My Only Real Car Wreck

I was 17 years old and a junior in high school. I was a typical reclusive teenager for the early 2000's and I mostly kept to myself, save for a small circle of friends that I hung out with due to similar interests. I did not get into trouble very often except for speeding which I did a lot of.

I was good behind the wheel of a car, not just my words but the testimony of my friends who rode with me. I could dance a car across the pavement in almost any way that I wanted and felt at home behind the wheel of almost any car. I drag raced my friends often and there were few who could keep up with my Heavy Chevy, as we affectionately named it. But other than this slight blemish I had a largely clean record during my youth, which led my mother to worry about me.

She was worried that I was not having enough fun in my youth. That I was too good and that in the process of never getting into trouble I was not having any fun. These circumstances led to the faithful night in question and begin a series of strange circumstances which led indirectly into an avalanche of trouble which filled my entire quota for high school adventure as far as I was concerned.

I arrived at her office in the afternoon fresh from school and looking forward to a quite weekend to find her brandishing an entire case of toilet paper. She handed me the large cardboard box and told me that she wanted me to go out and do something immature for fun explaining her concerns about my misspent youth, i.e., not ever getting into trouble. I was not allowed to protest, her mission for me was to go and toilet paper a friend’s house and not return until all the paper was spent. As I drove away from mission briefing, I decided that I needed an accomplice for this bit of potentially illegal activity for two reasons. First the more hands the quicker it would be over and the second my truck being equipped with cherry bomb mufflers was not the ideal stealth vehicle.

I had just the right friend in mind, who I selected because he drove a 1990 Chevrolet S-10 4x4 which with its v-6 and stock exhaust ran quietly but still quickly. I also assumed the four-wheel drive might be useful as I did not want to get into a situation where I was stuck in someone ditch. I called said friend and he was delighted to be my partner in crime but insisted that being the better driver I should take the wheel for the caper if something went wrong. I agreed and we met at locally where I loaded his truck with the paper, and we went to roll our mutual friend’s home.

This third friend lived in a small neighborhood outside of town that I was only somewhat familiar with. I had been to his house many times of course but I had always driven in and out the same way. I knew the neighborhood made a loop of some kind back to the main road, but I had never ventured down that path before. We pulled into the neighbor’s yard in the pitch black of night and began lobbing toilet paper into his vehicle and above it via some overhanging branches. After a short period of time and an embarrassingly small amount of toilet paper committed to the yard, I heard a door open across the street.

It was an older man who told us he had called the police and they were soon to arrive if we did not get out of there immediately. Terrified of possibly getting into more trouble than I had bargained for I ran to the truck, jumped inside, and sped down the street heading for what I assumed was the loop leading back to the main road. forty-five miles an hour does not sound like much and indeed compared to how I usually drove it was quite slow. But I was immediately aware that the road went further than I anticipated and the lights on the street were few and far between. I came to the first turn and made it with ease, relieved that apparently my intuition was correct. One turn would remain and then I would be headed away from danger. As I drove the lights grew even fewer and the reach of the headlights seemed incredibly small.

At first, I saw gravel at the end of the lights reach and thought the road must have changed surfaces. Too late I realized that I had just blown through a 20 mile an hour left turn that was unlit and had not warning signs. The gravel turned to dirt at the end of the headlights, and I slammed on the brakes. Then the dirt turned to trees, and I realized that the wheels where no longer on the ground. There was a terrific impact and then darkness.

When I opened my eyes, the truck was level and the headlights reflected on large pine trees directly in front. I had driven off a ravine that itself was planted thick with pines. The truck had settled on top of the pines, and I did not know it yet but was sitting several feet above the ground outside the doors. I looked to my right to check my friend who had ducked a the last possible second. It was a good thing to as the cab on the right had been crushed by one of the pine trees we struck. The singular pillar on the truck was strangely the only damage and not even the hood and front bumper was bent. We had sailed into the unknown and as the truck pivoted down it struck a single tree on the right pillar and just laid down all the rest underneath us.

