I think I can top that one, Webutante: more on car breakdowns and rescues
Some of you may have seen Webutante’s two-part story (see this and then this) about her “can you top this?” car breakdown and rescue. Driving with a fading alternator and no cell phone in a snowstorm in the Midwest, she was saved by coming upon a serendipitous trucker with room for Webutante in his cab, and for one more car in the trailer of his loaded truck—hers.
Well, I think I can top that—or at least match it. You be the judge.
It was the early 70s, and I was driving back to graduate school after visiting my parents in New York. I said goodbye to them one morning and hopped into my fully-loaded car.
I’d been driving for about forty-five minutes in very heavy but fast-moving traffic on the Belt Parkway. I was in the left lane on an elevated part of the road, and the distance between cars was too short for the high speeds we were traveling. But there was no way around that.
Then with great suddenness and seemingly for no reason, the car in front of me hit its brakes, hard.
I was young and my reflexes were good, and I slammed mine on too and managed somehow to stop about a hair from hitting him. But the car in back of me was not so lucky, and I sat helplessly as it rear-ended me.
The entire episode took only a split second, but it seemed to happen in slow motion as I saw it all—the car ahead I feared I’d hit, the moment of relief when I knew I’d probably avoid contact with it, and then the glance in my rear-view mirror that told me the car behind was coming on all too fast.
After the scary impact, all three of us got out of our cars and stood on the elevated roadway in a high wind, attempting to exchange details of licenses and registrations. The man in front of me—the one who’d started the chain reaction—didn’t speak English and I could only get his license information before he sped off again.
His car was nearly undamaged. But my trunk had caved in considerably, and the lock had broken open with the hood slightly raised but jammed, exposing my suitcases and other paraphernalia. I could neither open it fully nor close it fully. And worse, when I tried to start my engine, it made a strange grating noise and the car wouldn’t budge.
The guy who’d rear-ended me was likewise trapped, and together we traipsed to the two nearest emergency phones which, in those pre-cellphone days, were placed at regular and close intervals along the highway.
But like so many public conveniences in the city, they were broken. The man volunteered to walk to the nearest exit and then to the nearest gas station and call for help. I remained standing on the highway, guarding my open trunk (not that I could have done a thing about it if anyone had chosen to pry it open and walk off with my precious possessions, but still), and shivering. There was no breakdown lane and my car was in the left lane of a three-lane highway with lots of traffic going very fast, so all I could do was press myself against the median rail and hope against hope that a police car would happen by.
Where were they when you needed them? Nowhere in sight. I stood there for what seemed like many hours but was perhaps another forty-five minutes, gazing at the speeding cars and hoping some more.
Then I saw an auto in the distance that was going especially slowly, holding up traffic behind it. As it approached, it began to look familiar—why, my mother had a car like that! And then I realized the reason it was going so slowly. It was my mother’s car.
And my mother was driving it.
A more unexpectedly lovely sight—and a more welcome one—could hardly be imagined. It’s not as though I was near home, either. Nor was this a road my mother frequently traversed. But here she was (as it turned out, on her way into Manhattan with an interior decorator to look at fabrics), and I was saved.
Can’t top either one of those, but have a story relating to the rear-end collision.
Back in grad school I was approaching the Caldecott Tunnel as I drove back to Berkeley. Traffic had stopped for some reason. Idling in the stopped traffic, I glanced up in my rear view mirror and saw a car hurtling toward me much too fast. Watching in growing horror, I realized that he’d now passed the point at which he could possibly stop before hitting me.
I cranked the wheel over and gunned the car up onto the elevated median strip while nearby drivers looked at me as though I’d gone crazy. An instant later, the oncoming driver stood on the brakes, laying a massive patch of rubber and screeching to a halt about a foot behind the car that had been in front of me.
One of the nearby drivers who’d shot me a WTF? look smiled, nodded, and gave a little salute as I drove back down off the median strip. No harm, no foul!
Decoration
contributes to happiness
in subtle ways
Free market fabric
wonderfully combined with
highway feng shui
So, what happened in Chapter 2?
Did your mother wait with you for the driver of the other car? Did he bring two tow trucks? Was the driver of the car in front of you liable in any way?
You left me hanging. But it’s okay. I don’t have to know.
When I was a high school senior (in 1976) and a new driver, I caved into pressure from a younger sibling to drive her to a school basketball game. During the half hour drive to the game, it began to snow. I was traveling down a snowy hill and hit the brakes hard (I was too much of a novice to know that you are supposed to pump the brakes and/or shift into neutral ).
I slid into a Lincoln Continental at the bottom of the hill and promptly burst into tears. While I was trying to pull myself together and exchange insurance information (no one was hurt), who should appear on the scene, miles away from home, but my parents, who had gone out for the evening. My Mom said she became worried about the weather and had a feeling that something was wrong, so they turned around and headed in the direction they knew I had been traveling.
It all happened during the pre-cell phone era, but Mom came to the rescue anyway 🙂
My story’s not as good as those already told here, but it belongs on this thread anyway. A few years ago our daughter and our friends’ daughter were both on an Odyssey of the Mind team that was competing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The kids flew to Boulder, but their props were too big to fly, so my husband and I volunteered to drive them to Colorado. Road trip! Yay! But our car wasn’t big enough to hold the kids’ props, so our friends volunteered to lend us their nice big fairly new minivan. The car had a trip computer — new to us at that time. Before we left, my friend, the car-owner, explained to me some of its peculiarities, but I’m afraid I only half-listened.
