While driving down the road to the farm I work on, I passed the neighboring ranch and saw a not so unusual sight. Due to the recent rains, several dozen teenage boys had decided to go four-wheeling with their trucks in the empty reservoir. Reservoirs, as you know, are essentially low spots. That’s the nature of reservoirs. That, in combination with the fact that water tends to run downhill, means that reservoirs are generally moist, even when they look dry. Needless to say, the trucks were stuck. I phoned my neighbor’s ranch foreman. He isn’t fond of teenagers who go four-wheeling on his ranch. Among other things, it rips up the roads, which means a tractor has to spend some time scraping them back into shape. That’s money burned in time and diesel. There’s also the issue of private property, but that’s very much out of style these days, so I won’t comment on it. Happily, a minute after I passed the luckless teenagers, a sheriff whizzed by going the other way.
The German word for the feeling one experiences when seeing such teenagers stuck in the mud is “Schadenfreude”. I also experienced it quite acutely on the freeway the other day, when I saw a driver who had just freaked me out by his reckless speeding pulled over by a cop car. Hehe. Heh. Heheheh.
However, I sincerely hope those teens won’t just get a record and be made to pay a fine, but instead be given community service, preferrably served by driving road-grading tractors on farms. Kind of like the movie “Cars”, except with fewer cars.