Uphill

I was walking up a street on a long hillside in India or Bangladesh in the pouring rain w/ a young local boy who was my guide.  The water was rushing down in torrents with the ditches full to overflowing and some places the road itself was flooded a foot or two deep.  At first it was extremely dirty w/ all the trash and filth of the crowded city washing out, but as water kept falling it began to clean up a little.  The street continued uphill, not steeply, but unbroken for at least a mile.  Lots of people were out slogging their way along, completely soaked as we were.  Occasionally a car came past and I wondered how they managed to not drown out when the water was surging up over the hood and roof.

As I got further up the hill it got steeper and now I was in my old 1980 Ford driving up a gravel road in 2^nd gear with my parents in the back seat.  The hill was really steep and I was impressed that the car kept going without slipping on the gravel, and I was glad it had enough power in 2^nd because I was worried about getting it into 1^st without stopping and I definitely didn’t want to stop.  The road was barely wider than the car and both sides were heavily wooded.

I got out and walked along a trail that hugged the edge of a mountain as I headed for the house that was at the top.  At one spot the trail was missing for a short ways but I could see that it continued ahead about 20 feet and about 5 feet below, so I sort of ran on the hillside and slid down and came to the other side just fine.

I walked along a little ways further and the trail widened out into a road again, but it was blocked partway by a large trailer that had some kind of metal frames on it that hung over the sides and took up all the space between the trees.  I thought I could get around by going through the cab of the semi, so I hopped in the driver’s side door.  The driver gave me a funny look as I climbed over him, but he didn’t say anything.  There was a hole in the dashboard on the passenger side and I noticed there was a nest of brown rats in the hole.  They seemed to be hibernating because they didn’t move, even when I grabbed them.  It didn’t seem right that there would be a nest of rats in the cab of a truck that was being used, so I started picking them up one at a time and throwing them out the window.  There were probably a dozen including some nearly the size of a small cat down to a couple little mouse sized ones.