Don't Stop for Anything

Dear Blog Reader;

I hope that this finds you doing well. We are currently nestled between Arctic Vortices. We are happily watching the tables being turned on the frozen tundra as the afternoon temp has snuck up to 40 degrees. A snowball has been placed up on the porch railing. We are gleefully looking out the window, watching as he wets himself. I particularly enjoy seeing the sweat break out on his forehead.  Hopefully, Mr. Arctic Vortex will arrive before he melts away, and his refrigerative powers will turn our little snowball into a solid crystalline mass. I will slip a hammer into my coat pocket as I go out to stoke the fire, I will shatter Mr. Ice Ball into a million tiny shards. Wear your safety goggles, folks.

The Sharritt’s have turned another corner in their lives. The last cold blast with the frozen chunks of ice on the interstate shook a filling loose on my 2000 Lexus ES300. It has been a great car these past five years. I had the pleasure of driving it from the 150,000 mark to the current tally of 272,567 miles. However, it was time to part ways.

People would ask me “what kind of gas mileage does it get?”

“It has leather seats.” I would reply.

“No, really what kind of gas mileage does a big car like that get?”

“It has leather seats.”

As I cleaned out the $6.67 of accumulated change from the consol, the pack of flossers, and the battery powered electric shaver for those emergency mornings when I had over slept, I became quite nostalgic. The memories flowed back over me; not only of the book listening obsession developed during the past 5 years but also of all of the cars that have been a part of my life. I know that I have friends who are big public transportation fans and have a healthy dislike of the auto. I applaud you. It is good to embrace causes before their time; causes that limit the mobility of the population. The ability to move around and find mates has certainly diversified the gene pool, and has gone on long enough. In fact, Kentucky has families whose trees no longer look like a wreath. It is time that kind of progress was halted.

My nostalgia settled on the first two cars that made an impact on my life; both of them before I could drive. There was Crackpot; 1960 Pontiac with big fins and was fire engine red. It was the car that was carrying me to kindergarten when it was rear ended as we slowed to turn into the parking lot. Those big fins were made of really thick steel. The mass from those fenders kept the car from being deflected off course. My father still navigated the turn. After exchanging insurance information, dad went ahead and delivered me to school and life went on. The dent in the driver’s side fender was never fixed. We were pretty poor back then and the settlement may well have been used for school supplies and cloths. I don’t really know.

Crackpot didn’t have many of the modern safety switches. As a result a young child, of six, practicing his driving skills, could move the shift lever without the key being in the ignition. I found this out while practicing on a slight hill on my grandmother’s driveway. I knew that in order to drive properly the big handle behind the steering wheel had to be rotated to the right. Panic gripped me as I and Crackpot rolled backwards into a plow that was in the grass at the bottom of the small drive. This gave the car a nice long scrape and ding on the passenger’s side rear fender. This solidified the red Pontiac’s name until it was retired a few years later. My dad loved that car. In fact, rather than trade it in, he had plans for restoring it as he gathered the resources to take it to the shop, beat out the fenders, and drop a new motor in that beast. It never happened. Finally, 10 years later, it was pried out of the mud and taken to the junk yard for scrap.

Crackpot was replaced by a blue Pontiac Bonneville wagon. That car took my family without dad to Virginia, Florida, and Washington DC for family vacations. Dad was always too busy for vacations with the farm. So mom would pack us up and off we would go to stay for a week with an uncle who served in the Air Force. That Pontiac lasted a long time and witnessed mom getting a nursing job after my sisters and I got into school. One night when I was 15 the timing chain broke on the car and would not start as my mom came out from second shift and got ready to come home. My years of practice driving, driving tractors and trucks on the farm had paid off. Dad took me to the hospital parking lot at 10:00 p.m. He hooked the truck to it. He said don’t worry no cop is going to pull someone over while towing a car in Anderson. “You’ll be fine. Oh and son, don’t stop for anything.” He knew that my starts might not be the smoothest since I was so nervous. So I was supposed to time the lights and roll through the stop signs and keep it moving.

Mom was in the truck with me. To this day, I don’t know how I was designated the expert here. Dad was in the blue Bonneville jockeying the emergency brake as I would slow down, timing lights; releasing it as I would speed up. Dad timing momentum so that I didn’t rip the bumper off. The trip went surprisingly well. We had traversed the 15 miles from Anderson and were just pulling into Ingalls down SR 67. The last turn required going over a railroad track. Our route had been running parallel to the tracks for 6 miles or so. Dad had told me to use the middle crossing in town because it was the flattest. I was just starting to breathe easily when I looked up and saw a train coming. Crap! It was almost too close. I think I can make it. The warning lights had started to blink. The horn could be heard easily through the closed truck windows. Dad said “don’t stop for any thing.” I down shifted. Mom’s hands went to the dash board. She had heard his admonition and wanted her bumper unharmed. She offered no advice but could do the physics and knew that it would be close. Sure the truck would make it. It was 12 feet long but the 12 foot Bonneville and the 6 foot chain made us a 30 foot target. Crap, Crap, Crap! Don’t stop for any thing. A train was a thing; a really big thing.

I had down shifted. This was no time to get bogged down and have the truck hesitate for a lack of power. I had not even braked heading up to the apron of the crossing. I was just letting out on the clutch and giving it the gas when I knew the physics wasn’t going to work. I depressed the clutch; train horn blaring. I moved my right foot from gas to brake; the train’s cyclopic light blazing in my eyes. The truck stopped and just kissed the crossing arm. Setting the emergency brake, I jumped out of the cab and ran back to say that I thought I really had to stop. Dad’s foot must have been hovering on his emergency brake because he stopped that car in five feet saving the front bumper. He got out and patted me on the back. “It would have been close. I would have followed you right on across if you had gone, but I’m glad you stopped,” he said.

We stood there buffeted by the backwash off of those train cars. The maddening clack of steel wheel bumping over a miss-aligned rail joint distracted our thoughts of what could have been.

Thirty-seven years later the light still blazes. The wind still buffets. My dad still pats me on the back and says “I would have followed you across, but I’m glad you stopped.”

Take care,

Roger