Shadowfast versus the Tornadoes

It was a Saturday, and I was off work. My best friend Steve and his brother Will were visiting. We planned to drink and make merry, despite it being stormy weather.

Problem was, I was an unprepared host. Mainly because my recent problems had left me low on cash. So I had to wait until Steve arrived from Houston and Will from Baton Rouge to collect some contributions from them too for the festivities. They fully understood my situation, as their lives had much in common with my own (poor guys).

So Shadow and I left Steve and Will to make a run to a local convenience store for some party essentials, while the two brothers caught one another up on recent experiences, and relaxed after their respective drives.

As I was climbing into Shadow outside my trailer, I noticed my cute next door neighbor Alley Benton from across the drive starting out on an apparent walk in the present sprinkle-which-could-turn-deluge at any moment. She was holding something over her head against the moisture in the air.

Alley was a petite native-born Texan girl with mostly straight dark brown hair ending above her shoulders and a pale complexion which seemed out of place here. I say her hair was mostly straight because it got very fuzzy around the edges, and did possess a slight repeating curl overall. I know this sounds contradictory, but contradiction was sort of a theme with Alley. Another example was she was significantly older than me, but to my mind looked younger. She had an unusual voice too which often cracked when she spoke, sort of like a feminine version of a teenage boy's voice changes. At times she'd sound like a comedian's impersonation of the ultimate annoying high-pitched little girl, while in others you couldn't recognize her by voice alone standing behind you-- she'd sound so sultry and seductive. Her voice then being that of a full grown and melodic woman's.

The oft-times funny part was that Alley seemed to have little control over where and when her voice changed between these two modes. She might try to say something serious but it'd come out in the hilarious little girl voice. Or she might try to be silly but have the vamp voice kick in at the worst moment. So Alley's communications were often seriously hampered by her flip-flopping voice. People would give her odd looks as her voice often seemed purposely out of synch with her intent. But I'd seen enough to be pretty sure she couldn't control it.

To me her unusual vocal problem seemed kind of endearing. And I thought the husky temptress voice quite attractive.

I'd been looking for some good way to approach Alley for a possible date for a while now, but had no luck. I'd first met her at a get-together in another neighbor's trailer in the park not long after I'd moved in. I'd thought her quite pleasant at the time as well as attractive, but felt a little too overwhelmed by other things going on in my life to ask her out. For over previous weeks I'd been forced to spend way too much time working, or being exhausted from working, or healing up from various injuries or repairing Shadow's own damages-- it'd just been one big mess.

But I'd caught occasional glimpses of Alley here and there, plus had a word or two in passing, and found my attraction to her growing by the day.

"Hey Alley! Can I give you a ride somewhere? It's likely to start pouring rain any minute!" I yelled at her from across the way.

"No, that's all right. I'm just going to the little store on the corner," she responded.

She had to be referring to the same store to which I was headed myself! Situated on the corner where the road running past our little trailer park met up with the main drag some 50 or 60 yards/meters distant-- and the main drag being where I'd met Briggs two times out of the three of our encounters so far.

(at this time I was still wary of Briggs possibly popping up again somewhere, even after the pipe incident)

"Hey! Me too! Come on! There's no need to get wet when you don't have to!"

Alley stopped, smiled, and came my way.

I opened Shadow's passenger door for her and cautioned her about climbing over the somewhat obtrusive roll cage member angled across the doorway.

Most girls didn't get Shadowfast at all. Heck, for that matter most men didn't either! So I often felt compelled to explain various aspects of my unusual car to passengers.

It felt good to have a girl in the car again. Alley was the first in quite a while.

Alley seemed a bit on the shy side. I tried to draw her out and got a taste of an odd perspective.

"I'm just bad luck, that's all," she said. In her ridiculous little girl voice.

"What do you mean?"

"Bad things happen when I'm around," the major screen star voice said. Yeah, it could be weird conversing with Alley. Like there were at least two women there rather than just the one.

"Well, I've been living across from you for a while now, and I'm okay!" I offered cheerily. But in the back of my mind I was listing the various altercations I'd experienced since moving into the trailer park. Could it be Alley was on to something there? No! Besides, I'd never been very superstitious. And found the whole concept somewhat repellant. Maybe mostly because if such things were true, then my own past didn't bode well for my future. Yikes!

"Really? You and your car have both looked a little banged up lately," the wonderful voice worthy of being used for sexy radio commercials intoned.

Hmm. So she'd noticed us!

"Aww, me and the law just don't get along sometimes, that's all," I told her, with not a little real bravado.

"What do you mean by that? Is the law after you?" Alley looked concerned. And her little girl voice was back in full force. I felt myself involuntarily wince. Maybe her changing voice would take more getting used to than I thought...

"No more than usual. Lots of cops just don't like my car. Plus, sometimes I like to get to places a little faster than the law allows. That's all."

Alley's look of concern remained.

"Well, I hope they're not after you now, because they'll surely catch you if I'm with you. Or maybe worse." Alley's voice suddenly showed a third mode: normal woman. This third mode had been pretty rare in my previous encounters with her.

I was starting to think there was more off about Alley than just her voice. Like maybe she had a mental problem about herself. Either that, or she was just trying to distance herself from me because she wasn't interested in being more than neighbors. Well, that was okay. You couldn't blame a guy for trying. She'd seemed a lot friendlier weeks back, though.

Maybe my timing was off. But heck: I had little control over that.

We pulled into the convenience store parking lot and exited Shadow.

Alley and I approached the front door, continuing our conversation, when something began tugging at the short hairs on the back of my neck.

I slowed my pace and Alley did too.

"What's the matter? Is something wrong?" Alley asked, as we stopped entirely.

"I--" I didn't know what to say, but something wasn't right inside the store. Something was going on between a customer and the cashier. Something bad. Then I realized what must be happening.

"Alley, go back, get in the car, and hide. Hurry," I told her.

"Why? What's going on?" She glanced around the parking lot and then into the store windows.

"Just get in the car or you might get shot! The store's being robbed!"

Alley looked confused, and barely budged.

"Now!" I yelled at her, startling her into movement. She did as she was told then.

But I was afraid she wouldn't have enough time to get to safety. As was my habit ever since the Crosby High incident, I'd parked near the outer perimeter of the lot rather than close-in, in order to keep my options open, escape-wise. But the price for that now included Alley requiring significant time to get herself back into Shadow's protective shell. So I meant to slow down the gunman inside before retreating myself. I began quickly turning over various sized vending machines which lined the front of the building to block the door from the outside. I was surprised by how heavy some of them were. If I hadn't been getting pretty good exercise at my job the past month or so I doubted I could have upset the more vault-like of the things. As it was, it felt like I strained something.

The robber inside noticed my actions and started firing at me, sending shattered glass flying. I heard thunder from both inside and outside the store. Luckily for me the guy was using a small handgun rather than a shotgun, and firing wildly at that. And some of the machines I was tipping over were pretty good shields in themselves. So he didn't get me.

I guess some of you can tell I wasn't too savvy about robbers back then. For I didn't realize he had an armed accomplice in a car outside waiting for him. Not until the driver disembarked with his own pistol and starting shooting at me too.

Maybe the only thing which kept me uninjured was all the moving around I was doing to dodge the first guy's bullets and turn over the machines at the door.

I grabbed a trash can and threw it at the driver, over the hood of his car. The can too turned out to be lots heavier than it looked, so for all that effort I missed by a mile.

