this is all going to change. The first rains are called the settling of the ashes, and that is a pretty accurate description. It normally builds for three or four days with the air becoming more humid in the afternoon until the day the heavens open. Usually it starts in the afternoon, great big, juicy drops of fresh quenching water, the impact when they strike the ground sending up a puff of dust, then as they get more frequent so the ground starts to transform from the dust bowl it has become over the past few months, into a dark brown wallow. As the flow from the sky intensifies, then the thunder and lightning, the likes of which you can hardly believe if you have only witnessed a thunder storm in Cornwall. The lighting cracks, then nano seconds later a boom of thunder so deep and loud you feel it passing through your chest, for those with a week heart some of these booms, I swear would end their time in this place. And for those with poor muscle control they will find themselves with other all sorts of other problems. It will normally rain in the afternoons for about a week or ten days. Then stop for a few weeks, before the intervals between these bouts become shorter and the rainy season sets in, in earnest.

That is a brief outline of the rains here and the passion it invokes.
Once the ground has soaked up all it can consume the water flows where it can flow, then settles and rests where it cannot.
This brings me onto the subject of this piece, Puddles. Now puddles in Cornwall are inconvenient, a nuisance at worst. I never forget as a child being told the rime about a rather absent minder doctor from the midlands who managed to step in a puddle that came up to his waist. I think his name was Foster but that’s by the by. What my point was, that it was preposterous to think that a grown man is going to find a puddle in Gloucester that would ever come up to his waist then step in it. This having been said, in the past few years with the floods there it’s becoming a common occurrence.

The roads here as I am sure I have mentioned before are an interesting experience, not least when you get off the main roads and get onto the dirt. Some of these are well maintained but others are not, it is these un-kept roads that become interesting when it rains.
There is a stretch of road (I use the term loosely) that I used to travel every day on the way to work, as the rains came the road became slippery at first and then very slippery. Because the roads are cambered, the idea being, the water runs off. Your vehicle realises two things, the first being it now has a mind of its own and the second being its got a wicked sense of humour. the last thing it wants to do is to go in a straight line, even if you do manage straight forward travel, there is a better than good chance that the back end of your vehicle will be travelling along beside you. A friend described it to me as trying to drive on a bar of soap. I must point out at this time this is not a stretch of road 100m long, there are 17km of it.

The roads after a couple more days of rain decide they have had enough and decide to leave, they do this by attaching themselves to your wheels and try to come to work with you, this makes your vehicle even more uncontrollable and about three times heavier.

The final stage and one that tends to stay for most of the rainy season is where the huge pits that have formed over the past 9 months fill with water. I can tell you this without fear of contradiction, we saw a car in a puddle and the water level was up to the roof lining. It seems the driver had driven into the puddle, not knowing how deep it was and it flooded his engine. It was then about half way up his doors, so he decided to leave it there and go to get help to tow it out, By the time he got back to it(It had rained non-stop since he was gone) the water was to the roof. These puddles are also, not clean ones like you get in Cornwall, they are thick and gloopy, more mud than water and the mud stains.

This was an extreme puddle but I can guarantee that I will have to drive through at least 10 puddles over 60cm deep and some even deeper every day on the way to work.
The other reason for finding cars in the middle of puddles, is an interesting one, and one that should stand as a warning for those who like to drive fast through puddles.
In an interestingly helpful way to try and solve this whole puddle problem some friendly folk decide to remove the puddles by filling them with rocks and rubble. And these folk being punctual as well as helpful, if at 17.00 the said puddle only has two 40cm square boulders in it, that is how it will stay until the morning when they return to work to find a 4x4 with no sump and no front axle keeping the boulders company, and a rather unhappy owner awaiting their punctual arrival back to work.

When the rains finally stop the roads take about another month to dry out to a reasonable level when progress can be made along them at an acceptable speed. Until next year!


Denzil Bark.