In fact, the truck was still running and unaware of our predicament I put the truck in reverse and tried to back up onto the road which I could see faintly behind us in the taillights. The truck did not move, and I slipped it into four-wheel drive but still nothing. I opened the door and realized our hanging predicament. The bed of the truck was only feet above the ground, but the doors were at least ten feet up. I looked over our shoulder to the back and noticed the back glass had popped out in the crash. I told my friend we should crawl out the back window and then walk in the bed of the truck to safety. To my shock the back glass of the vehicle was all in one piece, unbroken in the back of the truck.

We stepped over it carefully and made our way to the back of the truck feeling it creek as we shifted weight on top of the trees supporting it. We stepped over the tailgate and walked on the laid down trunks to the ground and then crawled up the ravine to the road. Sitting on the curve in the dark we breathed sighs of relief. I pulled out my Nokia cell phone and called my friends parents.

They did not believe me; his parents could not believe that I had wrecked the truck. They thought perhaps that he had wrecked it and that I was just covering for him so he would not get into trouble. I was "too good of a driver," his mother had said, stinging my pride. Perhaps I was not as good as I thought. Then I had to make to more difficult call. Please let my mom pick up I thought as the phone rang. It was not going to have any luck this night. Hello, the booming intimidating voice of my father answered. I explained my predicament to him as best I could, and he silently listened to my whole story. Then came the questions, how fast was I really going? Did I have the headlights on? I could not believe he thought I would be so irresponsible, but then again, he could not believe I was out rolling yards on a Friday night.

Fortunately, my mother did explain to my dad some of my circumstances on the way to me. My family lived about twice the distance from the wreck as my friends, but my dad still was the first one there, now you know where the need for speed comes from. Arriving in his brand-new F-250 Super duty 4x4 my dad stepped out of the enormous truck and equally imposing facade. To this day my dad is taller and bigger than me and I have personally seen him unbolt and engine from a bay, bear hug it and set it on the ground. As he stepped forward surveying the situation, we waited for the other parents to arrive. Once they had my dad decided that he could pull the truck out of the ravine with his "brand new" Super duty. The 1999 pick up was only a few days old and with its triton v-10 engine was a force to be reckoned with.

He pulled out his tow straps that he bought for his old truck another Ford F-250, that one a 1997. For the uninitiated, in 1999 Ford released a brand-new body style for the Super Duty, one with much more modern and rounded features, very similar to what they sell to this day. It was then he discovered that the tow hooks on his old truck were shaped different than the new one and as such the tow rope would not fit in the new hooks. No problem he said and hooked the tow rope to the bumper. If were careful it should be fine, he said.

My friends Dad climbed down into the truck in the ravine as my dad readied to pull him out. He cranked the truck, put it in reverse and put the petal on the floor. Plumes of white smoke billowed out of the ravine lit by the headlights of the mighty Ford. My Dad thinking it might be engine smoke tapped the accelerator on the V-10 accessing a little more of its power. The little truck shot out of the ravine like a rocket landing just short of the front bumper of the mighty new Ford. There was just one problem. The tow hooks had curled the pumper forward to the point where the passenger edge was now facing backwards. As I sat looking at the ruined truck and now ruined bumper of my father’s new truck the headache, I had been nursing grew unbearable and I cradled my head in my hands wondering what on earth tomorrow would bring.

The next day my father and I went and found my friend a slightly newer GMC version of his S-10. Our fathers switched titles for the trucks, and I spent the summer trying to pay dad back the cost of the little truck. Dad straitened the bumper of the Ford with a tree and when he was done only a small dent remained. The S-10 sat in our shop in pieces for almost fifteen years before I finally hauled it away for scrap. For almost a decade and a half it mocked me sitting rotting away in the corner while my life grew busier and busier.

That was the last house I ever rolled, and I have to say to anyone thinking of endeavoring to give it a whirl that I found the experience to be literally one of the worst in my life. So, what is the moral or point of telling you this story? Well hopefully to entertain you at the least but also to remind us all sometimes it’s okay to be a boring teenager, because you never know what that excitement will cost you in the end.