He came around the front of his car occasionally taking another shot at me, as I ran around the other end of his car trying to take cover and keep him from shooting in Alley's direction.

I realized he was trying to move the machines blocking the store entrance, to help his cohort. While still taking pot shots at me.

By this time I'd made it around to his car's driver's side. The vehicle was running. In a moment of inspiration I opened the door, killed the ignition, and removed the keys.

I yelled at the driver who was still moving machines from the door.

"Hey! You better get your car keys!"

I waited until he had a good look at me dangling his keys over his dead car and then threw them a ways over in the parking lot (in the opposite direction from Alley and Shadow).

I think that's when we all first heard the police sirens wailing in the distance. I also noticed the gunshots were starting to attract attention from others in the vicinity.

The driver cursed several generations of my family and loosed every bullet he had left in my direction. I heard his gun click on empty chambers after his volley. But as he didn't want to damage his own car I was easily able to use it for cover.

The driver ran for his keys and I ran for Shadow and Alley. In the meantime the robber inside the store was pushing his way past what remained of my obstacles.

I jumped into Shadow, cranked him up, threw him into reverse, and drove immediately out of the lot and onto the main road-- all backwards. As I didn't have time to roll my window down, I did this largely all via what I could see in my 180 degree rear view mirror, and side door mirrors.

Whoa! We had a close call getting onto the road, narrowly missing a truck that I somehow just didn't see until the last moment. I ended up actually driving backwards around it in a deep arc to avoid a collision, as the truck itself frantically braked.

This delay neutralized our head start over the robbers, who'd apparently now decided to come after us. It seemed they were the kind of fellows who would hold a grudge.

Alley seemed all right but terrified.

"What are you doing?" she demanded of me several times before I had the spare resources with which to answer her.

"Getting us the hell out of here before those guys kill us!"

"But the police will get them! We need to stop!"

"No! Alley, you don't understand! Those guys will kill us if they catch us!"

Neither Alley or I were wearing our seat belts, and I hadn't had time to notice Alley's belt status or caution her until now. The prior reverse semi-doughnut maneuver had pressed her against the door, but gently, due to our relatively low speed. But things were about to change.

"Hold onto something Alley-- I've got to turn around fast!"

I hoped we had enough speed built up for a complete 180 degree turn. I stomped the emergency brake with my left foot and twisted the steering wheel to the right so the still free-wheeling front end whipped around to face in the opposite direction. At the same time I shifted from reverse to drive, with only a slight drop in gas pedal pressure from my right foot.

I knew my transmission governor would allow the gear change at this speed. I just needed to keep the engine revs properly adjusted.

I yanked the emergency brake off again with my left hand under the dash and straightened our front wheels with my right.

This put us facing oncoming traffic in this lane-- but going back the other way might be a drive into a hail of bullets or a head-on game of chicken. I'd had to get turned around to expand my options.

I hated endangering civilian traffic, but planned to get out of its way as soon as possible.

Poor Alley bumped her head on her passenger side window, being unbelted and also not holding on tight enough to anything.

Now that we were facing forward, I headed for the nearest turn off to get out of the face of oncoming traffic and away from the main highway entirely. The robbers were now on our tail rather than ahead of us, perspective-wise, and it seemed like everybody in Texas was angrily honking their horns at me.

The road under Shadow's wide tires was wet and slippery from the sprinkling rain, so I couldn't accelerate or corner as rapidly as I wished.

I also didn't want to use my tire poppers or crash bars on a major roadway like this, as they'd be sure to get more folks than merely the robbers themselves. Especially in this weather.

And yes, I'd reloaded those things since my close call with Briggs.

We turned off the main highway and I saw two police cars take position behind the robber vehicle, which was itself still behind us.

We raced through some suburbs, unfortunately with their own significant traffic, and so still too risky for using my poppers or bars.

Occasionally I thought I heard a bullet strike my car. In my mirror it looked like the robbers were taking turns firing at us and the cops behind them. Those guys were crazy!

The cops of course started firing back. And we were in the same line of fire as the robbers.

"Alley, fasten your seat belt! And keep your head down!" I ordered her.

"What?"

"Put on your seat belt! And keep your head down! They're shooting at us!"

"But you're not wearing yours!"

"I just haven't had time to buckle it!"

"Well, I don't want to be trapped in here when we crash!"

"You won't be trapped! Here, buckle me in first then!" I passed her my belt for buckling in next to the center console. Alley buckled me, and then herself. After more urging from me, she also bent over for better protection from gunfire.

I personally had little choice but to remain upright in order to drive. Feeling very vulnerable to a stray bullet or ricochet. Times like this would be why I'd eventually fashion metal shields to hang down behind my seat backs.

I wished I had my police scanner so I could learn what the cops were saying.

As we wound our way deeper into the countryside I saw another police car, and then a fourth, join in the chase.

It was raining harder now, and the sky had gotten darker. Visibility was diminishing and all the water was forcing the chase to become one of almost comical slow motion. At least compared to the chases I was usually involved in.

The houses and road traffic were getting sparser. The rain was alternating between almost non-existent sprinkles one second and the pouring, driving, hard stuff the next. A strangely bright band of light was on the horizon ahead, with almost black clouds above it. Some of the clouds looked very low and close to the ground. Peals of thunder powerful enough to shake the car were happening now, immediately on the heels of visible lightning bolts. The strikes seemed awfully close.

When the hard rain momentarily put a lot of water on the pavement I had to slow down drastically or lose control via hydroplaning.

The robbers had narrower tires and so better maneuverability than us under the circumstances. They exploited this by making a hard left turn immediately after we both came around a long winding curve to the right. It was a turn I'd have made myself had I been aware of the road almost entirely hidden there by trees and brush. And if the pavement had been dry.

The result of this was when everyone emerged from the lengthy curve the robbers' car was gone and all the police vehicles were directly behind us instead.

Visibility was overall poor for everyone. Partly because everything was getting so dark, atop the periods of manic downpours. We'd all had to turn our lights on.

I didn't have much chance to consider surrendering to explain things, for the cops seemed to still be in shoot first, ask questions later mode. And I couldn't blame them, based on what they knew so far about events.

This was one fine mess!

Without my scanner I couldn't know what they were thinking. Did they think we were with the robbers? Or that the robbers were now somewhere ahead of me in the soaking wet procession? Or was Briggs maybe in that police pack somewhere, misleading everyone else to try to kill me in some new way?

Suddenly we were being pelted by some really big hail. Big enough, and striking hard enough, that I worried it might bust my windshield or rear window. Whoa!

You could plainly hear it striking all the exposed metal surfaces on Shadow. It reminded me of the sounds of a canning factory I'd worked at before, back home.

It was so messy and dark out here now-- in the middle of the day!-- that it was hard for me to tell if there were two or four police cars behind us. The intense fogginess created by the hard rain and maybe unusual temperature changes didn't help visibility either.

Then we ran out of pavement. Thankfully it wasn't completely mud. But we now appeared to be in a wilderness of agricultural fields. A place I could have used my poppers and bars on the robbers, if they'd still been behind me.

By now the robbers looked to have gotten clean away, and if I disabled all the cop cars now behind me there might not be any mobile police vehicles for miles around for the next few hours. The little Texas town I presently resided in could be bereft of its entire automotive police force at one stroke by me here-- maybe. If four cars was all they had. It seemed possible!

