A Lifetime of Experience: God and the Pod

[UberGoober]

A few miles east of Ellensburg, on the long winding descent into the Columbia river gorge, the little car, too small to run smoothly in both sets of the deep ruts that the semi trucks had worn into the pavement of Interstate 90, rolled from groove it had been following on the right side of the lane and dropped abruptly into the groove on the left. The lateral movement of the car within the lane was not great, maybe a foot or two, and I accounted for the motion with a simple counter of the steering wheel as I speed steadily along through the dark winter night.

I have never been one to name my vehicles. Generally I refer to them by the make or model, “my GMC” or “my Shadow” but in a nod to both its bulbous shape and its cheerful green color, I had taken to calling my little Geo Metro “The Pod.” I had not owned the car long, just a few weeks, and so far it had been a positive experience. To be sure, it was no power machine, but with my lead foot and the car’s slick 5 speed transmission it could be speedy enough. Even now it was moving along effortlessly and near the posted speed limit.

Another corner approached, this one a wide sweeping left hander and I turned the car in as smoothly as possible. The car responded a little sluggishly and again, rolled up out of the groove in which I had been running an jerked into the parallel rut, this time alongside the outside of the lane. With a sudden jolt the back tires broke traction and rear of the car swung wide. Surprised at the car's motion, I responded with an equally sudden counter steer. The back end of the car snapped back, but again failed to find the groove and went wide left. Again I corrected with the steering wheel and the car responded at once, snapping back again to the right side even more violently and demanding even greater correction with the wheel.

Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, the car was fishtailing wildly now and the back and forth cycle was growing ever more violent with each change of direction. I jammed in the clutch with my left foot and took my right foot from the gas pedal to cover the brake. I held it over the pedal without pressing down, brakes wouldn't help, I knew, they were the last resort. The car pitched again to the right, now fully 90 degrees to the lane of travel and I knew the next swing back to the left would be the most violent yet. When the car swung left, I corrected naturally but to no effect. The front wheels finally broke traction and the front of the car swung right and entered a full spin. I knew it was a lost cause and hammered the brakes as I threw my arm over my girlfriend, asleep in the passenger seat and fully unaware of what was about to happen.

I had purchased the little Metro for the same reasons that everyone purchases small, fuel efficient cars and safety was not at the top of my list. In the fall of 1995 I pretty much had it all, a decent job, a beautiful girlfriend and I was even making slow but steady process towards my college degree. I had graduated from community college and enrolled in a teaching certification program being offered in the evenings by Western Washington University through Seattle Central Community College.

Since I lived a good distance outside of Seattle, I ended up putting a lot of miles on my little Dodge Shadow and I was rightly concerned. At around 80,000 miles it had required a head gasket and I had done the work myself. Although I got it back together and running in good order, the incident had reminded me how fragile the highly strung little car was and I was concerned about throwing thousands of additional miles on it each month. I loved the car and didn’t want to sell it, but clearly I needed something else.

The Geo Metro fit the bill perfectly. Its tiny three cylinder engine would sip gas and save me money and the buy in price for the base model with no options was ludicrously low. A test drive confirmed the car was exactly the no frills transportation I needed and so I struck the deal and made the purchase.

My little car performed exactly as I knew it would, cutting its way through the traffic to Seattle and back three rainy nights each week. Since the car had no options, a few upgrades were necessary. A cheap Kraco stereo and a couple of Sparkomatic speakers filled the hard plastic Spartan interior with sound and, when winter came, I threw on a set of studded snow tires. Enmeshed in a cocoon of tinny music and lulled by the steady sound of steel clicking on pavement, I hardly noticed the noise of the wind that tore past the car’s thin sheet metal at freeway speeds. Maybe it wasn’t Heaven, I assured myself, but it was good enough for what it was for.

Sometime in January, my girlfriend who was a year behind me and still at Everett Community College, announced that she was thinking about finishing her four year degree at Washington State University in Pullman. I was familiar with the University, my sister had gone there in the 1970s and I knew it had a decent reputation. The only problem was where it was located, on the extreme eastern edge of the state just a few miles from the Washington/Idaho border almost 300 miles from my house. Still, I supported her decision and when she asked if I wanted to take a trip to see the college and scout out possible apartments, I volunteered to take her.

Thanks to the Cascade mountain range, traveling across Washington state in January has never been easy. In the winter months, the northern passes are clogged with snow and generally closed. Southern passes too, tend to be quite high and can also become dangerous. The pass closest to my home, Stevens, is notorious for harsh conditions and avalanches, including the deadliest in US history, a 1910 avalanche that killed 96 people when it swept two trains off their tracks. Slightly further south, Interstate 90 runs through Snoqualmie pass and the road is better maintained. Naturally, I decided that this was the route we would take.

We left in the evening, as soon as I got off work, thinking we could cross the state and overnight in Pullman. We headed straight up Snoqualmie pass and into the teeth of a snowstorm that stopped lesser cars cold. With its studded tires, my little Geo didn’t need chains to claw its way up the western slopes and we plodded confidently along past wreck after wreck.

