Yesterday, I drove through the intersection where I was in a potentially deadly car accident. I hadn’t been there in over 20 years or more. I hadn’t thought about that night or incident in detail in a long time. It would come up occasionally in random conversation. What’s the worst car accident you’ve ever been in?
Do you ever feel like you escaped death?
When I was in high school, I worked at a retirement community doing dishes in their massive restaurant. This wasn’t a fun job by any normal description. It did pay significantly more than other work I could get at that time–an amazing $10 an hour. The other major perk, was that a huge group of my friends (and some cute girls) from school worked there. We often carpooled to and from work.
The fact that my crew worked there made it bearable through the steam, stink, filth and periodic trash searches for lost dentures. We would blast the Geto Boys, ‘We Can’t Be Stopped’ on repeat. This made the work time fly by.
One late, rainy night after work, we piled into my friend Jim’s VW bus. There were five of us that night. Jim only had the two front seats and the rear bench seat installed. He was always working on fixing the bus and it’s condition was in constant flux. Five dudes piled in, two in the front, three in the back. The guys in the front did buckle in.
One odd detail that now, looking back on this potentially pivotal event, I can’t remember who was in that van on that night. I know Jim was there, it was his van and he was driving. In the passenger seat was maybe Nate, but I really can’t remember who else was in that vehicle. I know that I was on the right hand side of that rear bench seat. As, I explain further, I think you’ll agree that it’s strange that my memory is missing these details.
So, we headed for home. Our route winds through a state park and it was here that things literally went sideways. We came up on a stop sign where the road veered hard to the right. As we approached the stop sign, the van started to slide. We slid right through that stop. This wasn’t a major intersection–we were inside the park still. We slid quite a ways, maybe over a hundred feet or more. The road then made a sharp left hand turn. Jim tried to keep us on the pavement, and turned the wheels to redirect the bus. He managed to get us heading the correct way, the problem was that now the van was sliding sideways, with the passenger side facing forward and the rear tires were in the dirt.
The rear tires suddenly hit something, maybe rocks, in the shoulder and the van was twisted clockwise with a lot of speed. The van was going the opposite way now and it was also upside down. We rotated to the passenger side down, then wheels up, driver’s side down and another half turn before skidding to a stop with the passenger’s side door where the wheels were supposed to be.
I do remember seeing sparks. I felt the heat of those on my right shoulder. It was dark, but I saw debris and car parts flying like objects in zero gravity. I blinked at some point during the moments all this was happening because I opened my eyes to see my friend Jim hanging by his seatbelt from the driver’s seat. The front windshield was gone and it looked like an open door to the street.
Someone asked, “Is everyone OK?”
Everyone replied yes in some shape or from and we quickly exited the van through the makeshift front door.
Once we were all outside we flipped the van over to get it back on it’s wheels. The adrenalin was pumping and we were all laughing and joking within seconds. Shock is an amazing thing. Jim even tried to start the van again, but he quickly realized that the transmission was alive anymore. The police arrived pretty quickly.
The cop who arrived first said, “I thought we were gonna have a mess out here when I heard a van full of kids flipped.” It’s pretty miraculous that no one was seriously injured. There were a slew of heavy car parts behind the bench seat. We all walked away and were home in our own beds that evening like nothing happened.
This event passed without much thought or after effects. I still rode with Jim to and from work regularly. I drove, without fear and I don’t remember any deep conversations beyond the week after, when it was a fun story to tell. Teenagers often feel invincible and maybe this simply reinforced those notions. Maybe we were just too young and dumb to realize how lucky we really were that night.