I'd never been in a position to ground a town's whole police force before...well, except for that itsy bitsy burg near my hometown with the pitiful guy driving the Falcon with the blue light on top, that nobody paid attention to for he was mainly around to prevent speeding past a school at bus stop times. Once, I'd accidentally passed him a little too fast and he'd come after me with his little light rotating. I'd actually let him stay in sight of me for a while, wondering if he had any backup. He didn't, so I finally got bored and left him behind.

Now it occurred to me I might run completely out of road any minute, so no matter how magnanimous I felt, I'd have to do something the cops wouldn't like soon or else be in a big mess personally.

And here I was with a girl in the car. Alley was white as a sheet, staying silent, just trying to ride it all out.

Man oh man I had not meant to subject her to anything like this!

Though my wide tires and the rain and the mud had made it darn difficult, I'd put enough distance between us and the cops to be on the verge of getting away now. I was maybe only one quick turn away from losing them. The low visibility due to the weather and all the debris flying in the wind was helping too.

As things were calming down a bit now (except for the weather, which seemed to be getting worse by the moment), I considered my CB radio options. It'd be nice to get the cops redirected onto the robbers' trail and off mine. Or something.

After all the trouble with Briggs before I'd not only reloaded my tire poppers and crash bars, but kept my somewhat annoying CB antenna mounted on the car roof as well.

I also had my 38 Special revolver and short-barreled 12 gauge automatic pump in Shadow. If I got pulled over with them the cops would steal them (calling it 'confiscation'). At least if they were anything like the cops of my hometown. I sure hated buying guns for the relatives of cops. Good guns were awfully expensive!

I didn't usually carry guns in Shadow (except for the flare gun; and I don't think that was even illegal at the time in most of the USA). But the incidents with Briggs had me paranoid. And lots of my Texas co-workers talked like it wasn't unusual for folks to travel 'packing' around these parts.

The low, angry looking clouds directly ahead began swirling around, and something ugly began dangling beneath them.

Holy smokes if it wasn't a tornado in the making! The first I'd ever seen in person. It looked like we were going to drive right underneath it if we didn't change course soon.

Alley hadn't yet seen it, despite looking fearfully out first one window then another.

I was trying to figure out what to do next when the decision was taken completely out of my hands.

Everything went absolutely pure white. Like one of those weird events in a theatrical film. Or a white-out in a blizzard, I suppose. But we were inside a car!

Everything got much quieter too, all of a sudden. Heavily muffled. It was like reality just stopped entirely. Like the film of my life had broken in the projector.

Then, just as suddenly, the world was back again, seemingly much darker and grittier than before.

It all happened too fast for me to get scared.

Shadow shook all over. The interior seemed filled with sparks and smoke. The steering wheel became as sluggish as molasses. The brakes still worked, and I used them. Since I had not a clue as to what had just happened.

This incident was something like a super-amplified version of what happened to the victims of my rearward facing strobe lights at night. But how the heck somebody could pull such a thing on me under the present circumstances was beyond my comprehension.

Some part of me suspected some sort of mental episode had taken place. In my own head. For nothing else in my experience could explain the white-out.

An enormous roar next vibrated our very beings, down to the individual teeth in our skulls. Wow! A bomb had gone off! Somewhere very close! A big one outside! And maybe a little one inside? Man, was I confused!

Both Alley and I instinctively began rolling the windows down to get some fresh air. The kick panel vents were already open all the way, as Texas summers pretty much demanded it. Except for those early morning hours sometimes when it could feel cold enough to frost.

The brakes were working a thousand times better than usual in slowing us down. Then I realized our engine had died. All our normal outside lights still burned, but something had killed the engine and caused sparks in the passenger compartment. Several red warning lights were now lit up on the dash.

The smell of burned wires was apparent throughout the car.

I realized then that the CB radio in the overhead console had exploded into flame. And a few small blue flames still licked at the flammable interior ceiling panels situated to either side of the metal console, only inches from the heads of both Alley and I. Yikes!

The initial white out was only somewhere between two and four seconds past, by this point. So every second since had seemed to be packed with new and bizarre discoveries!

I moved my right knee up to keep the steering wheel straight as we slowed to a stop, and used both hands to yank the mini-fire extinguisher from the floor console and put out the ceiling fire with a few squirts. So far as I could see in a quick visual sweep of the interior the CB had been the only thing on fire.

The extinguisher exhaust didn't add anything to the breathing quality of the air inside the car though. Alley and I were now coughing and our eyes watering from the smoke and maybe the extinguisher residue too.

Fortunately, rolling the windows down allowed a mighty wind to enter the car and clear it out fast, once the fire was out.

Rain was coming in too though. Side-ways. It was raining horizontally through the window. It was really strange.

It's not every day you enter a real world twilight zone.

We came to a complete stop and I tried to assess the situation in a calm and rational manner.

One, the cops now had us, and were pulling up to encircle us.

Two, I was having trouble re-starting Shadow. Had my ignition circuits burned out too, I wondered? I couldn't figure out why the hell the CB had exploded, or how its explosion had simultaneously caused that white-out inside-- and enormous noise outside-- the car.

Maybe Briggs had booby-trapped it or something? In the moment that seemed to make as much sense as anything else!

Three, the descending funnel ahead was now clearly a tornado, which Alley recognized and began screaming about. I didn't bother to make it worse by informing her I could now see a second tornado in another direction, just as close as the first.

The major buffeting and wind roar coming in through the open windows made even Alley's loudest screams seem like whispers.

Four, maybe the cops too were noticing the tornadoes, and actually trying to turn around and escape, rather than capture us as I'd first thought.

Shadow's tail end was scooting sideways a bit in the wind, rain, and mud. But the cop cars seemed to be having more trouble. Apparently our aerodynamics were resisting the wind a tad better than the more conventionally shaped cruisers.

But I knew our lighter weight (or a change in wind direction) might cancel that out at any time.

The terrain here looked flat as a pancake as far as the eye could see. For untold acres there was a virtually unbroken expanse of grass maybe two or three feet high. At the moment the wind was causing violent ripples to run across the grass at unbelievable speeds, resembling a great flag fluttering madly in a supersonic wind tunnel. And this grass flag was coming apart at the seams, with tiny flying islands of sod also whipping past in the gusts now.

The side-ways rain forced me to raise my window again as soon as I could breathe. It'd been driving in my window and exiting out Alley's. The rain was moving so fast it stung where it hit you. I was also worried about the amazing amount of water that'd entered Shadow in the brief time the windows were down. There was enough for our feet to splash about in the floorboards!

A habitual check of my wide-angle rear view mirror showed what now looked like a third tornado forming behind us.

At that moment I wondered if I was actually asleep and dreaming. For at that age I thought tornadoes only appeared one at a time-- not in pairs or even clubs(!)

I was also unaware of the special love tornadoes had for Texas. After all, I was only a visitor here, as the song goes.

Usually the only time I had trouble starting Shadow was after I'd done some sort of engine modification or mistake in wiring, or run out of gas, or on especially cold winter days. He'd been amazingly reliable for all the crap I'd put him through.

But if he didn't start now, we might literally be visiting that great race track in the sky soon.

Damn! Poor Alley. She should have resisted me for just a moment longer at the trailer park. But I hadn't meant to get her hurt!

Only a few car lengths from us-- almost straight ahead looking through the windshield-- the rear-end of one of the cop cars lifted into the air, its wheels spinning uselessly to get away. The vehicle spun around on its front end for a moment, like a huge toy top, then abruptly took off like a rocket into the sky.

Holy shit!