As we cleared the pass the snow abated and the weather grew colder and clearer. We rolled down the eastern slope of the pass in good condition with the snow on the roadway giving way to patchy snow and ice, and eventually bare pavement as we moved further east. West of Ellensburg we worked our way through a smaller pass and finally down onto the plains of central Washington.

We rolled through Ellensburg, a medium sized town that is generally a good place to stop but I pressed on in the hopes of making up some of the time we had lost in the mountain passes. Traffic on the interstate was minimal, and I gradually wicked up the speed as we headed out and away from civilization and up over the final hump before dropping down into the gentle, winding descent that led to where the Columbia river bisected the state. The fact that there was black ice on the road never occurred to me.

Photo: A Geo Metro very similar to the one I owned

[UberGoober]

The car was now spinning out of control. With my right arm thrown across my sleeping girlfriend, who was seatbelted securely in her seat, I fought for control with my left. It was a futile gesture. I estimate that we were still doing around 50 MPH when we left the road. Fully out of control, the car was backwards when the right rear tire bit into the soft shoulder. I heard the roar of pebbles as the car slid onto the shoulder and snapped violently around to the right. A fraction of a second later we were stopped, my headlights shining up through the branches of a leafless bush, their brightness lost in the starry sky overhead.

Filled with adrenalin I am sure that I noticed everything at once, although now it seems to me that there was a slow orderly way in which my senses noted my surroundings. First it was the sounds, the engine was dead but the heater fan hummed steadily along and the radio continued to put forth its stream of tinny AM talk. My girlfriend sat beside me, silent but as awake and focused as I was and we exchanged a wordless glance. I noticed then that the airbag had not deployed.

I covered the clutch and turned the ignition key. The little engine sprang effortlessly to life and purred at idle. I slipped the gearshift into reverse and noted the sound of crunching gravel as the little car backed up a small slope onto the hard shoulder of the interstate. Leaving the engine running, I slipped the car into neutral, shot the parking brake and got out to assess the damage.

Outside the car I could feel the isolation of the place. The canyon walls towered up on either side of me, the closest cliff side just across the two east bound lanes of the interstate extending a rocky talus foot to the very edge of the highway. The far side of the canyon was perhaps a half mile away and the west bound lanes of the interstate clung to it as the climbed up and away from the Columbia. Between them, a small creek ran towards the great river lost somewhere in the valley below me in the winding way that all slow currents move and over the years or even centuries the sand that it had eroded from the surrounding cliffs made up a wide flat plain. It was into this plain my car hand spun, and in the soft pebble-filled sand, had come safely to a stop.

A slow hissing sound drew my attention to the pod’s front passenger side. In its final spin, some small pebbles had forced their way between the tire and the rim and their presence was enough to cause a slow leak. Otherwise, my car had suffered no damage, not even a scratch.

Noting the twinkling of a few lights further down the valley, I resumed my place behind the wheel and put the car back out onto the road. As I ran up to speed, now a significantly lower speed than I had been traveling before, I noted the sound of small pebbles impinging upon the inner fender wells of the small car. Gradually, one rock at a time, the pebbles were being flung from their place in the bead of my front tire and the leak was sealing itself. By the time I reached the exit at the bottom of the Columbia gorge, at some small community doubtlessly there to serve the summertime visitors who came to the river but now empty in the middle of a winter’s night, the tire was fully sealed.

Since there was no place to stop and no compressor from which to fill my low front tire, we pressed on, leaving the Interstate at the far side of the river and onto the rural two lane highway that our map indicated would eventually lead us to Pullman. The first town we came to was Othello and we stopped there for the night.

The rest of our journey went without incident. My girlfriend was able to see the university and we toured several apartments in the town of Pullman. The day after that, in the full light day, we made our way West and as we passed through the gorge on our way home, I strained to see where we had left the road. There were no tracks that I could see, but the place itself was obvious. A small single oasis of sand in a place where the downward slope of the creek lessened just enough to widen it into a slow meandering stream. A hundred yards in either direction there was nothing but steel guardrails and hard, exposed rock.

Somewhere, further up the slope during my east bound descent, the rear wheels of my little pod had broken loose and I had begun a struggle for control with the forces of physics. I can’t say how far that we traveled during my fight, but by the time that physics had won and I had lost full control, we were in the only place for miles where we could have emerged unscathed.

To this day, I can't explain how that happened. Perhaps it was simple chance or incredible luck, I don't know. Maybe, just maybe, it was the guiding hand of God. I can't be sure, but I would like to think so.

[Electrical_Tech]

Awesome tale It wasn't either of your times.

[Alawicious]

I was fearing for you and was able to breathe easier once the little geo came to a stop

[UberGoober]

Thanks for caring but, actually I was killed. These are all being ghostwritten.

[Alawicious]