Cold and panicked, I got out and looked over the situation. The car
had come off the road and slid sideways down a pretty steep
embankment and the snow was coming down hard. I hiked up the road and
looked up and down in the eerie light of the snowstorm and looked in
vain for five minutes for the redemption of some headlights. I didn't
really think there was going to be a truck passing in the middle of
the night on a deserted road but I was hoping for miraculous
redemption. I went back and got into the car and started it to see
how much gas I had left, about a quarter of a tank. In that car a
quarter tank meant a very long time driving but I was not sure if it
would last the six or seven hours I needed until morning. I decided
that I just needed to try and drive out get back on the road and
drive back to the house my girl was baby sitting in. I got out and
cleared the tires the best I could which meant I was now soaking wet
and freezing. I got back in the car and said a prayer, turned the car
on and then tried to drive up the embankment. I tried to drive strait
up it and slid sideways and killed the engine again. I was so cold
and tired that I felt defeated and put my head down on the steering
wheel and cried. I pulled myself together and reasoned that the angle
was too steep to go strait up so I would have to go sideways a couple
of hundred feet and slowly crest the ridge. The problem there was
that I couldn't see what was in front of me and the snow was still
filtering down cutting visibility to just a few feet in front of me.
I decided it was too late to have another plan so I once again went
with the ram-it-home school of engineering and straitened the wheel
gunned the engine and drove like a crazy person hard forward and
slightly to the left. After an interminable ten seconds I felt the
car crest the ridge and the tires go back to just slipping on snow
and not snow and gravel. I drove the six miles back into town and
luckily remembered the way back to my girlfriend's. II had been gone
an hour and a half so it was really late now and she was not
interested in answering the door while she was all alone at night in
a farm house. I knocked and knocked shivering and yelling that it was
me and for her to answer the door and let me in. she finally got up
the courage to look out and see who it was and then let me in. I told
her what had happened and I called my mom to let her know I would not
be coming home. This would have been the part where I should have
apologized and told her I was sorry for lying and that I almost died
because I was an idiot. Instead I told her that I when I was driving
home from my friends house in the snow storm I had slid off the road
got saved and was now back at his house and going to spend the night.
The main problem with that story was that on her side of the mountain
it was not snowing which made my story just a little bit implausible.
I countered her observation that it was not snowing with a clever
tale of black ice and a small amount of snow. She sounded skeptical
but I told her I was cold and tired and was going to bed and I would
be home in the morning.
