Me Knows Better Than to Say This… but I will. Now that the Statue of Limitations has expired and anything I say beyond this point should NOT be construed as an admission of guilt, I can tell this story. Jimmy realizes now that winter driving skills are finely honed artistic endeavors… much like ballet on ice.
Every time it snows, my daughter starts laughing and then proceeds to remind me of a story I told her that happened many years ago… now well past the Statue of Limitations I remind you and not subject to prosecution. I only told her to show her the dangers of idiotic winter driving and following cars too closely when the driving conditions are suspect.
The adventure happened while I was rolling down the road in the left lane on my way to work… going along with the traffic at the prevailing speed, which as it turned out was faster than any of us should have been driving. The snowing was falling with a good stiff northwesterly breeze making the visibility a bit lower than ideal and the white fluffy stuff was accumulating quite nicely. As I was driving with the pack, I became a bit concerned at the speed and decided I should check to see how slippery the road deck was and thought I should tap my brakes just a bit to gather a data point to support my suspicions. I carefully realized that it would have been stupid to tap my brakes while traveling over the bridge so I smartly waited until after I cleared… well just barely cleared. That was when all hell broke loose.
See… this is where the knowledge of following some idiot too closely is important. Not to say that Jimmy was the idiot here or not, but the idiot behind him truly was such an example… and the idiot behind him… and probably a few other idiots in succession. The moment I started my experiment to gather data (again only to check the low coefficient of friction theory) I realized that the back end of my car moved a small amount and I made the reasonable conclusion that it was indeed slick and that we were all idiots for traveling too fast. Unfortunately for the car behind me (who I might remind everyone is just coming off the bridge) panics at the sight of brake lights and steps on his brakes a bit harder than he should have. Subsequently, the car behind him which is fully on the bridge concludes there is a problem ahead, jumps on his brakes as he suspects time to impact is now a vital concern.
This is where it gets interesting. Everyone knows that while driving in slippery conditions that one should never use the brakes on a bridge deck as the results will look like a ballet in slow motion. Mere moments after my successful experiment, I looked in my rear view mirror to watch the idiot immediately behind me fishtail and start to regain control. Then a split second later, the supreme idiot behind him does what I would consider is an unrecoverable spin with an immediate bailout into the ditch at a ninety degree angle to the median with a blast of snow which cushions the impact and brings him to an immediate stop. The explosion of snow was quite the sight as apparently everyone behind him decided to admire the spectacle. That pretty well cleared the road as Jimmy had no one following him into work that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment