You know those TV dramas where the protagonist always seems to find just what he needs to get out of a jam? It always seems kind of unbelievable. But a lot of my early memories of my Dad seem to be just like that.
There was the time our house on Sir Francis Drake in Marin County started flooding. We escaped to our cousins but Dad stayed back. He took all our precious belongings and put them on my parents’ queen bed and then took our chest of wooden blocks and put the blocks under one leg of the bed at a time slowly raising the whole thing. Fortunately, the water stopped rising before he ran out of blocks. The mud on those wooden blocks never washed off.
Then there was that trip when the fanbelt in our Pugeot 404 broke in the middle of the Nigerian desert. We replaced the fanbelt with a rope and limped into the next tiny village. Then out of nowhere another Pugeot drove up. The driver was carrying an extra fanbelt and offered it to us when he learned of our plight.
Then there was the time our landrover burnt out its wheel bearings in some forest in Nigeria. All five of us were preparing to sleep in the landrover and my brother famously said “What will we do when the lions come?” Then up drove a ramshackle lorry. Three of us climbed into the cab and the other two jumped into the truck bed, which had a big hole. The lorry dropped us off in our little village inn just as their New Year’s Eve celebration was coming to a close.
And then there was the time our landrover was sliding down a cliff into a pond in Bangladesh. Dad asked some villagers for help but the two that came couldn’t keep it from sliding. Then he pulled out a 500 Thaka note and waved it and 20 people came running and pulled it right back up by hand onto the road.
And, of course, who can forget the baby taxi drive to Matlab? At the time many of the bridges in Bangladesh were in ruins as a result of the war so you had to take several ferries to reach the Megna where one could pick up the Boston Whaler speedboats. These little blue and white skiffs looked quite out of place next to the rusty launches and small country boats that were the primary river transportation at the time but were (and still are) an easy way transport staff and visitors to ICDDRB’s field site in Matlab. Unfortunately, there was a two-hour wait for cars at the first ferry due to traffic. So we walked on to the ferry and then on the other side hired a baby taxi (a.k.a. 3 wheel scooter). Will hung on to the back, I slid in next to the driver, and Dad, Mom, Paul, and Rebecca squeezed into the back seat. About an hour later we arrived at the speedboats.
Anyway, suffice it to say that when this kind of thing keeps happening you just stop worrying and trust that you’ll find what you need to scramble over whatever stumbling blocks are in your way.
That is one of the greatest gifts my father gave me.