In a genuine panic now, I accidentally gave Shadow what he needed. I pushed the gas pedal to the floor as I cranked the starter again.

Turned out he'd been flooded! That happened so rarely with him that I'd forgotten about the possibility.

Another police car was doing slow, lazy 360 degree spins nearby. Partly from the driver himself trying to maneuver for escape, and partly from the wind toying with him, it seemed. All four of its wheels still touched the ground, but maybe not for much longer.

We now had motive power, but the question was, what to do with it? Low spot. We needed to get as low as we could, immediately. But we were surrounded by flatness.

Then I remembered a tiny bridge we'd passed over just before the white-out. There'd been some sort of narrow little stream or irrigation ditch running under it. Maybe I could drop us into that ditch?

It wasn't much, but it was all I had.

I couldn't take the time to turn around. Plus, moving about randomly as they were, the remaining cop cars were now unpredictable obstacles in the vicinity. So I put it into reverse and tried to ease my way backwards-- almost directly towards the third tornado column.

I honked my horn and toggled my front driving lights at the remaining police cars, hoping somehow they might understand and follow me to the ditch. But it was doubtful the wind was going to permit that anyway. And I was positive they couldn't hear my horn over the wind's howling.

It was now incredibly dark for the middle of the day, and the water and debris and fogging on my rear window made its glass practically opaque. It seemed all my windows were misting up now, despite the incredible ventilation action via the side windows before I rolled mine back up most of the way only a minute before. Alley's was still down, and mine cracked open an inch or so. I really missed my windshield defroster, which had been part of the factory equipment to get tossed out in Shadow's transformation to supercar. I still had a fan, but it blew air of only the ambient interior temperature at the glass.

The dim red glow of my brake lights behind me did little to help with my rearward vision in the darkness.

Hey! I'd forgotten about my strobes! I switched them on and got a weird nightmarish stop-motion look behind me. But at least I could see. Although I'd been forced to roll my window down again and lean out it as I drove. I was getting soaked, and ever more water was pooling inside Shadow.

My damn eye glasses were a big problem in conditions like these. I used some free fingers of my left-hand to frantically keep wiping the lenses clear, over and over again. I couldn't remove them entirely, because I was way too near-sighted.

On the brighter side, though I couldn't tell how close the rear-most tornado actually was to us, at least the light from my strobes wasn't reflecting off its funnel. So it was surely at least quite a few car lengths away. Or maybe several football fields worth. I just couldn't tell at the moment. The distance depended on the width of the funnel itself, and there was nothing to compare to it size-wise in my field of vision.

I accelerated what little I dared. We lost sight of the cops. I hoped they'd make it. Unfortunately it was every man for himself at the moment. And according to tradition, women and children were always supposed to be rescued first. So having the duty to extract Alley from this horrific situation made me feel a little better about my inability to help the cops.

Shadow himself was weaving and bobbing in the wind now, feeling awfully light at times. I think our open windows were compromising his aerodynamics. But I had to see!

We actually reached and drove over the little bridge before I even saw it. The different sound and feeling under the car when we crossed were what alerted me to the fact. I stopped, switched off the strobes, went into drive, and ran off the muddy road at a 90 degree angle, to roughly parallel the ditch, looking for a good spot to slide in.

The ditch was remarkably uniform in size and shape. Definitely man-made. Couldn't tell how deep it was due to the circumstances. I hoped we wouldn't drown!

Holy crap! The wind suddenly spun us around 180 degrees on the slippery grass! We almost went into the drink involuntarily!

Well, we'd wandered a bit far from the little bridge anyway, and now I found myself wanting to park underneath the bridge itself for added security.

So I motored my way back towards it...then the wind spun us around 180 degrees again!

And this time we got dunked. Went right into the ditch.

Well, at least it wasn't very deep. But still water began flowing in various spots on Shadow.

From here I had a new perspective on the ditch's construction. It may be that having the wind shove us in sideways was better than any manual job I could have done. On the flip side, it looked like it'd take a tractor or wrecker to get us out again. The ditch walls were sheer verticals.

The ditch protected us a little from the wind, but now there was lots more grass and other plant and insect material blowing around at eye-level as I had to once again hang my head outside and drive backwards, using my fingers to clear my glasses almost constantly. I switched on my strobes again (despite them now being possibly submerged) to illuminate the way and get a better handle on the conditions underneath the bridge, as a plan was starting to form in my mind...

Though I couldn't hear her with my head stuck outside, inside the car Alley was screaming about the tornadoes. She was now aware of all three of them, and didn't like it a bit.

I couldn't blame her. However, I personally wasn't entirely surprised by the present turn of events. Alley had earlier told me it seemed like bad luck followed her around. Well, she couldn't know it, but it seemed like every time I managed to get a girl into my car, something like this happened!

Sometimes I felt like God just didn't mean for me to reproduce. I kept hoping he'd let up when the right girl came along, but so far I'd racked up lots more losses than wins.

As unbelievable as it seemed, my love life was actually getting worse than it'd been before! I was now officially getting ever and ever further away from fruitful encounters with the opposite sex! Sheesh!

Well, at least the women who went somewhere with me would never forget the experience: that was for sure!

Shadow was occasionally losing traction in the water. At first I thought we were encountering deep spots in the trench and floating, but then I realized the wind was threatening to yank us up and out regardless of our now lower profile. Yikes! Wind speed had apparently increased.

Fortunately for our sanity, our lowered stance blinded us to where exactly the funnels were possibly touching ground around us. And the clouds of debris in the air were reducing visibility somewhat too. So all we could see was the dark, angry face of the cloud cover above, and the top three-quarters of the funnels reaching down from them up there. All three twisters looked awfully close.

Believe it or not, my strobes kept working for a minute or two even underwater. Before they finally went out. Ouch! Those two bulbs each cost as much as a car battery! Maybe if I hadn't had to crack open their housings for that damn inspection before, the water wouldn't have leaked in now and busted the hot glass.

We made it to the bridge, and I tried to back under it. I didn't want to lose Shadow to the wind. Or drown in the ditch. Or tell Alley we had to throw ourselves into the water like Titanic passengers.

The least I could do was keep her within the shelter of Shadowfast, if at all possible.

But Shadow wouldn't fit under the low-hanging bridge.

I pulled myself out into the howling wind far enough to get a look at the clearance, and almost went flying solo. Holy crap, but that wind had to be going more than 150 mph!

When the wind almost whipped me out of the car and away, something about the struggle seemed odd-- like the wind was taking my breath away, but it didn't matter because I didn't need to breathe(?) Despite the massive exertion I had to make to stay grounded in that instant.

I didn't think much of it then because I was too busy. But the memory stuck with me. Decades later, I'd learn that skydivers in free fall don't have to breathe because the high speed wind impacting them forces oxygen into their blood directly through their skin, clothes and all. So maybe I got a taste of that.

I pulled myself back into the car and considered the situation. If we could get under the bridge at all, the tight fit would be a good thing rather than bad. But how?

Then I remembered my dad telling me about a semi-truck driver who lacked a few inches getting underneath an underpass of some sort. He'd simply deflated his tires to achieve the feat.

Crap.

There wasn't time (or safety margins) for anything else. I drove forward again a couple car lengths, stopped, then reversed direction and yanked the cable pull for the tire poppers, to spread them out ahead of our backwards course.

In the water and mud though I had to run back and forth a time or two to get the job done, and even then the right front tire simply refused to go down.

But three was enough. We scraped under the bridge, tearing what was left of my CB antenna off the roof of the car, and creating a whole new water leak.

