It was a dark, cold, rainy night, not unlike this night. Wait a minute. It’s not cold and rainy as I write this, and it may not even be night when you read this. So, I’ll just say that at the time of the incident it was dark, cold, rainy and nighttime.
It didn’t start that way though. It started as a nice afternoon as Carol and I went to spend some time with some friends who lived up the 15. I can’t say if they lived in Victorville or Hesperia because I don’t remember, but it was somewhere out there. So we go to their home and have dinner and a nice night filled with good conversation. The talking continued late through the night and into early morning when we all decided the evening had come to an end. So we say our goodbyes and head out the door.
The first thing I noticed was how cold it was. I’m not overly appreciative of the cold. I’m of the mindset that I’d take being too hot over being too cold any day. Being too hot is miserable, but being too cold is pain. Anyway, we hop in the car, throw on the heater, and it’s mere minutes before we’re on the 15 heading home. As we approach the hill (as I’ve heard some of the locals refer to it), a light rain begins to fall, nothing really major, but enough to justify using the wipers consistently.
Somewhere at about the top, or on the other side of it, we find ourselves behind a car that I notice is swerving. It’s about 1:30, 2:00 am, and I’m thinking, “This guy’s drunk.” I have no desire to be anywhere near this guy, so I move over to the third lane and speed up a bit to get some distance between us. Once I feel that I’m far enough ahead of him, I proceed back over to the fast lane to enjoy a nice drive home. It’s not long, however, that the car I had passed is now catching up to me. He doesn’t necessarily start tailgating me, but he’s close enough to start causing me to be a bit concerned. Thinking he’s drunk, I’m wondering if he’s thinking there some sort of game going on between us.
Staring at the rearview mirror, I put some more pressure on the gas and I take the car, which is already a tad north of the speed limit, further north. The gap between the cars grows, and I’m feeling better that this guy is no longer an irritant.
“Maybe you should slow down,” Carol tells me.
“I will. I just want to make sure he doesn’t catch up with us again,” I respond. She had seen what had happened, and we had already discussed my desire to get away from this guy, so she wasn’t overly surprised that I was going that fast. And quite frankly, she was used to the speed of the car being rather high when I drive, but I know she was concerned about the rain.
It wasn’t more than a minute later when I felt the car do something it had never done before. Holding the steering wheel steady, I suddenly felt the car jerk on me. The car swerved a bit, and in a flash I realized my mistake. Raining, cold, a higher elevation, the car in front of me hadn’t been drunk, he had hit ice. It didn’t take more than a second for me to come to that realization, and it didn’t take more than a second to start to take my foot off the gas to slow down. But I didn’t have that extra second. Before I had a chance to start slowing down, the car jerked on me again, and this time, it happened rather violently. The car fishtailed one way, and I knew I overcompensated as it fishtailed the other way and then we went into a full tailspin.
Round and round we went. The view was quite fascinating. Seeing the red lights from the taillights on the cars in front of us and seeing the white lights from the headlights on the cars coming towards us.
Red, white, red, white, red, the colors flashed in our eyes, but I had one MAJOR concern, and I had it the moment the car first jerked.
I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. (I know, I know. I’ve heard it all before. This was many years ago, the seatbelt laws weren’t as strict, which doesn’t justify anything, it’s just a way of saying that’s how it was.)
As we’re spinning, I fully understand that my sports car is pretty low to the ground, but I can’t do anything drastic that will cause the car to flip. Because I know. If it starts flipping, I’m gone.
And so we spin, starting in the fast lane, the car spins across the entire freeway, as I hear Carol praying. It was fortunate there were no cars around us because if we had been next to anyone, we would have went right into them.
But no, we spin across the five lanes and end up backing onto the shoulder. I was certainly grateful the car stopped when it did, because we stopped no more than twenty feet from the edge of a drop that certainly appeared steep, and would have definitely been most unfortunate for us.
I looked at Carol.
“Are you ok?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says a little shakingly.
“Are you sure?” I respond.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” she answers.
I look around at our surroundings and make sure we’re not in danger of being hit by any oncoming cars, as our car is sitting perpendicular to the lanes. We are, however, fully off the lanes and parked on the shoulder, so we’re safe for a few moments, as I see a number of cars pass by us.
“Now you know why I don’t like riding the teacups at Disneyland,” I tell her.
“I still like it,” she answers back with a smile.
Seeing I have the clearing to jump back on the freeway, I put the car back in gear and take off, admittedly, at a much slower pace. That is, until I got off the hill. By that time, I was up to my usual speed. No ice, it’s all good.