Accordions

Random incident for the day:

As those of you in the New England area might be aware, we got hit with a pretty nasty storm this evening. You know, the usual. Rain, that turns to sleet, that turns to hail, that turns to snow, winds in the 30mph range, and a temperature swing from 40 down to 15.

Lucky me, I had the joy of trying to drive Kerri and myself home (with Freya) after the roads had been covered in the slippery mess. After negotiating the lovely highway between our houses at an astounding 25 mph, while dodging the SUV's that rocketed past as if 4 wheel drive somehow provides invincibility, we turned off at the exit to the state route that leads to my house. While winding our way through the horribly designed exit (seriously, who uses an S-curve as an exit ramp?. . . never mind, I live in Rhode Island) we found ourselves stuck behind a slowly moving car, who was stuck behind an even slower moving Tractor-Trailer.

Now, RI has a truck stop. . . that's right A truck stop, it advertises proudly how it is in fact the only one (or at least, the only 24 hour one). However, due to a significant design flaw, said truck stop requires that the drivers make a sharp turn of the state route in the middle of a rather steep hill.

As I mentioned before, the truck in front of the car in front of me was travelling rather slow. As anyone with a basic knowledge of physics can tell you, this does not provide for a significant amount of momentum when you have to drive up a hill. Needless to say, the driver got a lesson in physics, at the expense of those of us stuck behind him.

About half way up the hill to the truck stop, the truck appeared to stop, which resulted in me exclaiming "What the (expletive) is he doing?". Then, like the boulder of Sisyphus, the truck began to slide back down the hill towards the long line of cars, stacked behind like a potential set of dominos. At first I thought it was an optical illusion, at least I did until he collided with a dull "thud" against the front of the unfortunate care before me.

At this point, time slowed down. Kerri began yelling "They're coming right for us! They're coming right for us!" I began looking for options. Couldn't back up because there was an SUV (who had been ever so politely tailgaiting me since the exit ramp) parked directly behind me. Couldn't get to the side because there wasn't enough room between me and the slowly descending train of destruction. At this point in time, Freya took advantage of all the commotion and jumped into Kerri's lap.

The only thing to do was to trust that the brakes and the wheels on my trusty little civic could work in tandem to stop the lumbering behemoth. Otherwise, I had images of being crushed like a tin can between a large column of destruction. So I gritted my teeth, pressed even more firmly on the brakes, and hoped.

There was a "bang!" as the car that had become the truck's trolley collided with my front bumper, sending Freya into a frenzied panic of jumping back and forth between Kerri's lap and mine, then silence. Somehow my car had become "The little Civic that could" and had stopped the backward motion. The truck somehow managed to gain footing, and pulled away, disappearing into the blowing snow as he drove into the truck stop, never stopping to ensure that everyone was ok. The driver of the other car and I pulled over to the side of the road to survey the damage. The truck had snapped off her license plate holder and bent in the top of her hood a little, however the rear of her car and the front of mine showed no observable damage.

We quickly exchanged numbers, then she chased off after the truck to try and find it in the sea of trucks already parked at the truck stop, hoping to call the cops with the truck's information. We drove home the rest of the way without incident.

I have no clue if the poor woman ever tracked down the truck responsible for the problem. I hopefully will get a call sometime in the next couple of days from a police man asking for my version of the story. Something needs to happen to the truck driver who would simply run away from an accident like that.

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In other news, a big thanks to Kristen and her family for being such pleasant hosts to a couple of complete strangers, and a thanks to Amy for inviting us along in the first place. Playing "snow golf" on a frozen lake in Maine in the middle of March was not something I would have originally forseen taking place.