When I'd inspected the clearance before, I'd also been surprised to see the stubby burnt remains of my roof-top CB antenna, and realized the white-out minutes earlier must have been a lightning strike directly on Shadow. Wow!

And my little black beauty was still running! Ha!

I considered a melted CB to be a small price to pay for such a true-life story. But first we had to live through it.

Alley and I were mid-ankle deep in water, and I figured I better shut Shadow down. Parts of his wiring were already compromised, I knew. His battery behind Alley's seat in an under-shelf compartment had to be sitting a couple inches deep in water, too.

After I dug up a flashlight I shut down all Shadow's systems, including turning off all juice with the master kill switch. To Alley's obvious dismay.

I tried to explain to her my logic as I worked on further precautions, but I'm afraid I didn't do a very good job of it. Plus, I was pressed for time.

The little bridge framework had some inviting tie off points to it, but I was afraid to completely leave the car to exploit them. For I had an intense fear of flying at that moment. I had a couple of magnificent tow ropes in the trunk, with big steel hooks on either end. I wanted to use them for lifelines to the bridge, in case the wind grew strong enough to drag us out of our refuge.

Having already unbelted earlier, I now crawled back to the carpeted metal sheet which separated Shadow's extended passenger compartment from his shortened trunk. Crap. I had to get through that, and do it in a hurry. No time for digging up tools and undoing the normal fasteners. I groped around in the passenger compartment for a suitable implement, but most of my best tools were in the trunk.

Then I realized I didn't need to tear open the sheet metal. Just going through my stereo speakers would do it. As they fit in arm-sized holes cut in the metal. Knock one of those babies out, and I could pull the ropes through the wall.

That speaker set had cost me fifty bucks.

I comforted myself with the idea that if I could get by just ruining one, I could still hear the other. Mono wasn't stereo, but it was better than nothing.

I made my best guess which speaker was nearest the ropes, and punched and ripped it out using a club of heavy insulated electrical cable I kept under the front seat.

But I'd guessed wrong. So I had to punch out the second speaker too. Rats. No more music for me.

I pulled the thick tow ropes through, and set about securing Shadow to the bridge with them. I tied the ropes around the upper intersections of Shadow's roll cage on either side of the car, passing the rope out his small fold out vent windows just behind the door windows. I did have to lean out in the storm some from the main windows to tie off to the bridge, with Alley in one instance crouching in her floorboard puddle to make way for this, as she refused to move to the somewhat dryer carpeted shelf in the back. I guess the shelf was a little scary with that enormous rear window over it.

I hoped the loss of our CB antenna and slightly lower altitude made us less likely to attract another lightning strike while I was protruding outside the car like this. But in hindsight our partial submergence in the ditch probably outweighed any benefit derived from the other factors.

I was just amazingly lucky we didn't get struck again.

I made the rigging as tight as I could, then finally switched off the light to save battery power. I made sure we were both belted in too, although maybe it would have been safer not to have been. For if the tornadoes did take Shadow, we'd want to get out first, right?

Just as I'd feared, things did get worse. We rolled up the windows because the air became even thicker with flying debris, plus we needed the best 'hunker-down' aerodynamics we could muster. The small vent windows to the rear remained open for the sake of the massive tie-down ropes.

Alley and I didn't speak much in the face of the spectacle surrounding us. Partly because you had to yell to be heard over the commotion, even with the door windows now closed. It sounded a little like we were inside a gigantic internal combustion motor running at high revs.

Another reason we didn't speak much was we didn't really know each other at all. And finally, Ally was pissed, I guess.

Maybe some of the women who've known me would argue with me over this-- but I think this was the worst thing I ever put any woman through, in my life. Or at least I hope it was!

Sorry ladies!

I hoped there'd be no flood come through the ditch while we were stuck there.

Despite being literally jammed underneath the bridge and then tightly tied to it with massive ropes strong enough to tow trucks, Shadow came to be wrenched back and forth and side-ways several times by the wind over the next twenty minutes or so, as the wind grew even stronger than before. At times you could hear the ropes stretching and straining. Once, they popped their loudest as they snapped into a new, more stable position on the roll cage. For a second there both of us mistakenly thought something had broken loose.

We soon rolled the door windows back down again, to prevent them from being shattered if the wind pushed us too far backwards for the vent window openings to accommodate. And ducked our heads down to almost meet over the console, because of the flying debris danger.

It was a miserable, drenched, and at times terrifying matter of minutes, that seemed to go on forever. Often the movements of the car would come suddenly, with no warning at all.

When the danger finally passed, it did so fairly quickly as well.

Alley and I watched the three giant cones of death come together into one much bigger one. Then we were amazed to see that one humongous twister seem to just change its mind, and shrink back into normal looking storm clouds in mere minutes.

By another thirty minutes after that, it was obvious the storm was either leaving, or dissipating for good.

It was stunning to see normal daylight start breaking out again after the previous heavy darkness. And this was maybe mid-afternoon, folks!

Sitting in the ditch as we were, underneath the bridge, we couldn't see a whole lot of the area around us, but for the sky, the bridge, and the sides of the irrigation channel we were immersed in.

"I want to go home now," Alley told me.

"Okay. But it's going to take a while. I've only got one spare and I'll have to fix two tires..."

"How long will that take?"

"Oh, I don't know. A couple hours maybe?"

"I think I'll walk," Alley stated flatly.

"Okay. Believe me Alley, I understand. I think you'll be safe now. But it might be a long ways to civilization from here on foot."

"Or maybe not," she countered. And I recalled the police cars which might still be nearby. Maybe she was thinking of them.

So Alley left in search of a police car, house, or highway where she could get a better ride than poor burnt and battered Shadow offered at the moment. I offered to help her out of Shadow and the ditch, but she declined. And truth be told, my aid wouldn't have accomplished much. For we'd both gotten pretty soggy inside Shadow, with the water in the floorboards, and all the rain through the windows. Stepping into the ditch water from that sodden state wasn't all that much of a change. And the ditch walls were short enough so that Alley didn't collect too much additional grime clambering over them, either.

I felt terribly tired after all the tension just past, and just wanted to lay down and rest. But I couldn't. I had to get Shadow out of here.

I untied the massive tow ropes. Luckily their thickness made it fairly easy, despite my original tightening efforts, and then the added tightening brought on by the tugging of the wind. These ropes were so thick a big screwdriver easily pried their knots apart.

I stepped into the water of the ditch to check under the hood, and found nothing unexpected there-- except maybe for how wet everything was. That might be a problem. The bottom tip of the engine fan was in water too. That might cause a sprinkling effect over the entire motor when running. So I pulled one of my rubber floor mats out of the puddles of my floorboards, dried it on the carpeting of the interior shelf (I could clean the carpeting later), and secured it as best I could atop the fan shroud to minimize water being thrown atop the motor. I also left the hood up to help with drying.

I cleaned the muck off all the windows as best I could with the means available. It helped some.

I removed my guns from their storage compartment under the shelf. Rats! They'd gotten drowned under there.

My pistol was stainless steel, so maybe it wouldn't be hurt as much. But my shotgun had the standard blued finish. Crap! I didn't have anything better so I pulled off my shirt and tried to use it to dry off the shotgun inside and out. I wiped the pistol too a bit, but mostly as an afterthought (turns out stainless steel WILL get rusty spots on it after something like this, though). I then put them (minus any ammo) in one corner of the rear shelf under the big rear window, as that was the best spot inside the car at the moment. My shirt was so trashed already the gun cleaning didn't seem to make it much worse. I pulled it back on.

