Idling My Life Away

In honor of West Virginia's first snowfall this year today, I am posting this blog.

One time I was driving a car back from Florida to West Virginia. It had some sort of mechanical problem and it wouldn't idle below 45 miles per hour. What that means is that if I wanted to go slower than 45 mph, I had to ride the brake. I was doing fine until I hit the West Virginia State line.

I ran into a snow storm. It was not a little snow storm. It was dumping snow down by the foot. Like a big dummy I elected to take the back roads to my hometown of Logan. This is a good 3 hour drive when the roads are good. When it is snowing it is a 6 hour drive - not to mention that I was riding my brakes the whole way on a snowy, winding, back country road. A recipe for disaster if there ever was one.

I was doing pretty well and I had actually reached Gilbert (about 30 miles from Logan). I had just thought I was going to make it home without wrecking when everything happened. A car came around a curve flashing it's lights at me. (this probably saved some lives) I slowed down (I was only going about 25 to begin with), and I rounded a blind curve to see 3 cars wrecked in the road in front of me. This would not have been a problem except for the fact that the people who had been in those cars were trying to cross the icy road in front of me. They were slipping and sliding and not getting anywhere!

I turned my wheel so that I wouldn't hit them which sent me into a slow motion tailspin. I was wondering which car I was going to hit (at least I wasn't going to kill anybody!) when I got control of the car and it straightened out. It was aimed perfectly between 2 of the cars, heading straight for the ditch. I let it coast gently into the ditch. Nobody was hurt and I had managed not to touch any other cars... I believe that only divine intervention could have made things turn out so perfectly.

A few minutes later a tow truck came and the first thing the guy did was announce, "Who has cash, they go first!" (obviously he was just going to pocket the money). I volunteered $25, he pulled me out first and I was on my merry way home!