“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”
– Franklin P. Adams –
Over the weekend, we had family in from out-of-town.
As we often do when getting together, we talked of old times.
My dad had a VW bug.
Image by Adam Carr - GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
I remembered a long forgotten story.
It was the 1960's, and I hadn't had a driver's license for long. We lived on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands at that time.
My dad had a VW bug, one of those "old-style" models similar to the one in this photo. He let me use it once in a while, usually to run errands for his construction job.
One rainy day, I was crossing the island from south to north, traveling along Peppertree Road near Island Center. It was a dirt road and it had become quite muddy. In the Virgin Islands, we drive on the left side of the road.
Suddenly, a van pulled out of a steeply angled driveway in front of me. I'm sure the driver hadn't looked to see if traffic was coming. Not having a lot of experience, in my surprise I hit the brakes hard. To my horror, the VW bug began fishtailing in the slick and slimy mud.
Not knowing how to regain control,
I overcorrected. The car slid forward and downslope, approaching the lower right-hand edge of the road.
Road crews periodically scrape the dirt roads to eliminate the inevitable washboard road ripples. This left a dirt ridge on the low side. The front wheels of the car slid over the ridge.
By this time, I was already several hundred feet from the driveway where the van had exited. Though I had been traveling at the legal limit of 35 M.P.H., the bug still had a little momentum. I was sliding sideways, directly toward a telephone pole along the road's edge.
As I watched helplessly from the driver's seat, the pole advanced relentlessly. Having slowed to a crawl, I wasn't really afraid of being harmed, but it was like being in a horror movie. The pole kept on coming.
When the car at last slid gently sideways up against the pole, there was enough momentum left to put a large crease in the driver's side door.
It was only then that I became seriously fearful - afraid of what Dad was going to do to me!
Applying the full power of my teen-age logic,
I headed directly to where I knew I needed to go - my best friend Bob's house.
"Bob! You've got to go with me. There's no way I can face my dad alone!"
Close friend that he was, Bob got in the car with me. As we headed for disaster, I told him what had happened.
Pulling up to the house, I found that Dad had recently gotten home from work. I'm sure dealing with my situation was exactly how he had imagined spending his evening.
I showed Dad the crumpled side of his car,
and with my good buddy Bob at my side, I told him the story. The true, straight story, with no embellishments — apart from emphasizing my total innocence in the outcome.
You could have sharpened a knife on Dad's flint-like stone face. "Come with me." he said abruptly.
Uh-oh... Dad got behind the wheel of his Volkswagen truck, and Bob and I meekly got in the passenger side, me in the middle.
The ride to the scene was mostly silent. When we got there, I showed Dad the driveway and, much further down the road, the offending telephone pole. "I'm going to show you that what you've told me couldn't possibly have happened that way." Dad said tersely.
At this point, I knew I was doomed.
The rains had of course stopped, and the road was not quite as wet, not nearly as slick as it had been when the incident occurred. Dad turned the VW around, went back beyond the driveway, and set everything up for a re-run of the event.
Dad accelerated his VW truck to the 35 M.P.H. speed that I had specified, and just before reaching the driveway, he hit the brakes, intentionally putting us into a skid.
Although I don't recall for certain, as we began fishtailing back and forth, I'm sure I was praying fervently.
Right, left, right, left... we kept on fishtailing, kept right on sliding. Dad of course had far more skill as a driver than I had yet acquired, and thus was able to prevent us from slipping over the ridge on the low side of the road.
To this day,
I have no doubt that it was a very emotional moment — for Dad, utter, unmitigated surprise; for me, abject relief — as Dad's VW truck continued sliding sideways, passing that telephone pole by an undeniable margin.
Silently, Dad dropped Bob off at his folks, and then drove us home.
I was vindicated!
Dad never said another word about the incident.
Dad never said another word...
Image courtesy of Gerd Altmann and http://pixabay.com
FIN
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