I next checked the battery compartment. Deflating the tires, plus all the wind buffeting and jamming underneath the bridge, had gotten the water halfway up the sides of the battery. But the all-important terminals, kill-switch, and exposed wiring of the cables were still above the water-line.

I covered my eyes just in case and twisted the kill-switch to "on". Nothing happened. Good so far.

I tried cranking. The motor turned over but didn't catch. I tried again. No go. I did not waste more juice with another try.

I found a dry but greasy rag inside my main tool box in the trunk, removed my distributor cap, and dried its insides. I also dried other critical spots like the terminals of the ignition coil and relay box, plus around the spark plugs. The hardest parts to effectively dry were the contact surfaces of the points.

I finally got Shadow to fire up maybe twenty minutes later, and pulled him out from under the bridge.

Shadow made a really weird burbling noise when he first cranked up, and had to spit lots of water out of his mufflers and header collectors. His exhaust smelled strange too when it emerged from the water.

Although he had three blown tires he could still chug along in the ditch relatively well. But driving him felt downright awful.

I badly wanted to get him out of the water to try fixing his multiple flats. But tooling along quite a ways down the ditch-line revealed no good spot to do that.

I stopped again to re-assess my situation. It seemed a scary thought to use a jack underwater, atop a mud surface, to change a tire. So I gave up, and went looking on foot for a farmer with a tractor. After not finding one-- or a house or highway either for that matter-- over the course of an hour or so, I gave up and returned to Shadowfast. To find Alley back there, too.

"So you couldn't find anything either?" Alley asked.

"Nope. Did you see any of those cops around?"

"No."

"I hope they made it."

"How soon will it be before you can take me home?" Alley cut to the chase.

"I honestly don't know Alley. I still need to fix the tires, and to do that I need to get my car out of the water."

"Why can't you fix it in the water?"

"Well, I might could, but it'd be lots more dangerous. Plus, to get anywhere we'd still need to get out of the ditch itself."

"Oh." Alley looked disappointed. I had an idea to cheer her up.

"Hungry?"

"I'm more thirsty than hungry. But you've got something to eat?"

"Something to eat and drink both-- if you want it."

I had a few cans of beanee weenies sitting underwater in a storage compartment under the rear shelf. They were a modest replacement for my emergency stock of an entire case of pork and beans Steve, Lloyd, and I had consumed in Houston early on in this Texas trek.

I hauled a shiny can up from the water and showed it to Alley. It'd lost its label in the water, so I had to inform her of its contents. She nodded.

"Prefer your meal hot or cold?" I asked.

"Hmm. Hot would be good. But how are you going to heat it out here?"

"On my hot plate." I lifted the hood and placed a couple of slightly opened cans on spots I knew got hot quick on the engine. I cranked Shadow back up and checked the gas gauge. As I had recently adopted a new rule of never allowing my gas to drop below half a tank except in emergencies, we were more than okay there. And Shadow's gas cap was well above the water-line. In just a few minutes we had steaming beanie-weenies. As they came with their own built-in sauce, we got some liquid nourishment too.

For eating implements we had an honest-to-God spoon, fork, and knife made of steel: a camping utensil set. Being stored in an Army backpack in the trunk, they hadn't even got dunked in the water! They were some of the few clean things for miles around.

If only the gnats and mosquitoes and flies hadn't decided to come out in force, we might have had a nice moment there. Damn it.

Afterwards we drove a long ways down the ditch to find only another small bridge. This one seemed to have a little more clearance than the first, as we were able to squeeze under it even with the right front tire up, and continue past it.

Another long drive further we came to the end of an underground drain pipe far too small for Shadow to enter, but big enough that people could crouch over and go in. It was pitch black inside. We stopped short of it by a few car lengths, got out, and explored the vicinity to see if we could find anyone about there.

But we were still alone. And the bugs seemed to be worse here than at our previous stops.

How the hell could I get us out of this ditch? It was starting to look like we sure enough would have to abandon Shadow and try walking out, maybe following the original road we'd come in on.

In broad daylight it was apparent the ditch walls were sturdily built. Laid down with cinder block, then poured full of concrete, it looked like. I wouldn't have been surprised to even find rebar (steel reinforcement bars) in there too, considering how meticulous the builder seemed to have been.

Based on the wall construction, the floor of the ditch was likely concrete too, I reckoned. Only with years of muck built up atop it.

Anyway, although I did have some tools I could try tearing down a wall with to form a ramp, I was afraid that could take a week of excruciating labor. It just looked too well built.

The trouble with walking out was the tornadoes had trashed the whole area, so although the ditch and bridge were easy to locate, nothing else was. It'd be dead reckoning beyond the bridge and ditch, with no landmarks whatsoever but for the occasional bigger-than-usual pile of debris here and there-- which looked remarkably like all the others.

Dead reckoning wasn't the best of navigation methods. For you tended to walk in circles. For a while we'd have the sun's course to help about east and west (plus I did have a compass among my equipment) but not knowing what direction we'd ended up heading out of town, we were still hurting.

Texas is a big place. Being lost there on foot outside civilization could be downright dangerous. I did possess hiking and camping gear in Shadow, but expected a walk out would be pretty rigorous even for me-- let alone Alley.

We could try motoring back the way we came ditch-wise, only this time going past the original bridge. With time now in plentiful supply, I could deflate my right front tire the normal way for even better clearance. But we'd still be driving over all those poppers I'd laid...Agh! It could also be tough manually locating every single one in the ditch bed before-hand.

And after all that we might only find another drain pipe at the far end for our trouble. Keep in mind both Alley and I had already searched a fair distance around our original bridge location, and found no sign of help or a good escape route.

It was either walk into possible oblivion or get Shadow out of this ditch. Or stay here and die of thirst. Well, I did have a water filter we could use on the ditch water. And beyond that, survival methods for purifying water and living in the wilderness...but hellfire! That would be no fun at all!

My first preference by far was riding out. So how could we escape the ditch?

After all the scrapes I'd been in with Shadow and managed to find some way out of, I couldn't believe a plain old vertical sided -- and shallow!-- ditch could hold us.

I did have the massive tow ropes. And a come-along. But there was nothing to attach to. And even if there was, we'd need a ramp...

Well, there were the bridges. But hoisting one end of Shadow up a few feet just to splash back into the ditch again wouldn't be helpful...

Then I got it. Damn it. Damn it to hell.

I sure was going to have to pay a terrible price for a party I never got to attend, and a girl I never got to date. This was apparently going to be something of a re-make of my high school prom.

Play it again, Sam! Damn it!

The next fourteen or eighteen hours were no freaking fun at all. I wished many times I was alone. Why oh why had I taken Alley with me on this trip? It was hard to remember now. We were both miserable, plus I had a herculean task to do and Alley had very little to do, which made everything worse still.

It seemed almost all we could do was me work my ass off and Alley nag and complain-- when she wasn't pouting.

There were two bridges, luckily built of large wooden timbers and planks, held together by really big bolts and some nails. Fortunately most of the timbers were short enough that I could still handle them weight-wise alone. Barely. And I had a few workarounds I could use for the rest.

I drove back and disassembled the original bridge with my onboard tool set and transported the pieces to the other. It required several trips.

