In
the winter time when there were over night snowstorms the kids would
arrive at school before the snowplows could clear the lines and the
parking would be a little catch-as-catch can. The lines would be
chaotic and winding like a parking microcosm of the Lord of the
Flies. One morning in a soup of fog and drizzle I was driving our
huge truck, a full sized truck with a king cab and full bed to
school. The experience is probably most similar to piloting one of
those great big barges down the Mississippi and into a small estuary
to deliver a payload of one slightly tardy young man to school. I was
actually quite a bit late to school and so there was already a
sizable a huge tangle of cars this way and that parked at odd angles.
The massive truck with sight obscuring height and topper had the side
windows fog a little bit.
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| My weapon, with great truck comes great responsibility and I failed. |
I went to the front of the parking lot and
turned a little more sharply than I should have and I felt the truck
lift high in the air and then come right back crunching down slamming
pretty hard. I stopped dismounted and ran away to see what I had
done. I had driven over the hood of a Pontiac Fiero.
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| Why was it shaped that way if it didn't want it? |
The weight of
the truck had pressed the radiator, battery, headlights and the
rest of the front-end bits flat smashed to the ground. I was not a
huge car repair guy but what little I knew on an instinctual level was
that those particular pieces should have been more up and in and less
leaky and the who drippy mess looked like a lot of trouble for me. I
stood around looking for someone to tell me what to do in the windy
cold feeling a lot panicked. It was in the middle of the first class
of the day so I was standing and waiting in an abandoned parking lot
which I realized and parked the truck and went inside to find someone
who would probably yell at me for being an idiot. I put my stuff in
my locker and then I went to find the police officer who taught a
class on law enforcement at our school, she might know what to do I
thought. She was mildly attractive and several of the local hillbillys thought she was pretty hot stuff but I didn't share that
affliction. When I told her that I kinda ran somebody's car over in
the parking lot, she got really stern with me and started in on one
of those cop lectures that ignore the common sense element of a
situation. She said that she was going to give me a ticket for
abandoning the scene of an accident. I told her nobody was out there
so I thought the best plan was to come inside to tell her. Even so
she persisted in telling me that I was not ever supposed to leave the
scene of an accident. Even though I think I definitely had the right
of the argument I stopped right then and kept my mouth shut because
she was a cop. Well, she were cop uniform anyway. They inquired over
the PA system who's car was a flattened Fiero that was parked in the
south parking lot. I happened to belong to the mother of one of my
friends from elementary school. She was currently the janitor at the
school and probably couldn't afford to have her car run over early
in the morning at her job which probably paid right around minimum
wage. I felt terrible but she was really sweet about it and said it
was no big deal and the insurance would work everything out. She was
definitely a lot more accommodating and conciliatory than the power
tripping cop. We went out together to survey the mess I had made and
she saw where I had driven right over the top of the car. In my
defense the Fiero is a car shaped like a ramp and it was parked at an
odd angle outside of the lines and I was in a truck designed in the
ram-it-home school of getting things done. At least we found out
once and for all a definitive answer to that great old chestnut of
freshmen philosophers, 'What would happen if an irresistible force
driven by and idiot came up against a low slung ramp shaped object?'
Answer: It cost me $400 dollars out-of-pocket and a stern lecture
about remaining at the scene of a crime. My dad was almost bizarrely
reasonable about the whole thing so maybe that was the oddest thing.