Fast forward to a lonely interstate highway somewhere in western Nebraska or eastern Colorado. It’s wide-open windy gorgeous country, nothing for miles miles but high blue sky and rolling prairie full of sagebrush and magpies and yucca and tumbleweed. Here and there we saw a few beef cows, an irrigation system or a gas well pumping away — but no towns, no houses, no exits. I suppose it was desolate, but we’d never seen anything like it before and we were thrilled. So thrilled that we didn’t pay attention to the gas gauge until one of us noticed that it was beginning to get rather low. Nothing to worry about, though — the trip computer said we could travel another 85 miles. We just needed to start watching for an exit, that’s all.
What I had failed to register, however, when my friend was telling me about her car, was that the trip computer was off — by just about 85 miles. Moments after we noticed that the gauge was getting low, as we cleared a little rise, the engine coughed and died and the car began to lose momentum. All around us, there was nothing at all but sagebrush — except all of a sudden, there in the middle of nowhere as we rolled down the liitle rise was an exit — so we rolled down the exit ramp — and at the bottom of the exit ramp was a little road, so we turned onto it, still rolling — and just a stone’s throw down the road was a gas station, all by itself in the middle of nowhere — so we rolled into the parking lot. At last the car ran out of all of its momentum and came to a stop, right beside the pump.
Later we checked the map. That was the only exit on that stretch of the highway for for miles and miles and miles.
Sometime in the 70’s, my parents drove their station wagon from their home in a small town in NE Kansas to southern California, and then all the way up the coast to Washington to visit my dad’s brother and his wife. Other than a trip to Colorado in the early 50’s, this was their first long automobile trip.
On their return trip, they stopped at a truck stop/cafe in the southern California desert to eat. While they were in the cafe, their car caught on fire. They managed to get everything out of the car except for an old Polaroid camera, but the car was a total loss.
As they were trying to decide what to do next, a trucker introduced himself to them and offered to give them a lift. He put all their stuff in the truck and them in the sleeper cab. His destination was somewhere in Ohio or Indiana, but he went out of his way and dropped them off in front of their house on old Highway 36 in Highland, Kansas.
I had all but forgotten this, but Mrs Whatsit just jogged my memory:
When I was in college on Long Island in 1980, a bunch of us decided to go on a road trip to see the Grateful Dead in Virginia and Maryland.
After a wild and wooly weekend, and believe you me it was wild and wooly, we headed back north. Shortly after we crossed the bridge to Long Island, the driver decided to stop for gas.
The five of us carefully pooled our resources, and came up with a grand total of 53¢. So we bought 53¢ worth of gas and continued on our way, nervously watching the gas gauge.
We ended up running out of gas about a block from our dorm.
I won’t “enthrall” this group with my exploits, but suffice it to say:
a) One cannot drive from Wisconsin to California on $50….even in 1974.
b) A pickup truck does exceptionally poorly on ice in Central Illinois…..even in 2008.
I have been in one accident, in 1994. It was weather related. I was blown off the road at interstate speed, having rounded a bend in the dark and driving straight into a small twister coming up a mountainside. I ended up trapped beneath my dashboard with a broken back for an hour or more before a passer-by found me and called the ambulance and police (he was an off duty EMD). After much time in the hospital and a few months recovery afterward, I was able to do most things with limited pain. That remains unchanged for the most part, but movement is not getting better as I age. A moving vehicle becomes a projectile once control is lost. It is very scary. But I survived, and I can walk. And I still possess my rugged good looks, boyish charm, and naturally curly hair. I am very grateful to that unknown Samaritan.
This is too wierd. I spent yesterday driving from Alabama To Michigan (13 1/2 hours). Near Cincinnatti i spotted white smoke ahead and suddenly everyone was locking up the brakes. My dog and mountain dew ended up under my feet as i missed the car in front by inches. And the car behind me narrowly missed me.
I’m not sure what caused this incidence where 4 or 5 cars didn’t escape damage. But i’ll go ahead and suggest it may have been due to a heavy police prescence and some peoples reflexive need to hit the brakes when they spot one. Because a cop was instantly on the scene.
Somebody has to say it. Revenue enhancement makes our driving more dangerous!
Ah Cars
Unfortunately I have no stories of wonderful rescues.
I have only owned one new car in my life. One day while it was rolling down the interstate the interior began filling with smoke. I pulled over, got out , and thirty seconds later it bust into flames.
I procured an 85 or 86 Ford T-bird from an attorney in Denver. Lots of options and he had had a sun roof put in and a CD-player (not anywhere near standard equip back in those days). He said her name was Samantha. Samantha ended up mostly underwater in a Best Western parking lot in Gulfport, MS. We pulled her out and resuscitated her, but she was never the same. Actually gave her to a friend of mine and she totaled it.
I acquired a used Acura legend – nice car. Not long after spending several hundred on some needed repairs I drove to Scottsbluff, NE to do some work. Huge Tornado outside of
town. Big hail. Car drivable but totaled.
Procured a 4 cylinder 93 Passat – pristine condition – 35 MPG.
Just spent $600 to repair the A/C (necessary in Florida) and was rear-ended by an old Ford pick-up which pushed me into the SUV in front of me. Car accordioned – totaled.
Said to hell with that – bought a 10 year old Merc Sable – of course nothing happened to that car other than repairs.
Couple years ago picked up a “96 Passat from my brother – pristine – I live in fear.
Ah, yes, cars.
Hi Neo, I haven’t been near my computer for two days and I just got off the river in East Tennessee and found a wireless place to check some emails….
That is a great story that indeed matches the serendipitous adventure of mine! What are the odds of that happening!? I hope your mother saw you and stopped! Thanks for continuing this fun thread. And I hope we can do more in the future. Meanwhile, I fell down in the coldest water today and am chilled and going to warm up…and tell tales! I’ll include your latest in the story telling….
Awesome story!!