Why did I disassemble the first bridge and take it to the second, and not vice versa? After all, the first bridge was our single best remaining landmark in regards to returning to civilization. Simply this: I couldn't turn Shadow around in the ditch. And I was certain I needed Shadow's engine-heavy front end to lead the way out. I also wanted any ramp to snuggle up against one of the channel walls, as well as a bridge. So escaping the ditch at the original location would have forced me to try backing up any ramp I succeeded at making, while not having a very good driver's seat view of the narrow ramp I was trying to negotiate, either.

I reshaped the disassembled bridge into a ramp rising from the ditch bottom to the second bridge. It wasn't quite long enough so I had to also build up the ditch bottom by various measures. Luckily there were rocks in the area to help.

As Shadow weighed roughly a ton and a half, and I sure didn't want to fail and have to start all over again, maybe with less or worse quality resources-- I did my damnedest to make the arrangement as sturdy and solid as I could.

But even if everything went perfectly, both bridges were pretty narrow, so trying to make the turn off the ramp onto the second bridge and then land would be risky. So I built the ramp right up against the right-side wall of the ditch. Or as close to it as I could with the resources available.

I wanted to get out on the right side of the ditch because the closest civilization we were aware of was supposed to be on that side-- the side on which we'd first entered this little diorama of desperation.

Although I did have a relatively dim 12 volt trouble-light I could use after dark, run Shadow to prevent draining the battery, and still plenty of gas, there finally came a point where I was too exhausted to continue, and had to sleep.

This made Alley furious, and she stalked off into the night with my flashlight for a few minutes, but soon returned as the battery was giving out.

It got cold and we had to huddle together for warmth on Shadow's rear shelf. Luckily I had an Army surplus wool blanket that helped there. But everything was still uncomfortable, sticky, itchy, and tense as hell. The mosquitoes rated a whole book in themselves. We were cursing and slapping at ourselves all night.

Still, I think I got a couple hours of sleep there due to my utter exhaustion. And simply lying still for a while seemed to help some, after the unrelenting exertions of the day.

I definitely did not welcome the dawn.

Alley's agitation insured I was up with the roosters to continue my work.

That morning I was so sore every movement I made hurt like hell. Fortunately the soreness faded somewhat over the following hours of toil.

Alley especially despised the time I spent planning what I was going to do, and how to do it. If I was smarter it wouldn't take me so damn long, she told me not a few times.

I couldn't argue with her, because I needed the energy for more important things. Like getting away from her. So I tuned her out regarding anything not directly survival or escape related.

I collected more rocks and used them to build up the ramp side adjoining the ditch wall for a little more insurance in making our turn to freedom. Alley helped a bit in the collection stage-- but not happily.

Finally, after an unbelievable amount of work, I had an arrangement I felt sufficiently confident in to make an attempt at ditch escape.

First I unloaded all the extra weight from Shadow-- everything, including the majority of the rear interior, as it came out so easily. Much of the most important hardware in my life now lay displayed atop the grass and tornado debris on one side of the ditch.

Alley seemed to think I liked having her trapped out here with me and was only postponing leaving as long as I could. Like I'd purposely kidnapped her or something. And then magically arranged for the robbery and tornados to help my scheme along, I suppose.

I was getting very, very tired.

Alley wanted to be in Shadow too when I tried scrambling out of the ditch, despite me telling her we needed the car to be as light as we could make it, and that it might be dangerous to be inside. After all, it was possible something might go awry and Shadow end up flipped upside down in the ditch or something. Yikes!

I think she was a little afraid I might zoom off and leave her behind. As well as all my personal possessions laid out on the grass. And I did know fellas who probably would have in similar circumstances. But not me. Although Alley couldn't-- and wouldn't-- trust me, I knew she had at least as good a chance at getting home as I did, so long as I had anything to say about it. Maybe better. But it did little good trying to explain that to her.

I now had my front tires up (I'd replaced the left with my spare in the ditch), while my rear ones remained flat. I'd planned out our escape so that Shadow's front end would be the first to emerge from the ditch. That was the heavy end, and so the most difficult one to handle. If we still got stuck with the rear end somehow, that might be easier to resolve than having the front end still in the drink. I did have the come-along and tow ropes after all.

Shadow was running, and I was sitting at the wheel. My mind raced trying to think of anything I might have missed or should have done better. Was there any last minute fix required? Anything I'd forgotten?

Running on so little sleep and so much exertion I was burdened with a significant level of grogginess I couldn't shake off. A certain level of numbness and apathy towards everything. That was dangerous, I knew. So I tried to compensate for it, alternating between doses of ice cold logic and heights of paranoiac fear about something going terribly wrong.

But my mental checklist seemed fully ticked off for all those items I could do anything about. Everything that remained consisted of the immutable laws of physics, whatever finesse I might possess skill-wise piloting Shadow, and plain old luck.

Shadow was idling. I put us into first gear, and began gingerly playing both the brake and gas pedals to move us slowly towards the foot of my freshly made contraption.

(Under normal conditions Shadow would gradually get to moving ahead at a fairly decent clip on idle power alone, given level ground, and smooth asphalt or not too bumpy gravel way; but with two flat tires and a muddy ditch floor, things were different)

We wobbled up the bottommost rock ramp to meet the foot of the wooden one. We met the wood ramp centered, but as soon as I dared I began swerving rightwards so that the right side of the car climbed onto the improvised rock mini-ramp positioned atop part of the wooden ramp, which served to marry the wooden ramp to the ditch wall. For we had to make a sharp turn there to get onto firmer footing.

Shadow's front managed to get the left wheel atop the bridge, but then rocks began moving out from under the right rear wheel and we lost ground. I aborted and backed down the ramp quickly to minimize my losses.

I knew then that I couldn't just pile up the rocks and drive on them that way. I had to have a sticky filler to help them hold together.

So I laboriously rebuilt the lower rock ramp and the corner filler ramp, this time using mud along with the rocks. I also this time tried filling in the larger gaps between the big stones with lots of much smaller ones.

It was during this long and drawn-out stage that Alley said the meanest things to me of the whole ordeal. Though I did my best not to show it, they hurt me. They definitely weren't deserved. I just told myself she was blowing off steam and tried not to think about it. I knew what she said wasn't true, even if she didn't. I focused on the task at hand.

The smaller fill-in stones and plenty of mud did the trick. After our second attempt, Shadow finally sat on terra firma once again!

Now I only needed to fix the remaining flats, as well as reload everything I'd previously unloaded. Agh!

Though in theory we could go quite a ways on flats-- especially on a dirt road and with Shadow's relatively lightweight rear end-- eventually the tires would come off the rims and further progress on the metal wheels would be problematic. So running on flats to avoid work now might only lead to worse stranding later, if we didn't make it to civilization before the rubber abandoned us.

And (of course) I did not want to completely destroy any tires and wheels that I didn't have to; for such stuff was expensive! (but for all I knew, one or more of the tires were a lost cause anyway, having been holed by my own tire poppers)

The thought of the horrendous expense which could be incurred if replacement of all my badly holed tires turned out to be necessary flashed through my mind, and I remembered that line from 'Gone with the wind': "I'll think about that tomorrow." Or something like that, anyway.

I now began the laborious task of repairing the holes in both rear tires. In some ways this was as bad or worse than simply replacing the left front with my inflatable spare in the ditch.

After several bouts of frustration and disappointment I finally realized I had to completely remove a wheel from Shadow and determine its remaining leaks by dunking it in the ditch.

Shadow's wheel and tire combinations were somewhat bigger than standard versions, and so could be a little strenuous to man-handle even under the best of circumstances. But no break for me!

