Kissing the wall

I was minding my own business, tooling down the road, returning home from work. It was late afternoon. I noticed a police car come up behind me.

This particular middle-of-town road was similar to an interstate, with two lanes going one way and two the other, with various islands and turning points in-between-- but considerably slower in average traffic speed than the national highway system. The neighborhood was basically a suburban strip of stores, restaurants, and gas stations. Traffic was light at the moment.

I made sure I was doing no wrong, and hoped he'd turn off or pass on by. But no such luck.

Instead, he eased on up and bumped me(!) I immediately got angry, and had to calm myself back down.

Then he bumped me again. And I recognized the driver. It was Briggs. The same cop who'd almost gotten me arrested days before, and successfully forced a deadline on me to get a Texas license and Shadow inspected.

I was still nursing some injuries from our last encounter, and in no mood for this crap.

It was broad daylight. He bumped me again, and I immediately took off, tires squealing. Yeah, I shouldn't have, but I did.

Briggs moved from provocation to pursuit mode.

My intent was to shake him fast with some quick turns, and then hiding somewhere while he went off on a wild goose chase. I'd successfully pulled this off with other pursuers many times in the past. Of course, those instances usually took place in much more familiar country than southeast Texas.

I looked for a good candidate road and found it. I hurriedly turned off onto the side road and raced away.

Yikes! I wound around some unusually convoluted curves, and realized this was not a regular roadway at all. Signs of heavy construction suddenly sprouted up all around me, as I neared the crest of a shallow hill.

Then I noticed the flashing lights in my rear view. I hadn't yet lost the bastard.

I decided the way ahead looked clear enough to go for it. That is, it appeared I could easily weave around and through what few barricades had been placed in the way. More easily than the police car, I figured. That should gain me some extra time and distance to leave him behind.

I gunned the motor and Shadow leaped forward.

The next few moments seemed to happen in slow motion.

Too late, I noticed a large machine shovel was swiveling into sight above the rise ahead, the bottom jaw of its earth-moving maw opening even as it moved into position. Dirt was beginning to fall right on top of where I meant to pass.

I floored it, meaning to pass through before the load fell atop me. It occurred to me that if I could get past before the big pile hit the road, it might stop the cop behind me.

But as I topped the rise at full throttle I suddenly learned several new things all at once.

One, there was no road at the top of the hill: only a pit, maybe twelve feet wide and twenty feet deep. I realized this just as Shadow's front tires went airborne over the hole. Two, on the far side of the pit the road did continue, but not very far at all. Maybe 50 yards or less. And at the end was a solid brick wall. Turned out this was the driveway of a shopping mall under construction, and the road T-boned up ahead, splitting both left and right at 90 degree angles, with the brick wall there waiting for fools like me. Three, I wasn't going to make it across the pit before the dirt clobbered me. In mid-air over the pit things suddenly got much darker in the car, as my entire windshield was blacked out with falling dirt. Blinding me to the way ahead.

Luckily the slight rise and my acceleration to meet it enabled us to clear the pit okay, landing on the opposite side without incident. Except for me now driving blind towards a brick wall at around eighty mph, that is.

What happened next was either sheer dumb luck, or my gut instincts somehow saving the day. For my conscious mind didn't have a clue what to do then.

I knew I had to stop immediately. I was also afraid I didn't have room to stop, before striking the wall.

I didn't know why I did it, but suddenly my limbs took command of the situation and twisted the steering wheel first in one direction and then the other, much faster than the car could respond and still hold the road.

My foot simultaneously pounded the brake pedal. Not holding it down, but pumping. I felt us spinning out of control, and consciously waited for the impact with the wall.

Just as I was about to close my eyes in anticipation of the collision, I saw an amazing sight: the dirt on my windshield was flying off, as if by magic. Well, some was flying. Other bits were sliding down to the hood.

I could see again!

But what I saw was a blur of motion, as Shadow was whirling around like a dervish, flinging dirt in every direction.

My foot kept pummeling the brakes, and my arms kept working the wheel. And I began to understand what was going on. But I dared not think the danger was past.

The blur ahead became more legible, as my big black spinning top slowed, and I noticed for the first time the screeching of the tires and the burnt rubber smell, as we spun end to end down the road.

The wall ahead loomed ever larger, but hope soared within me that we might only hit it at around 20 or 30 mph: a much better velocity than 50 or 60 in terms of likely damage and injury!

But then I was amazed to feel Shadow finally slide to a complete stop, with no more contact than a gentle kiss of the wall with its right front corner post.

Holy cow!

I turned to look back for pursuit, and saw the tail end of the cop car now sticking up out of the pit-- Yay!

I also saw about a dozen men among the construction crew staring at me. Or at least looking in my direction. They were too far away for me to really see their eyes clearly. But I could definitely make out one thing: most of them were standing there with their mouths hanging open.

I briefly wished I could have seen it myself from their angle, then sighed, laughed, and sped off to find a quiet place where I could remove the rest of the dirt from my car.

I figured with all those construction guys standing around the police officer would have all the help he needed if he was hurt.

In hindsight all I could figure was that my self-training and experience with Shadow had somehow combined in my subconscious with the knowledge gained from my very first crash of Shadow, to give me the savvy to escape that trap. For the only other time I'd ever burned off so much speed by multiple 360 degree spins of the car like that had been my first wreck in it, long ago. And that had been a pure accident by every measure.

The spin clearing the dirt off the windshield too had just been the icing on the cake.

I don't think I could have stopped in a straight line from that speed. But plenty of 360 degree spins did it nicely. By greatly increasing the total amount of tire-to-road contact area, compared to what the straight line route would have offered me. At least that seemed like a plausible explanation to my still incomplete engineering education. In chemical reactions you get the most and fastest bang for your buck from attaining the maximum surface area contact between the different elements involved in your experiment. In chemistry this often meant either using liquid chemicals or the most finely powdered solids you could. In extreme automotive braking it meant substituting curves for straight lines: preferably the closed curves of 360 degree spins (circles). So far as the physics of deceleration were concerned, a straight path of 50 yards changed to some multiple of that in a series of circular spins over the same distance.

So I'd basically stretched the road ahead of me, to allow me a safer braking distance!

And my initial momentum kept me going in a more or less straight course during the feat (regardless of my spinning), helping to keep me on the road.

Don't get me wrong: I may have felt cocky as hell in the immediate aftermath of that incident, but that didn't mean I was confident I could repeat that trick. To the contrary; it was scary and uncertain enough that I'd subsequently do my best never to get into that precise situation again. Wow!

Unfortunately, when your options dwindle down fast in a desperate situation, you'll tend to pull out all the normal stops on what you're willing to try...