…One Crazy Ride

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The roads around Tulsa, Oklahoma are usually an easy ride as long as one knows where they are going. The only times that it can be treacherous is when a person gets too comfortable driving on them. I know these road like the back of my hand. I have driven on them every day for years. I even know which lane the off ramp is in and the number on the exit sign why wouldn’t I be comfortable? This is the kind of thinking that almost got me killed.

On a hot summer day,I was driving on a six lane highway with a grassy median dividing it. Oklahoma is known for changing its weather rapidly and sometimes violently but I have always seen this behavior and it comes as no surprise to me. On this drive the weather turned from partly cloudy to rain that had almost zero visibility but I could see the roads painted lines and I knew that I had plenty of room so I continues on my drive doing about 55 mile per hour in my old ford pick-up truck. The only problem was that the rain had not wash the oily film off the road yet.

Suddenly I saw tail lights come on and it was close enough that I was about to hit them! I locked up my brakes  and it sent me into a tale spin. I must have spun close to 10 times and each time I spun around I tried to counter steer in such a way as to send me to the grassy middle or at least stop the spin. It worked to some degree, I started spinning toward the middle. A guard rail began at the point my truck started to leave the road and it forced my truck to do a cart-wheel end over end over the middle into the on-coming lane. I landed on 2 tires and rested on all 4 only blowing out one tire in the process.

When I landed the action was not over, I had cars coming at me head on! I had 2 choices either drive the truck into the guard rail to try to escape or hit them head on. So I steered into the guard rail and stepped on the gas. I crashed into it, missing the on coming cars narrowly.

I sat there in shock for a few seconds, looked around, and realized I wasn’t wearing a seat belt! Oh…crap I said to my self. Thankfully I wasn’t hurt at all. I got out to assess the damage, my tools were all over the place and my spare was lodged in some low laying trees but I got that stuff back and change that flat as quick as I possibly could because I didn’t want a ticket on top of this.Ihe truck looked drivable so I pried it off the guard rail and took off. I ended up driving that old Ford f-150 for about 8 more months after that happened to my amazement.  I have to say though that was one crazy ride.