Around the time I got both rear wheels back up Alley called my attention to my right front, which had apparently picked up a tire popper or something at last, and went down too.

I sort of had a fit at that point, and blew off steam the only way I could by jumping up and down and screaming incoherently at the cosmos. I came close to accusing Alley herself of deflating the tire just to cause me more torment, but managed to stop short of it.

Then I got to work fixing the right front tire. Of course, soon after that the spare on the left went down too, forcing me to fix and put back the original left tire as well.

And yes, by this time rampant under-the-breath cursing had become my warmly welcomed companion. The anger helped keep me going against the awful fatigue.

Can you tell yet that this was one of the most memorable days ever of my young life? But it could have been worse: the repair kit could have run out of plugs before I did holes.

Though we still had the same 'dead reckoning' navigation problem to work through with Shadow as we would have without him, in the car we could cover a lot more territory in a much shorter time, plus measure distance by the odometer. So basically we could do everything much faster on wheels than foot. Make the mistakes faster, fix them faster. Get out of the tornados' destructive debris field and finally find some new landmarks again, faster.

I ended up having to stop and re-inflate my tires periodically as we finally made our way out of the vast farm wilderness. Did I mention that I had only an old-fashioned air pump you worked by both hands as you kept a toe on a plate at the bottom to hold it in place? Those pumps required an inordinate amount of effort to air up a single tire. And I had to do that not four times or five. Or even six. But more. MORE!

Of course all these delays only further incensed Alley. But she ended up remaining a more or less willing passenger until we finally made it all the way back to the trailer park.

Alley and I arrived back at the park close to noon on Sunday. To me, it seemed that we'd been stranded for weeks. I noticed my friends' cars were still at my trailer.

I knew Alley was more than ready to see the last of me and Shadowfast, so I just stopped in front of her trailer to let her out first thing.

"Thank God," I heard her say.

She wasted no time disembarking. She gave me a brief, hard to describe look just before she exited. She didn't say good bye. Or anything else. Just "thank God".

"I'm sorry about all this Alley!" I called after her, as she climbed up the handful of steps leading to her door, and soon disappeared inside. This was really a terrible, terrible shame. I wondered if she'd ever look at me again, let alone speak to me. But I also couldn't think of much I could have done differently.

I pulled deeper into the park, turned around at the far end, returned to my trailer and killed the motor. When I got out I noticed my driver's side rear tire was almost flat again. I left all the windows rolled down for drying purposes.

When I entered the trailer Will was listening to really loud music in the living room as was his wont, and Steve taking a shower. Neither seemed to have heard me pull in.

There were some empty beer and soda cans and discarded food packaging and dirty dishes about the place.

Will looked up at me and gave me the wry smile he often used in puzzling situations like this.

"What the hell happened to you man?" he asked softly, after turning the music down.

"I fell in a swamp," I lied, too tired to explain the events of the last 24 hours or so.

"Swamp, eh?" Will said skeptically. "We figured you got in an accident or something and went looking for you, but then a big-ass storm came up and we came back.

"You should have seen it, man. The trailer was shaking and everything! The radio said there were tornados not far from here. You missed it, man."

"Yeah, I missed it all right," was all I could say in return. I'd missed not only any future chances with Alley, but my weekend time with my friends too. I knew they'd both have to leave very soon. Of the two of them Will had the much longer drive.

"You said you listened to the radio-- did you hear anything about some cops caught in the tornados?" I asked Will.

"Hmm. I think maybe they said something about some officers injured, yeah," Will replied.

Good. They'd made it out alive. All of them.

Will's slight smile was still there.

"Man, you've not been pulling the tiger's tail again, have you?"

"Me? Naw."

Steve entered the room fully dressed but for shoes, and sporting wet hair.

"Hey, man! What happened to you?" Steve asked in his breathless fashion, basically stemming from his desire for all of life to be one grand continuous adventure. He was obviously amused by my badly bedraggled appearance. Of course he'd seen me like this a few times before. The zillions of itchy mosquito bites festering amid the sunburn might have been new to him though.

"Car trouble," I told him. "Sorry I missed our whole get-together, man-- I just couldn't help it." I remembered their money and pulled out my wallet.

"Whoa, man! Watch out! There's all kinds of shit coming out of your pocket!" Will exclaimed.

There was ditch crap in my pocket atop my wallet. Most of the stuff on my exterior was dried and hardened but for my knees down. My shoes were still squishy wet.

"Hey guys, here's your money back--"

But they wouldn't take it, saying I looked like I needed it worse than they did. Plus I think they were repelled by the smell and damp nature of everything, too. I didn't want to keep it, but I was too tired to argue over it. So I just laid it down on a nearby table in case they changed their minds.

In any case, they'd only given me enough money for some party goodies. It'd take a lot more than that to repair Shadow after this run. But I didn't want to think about that at the moment.

There was another whole rehash of the where-had-I-been-and-what-had-I-been-doing thing once we stepped outside and they saw the shape poor Shadow was in.

In the hot Texas sun the water inside was now visibly steaming out the windows. Dried ditch grass, mud, and related materials matted much of the exterior. Though some of it could be hard to differentiate from the flat black painted roof, the area around the original mounting spot for the CB antenna was scorched, and a small ragged hole in the sheet metal apparent at the center. If you looked through an open window rather than the windshield (which was nearly opaque with grime), you could see the holes in the back where I'd ripped out the speakers, mud smeared almost everywhere, and lots of my equipment just piled up pell-mell on the rear shelf as I'd been in too big a hurry to pack it the usual way during the reload. Lastly, you could look up inside to see the melted CB radio too, of course.

I almost blurted out I'd actually had a girl with me the whole time since they'd seen me last, but stopped myself. For that would only open up a whole other can of worms.

"Holy shit man," Steve observed quite concisely. "You're going to have to tell us about this one for sure!"

"Just be damn glad you didn't go with me to the store!" I replied. Then begged off as best I could from relating the story at that moment. They could see I had nothing left energy-wise, and so went their ways with my promise they'd know all next time I talked to them. I would eventually relate the gist of the tale to Will in a letter, and Steve in person, due to their locations in different states.

After they left I found the wool army blanket in Shadow and used it to cover up my equipment on the shelf from thieving eyes, rolled up the windows to leave just narrow gaps for ventilation, and locked the doors.

Then I re-entered the trailer, turned off the air conditioner, removed my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants legs, and laid down on the living room carpet to sleep. I was too filthy to use the bed or couch and too tired to shower. Around ten PM that night I got up, ate everything in the house I could with minimal preparation, showered, and then went to my real bed.

I had no dreams whatsoever in the first stint. But some wild ones in the second.

In one really nice dream Alley forgave me for the hell I put her through. In real life she never did though.

If you're reading this Alley, sorry again! But what could I have done differently?

Early the next morning while it was still dark I had to get up, use the cursed air pump on three of my tires, repack most of my equipment where it belonged, and go to work. It'd be another three days before I had the tire situation mostly resolved. Longer for the other damages. I remained sore as hell all over for days, despite the strenuous nature of my day job. I was eaten up with itchy mosquito bites, and severely sunburned in several places. It was tough determining the best ointment relief regimen for my skin.

But I guess I had to admit this had been one kick-ass summer vacation from school so far! And I meant that in the worst possible way!

Above can be seen Shadowfast's original two tow ropes as described in several accounts on-site.

Above is the original green wool blanket carried in Shadowfast (I believe it was military issue, bought at a surplus store).