"Get to Know Me Week"
Today's "Get to Know Me" entry is a retelling of a high school tale...
Most people in high school have that one person you do everything with, from hanging out to playing sports to going on late-night escapades.
Mine was a guy we'll call DH. We played basketball together, went to amusement parks together, went to diners at 3 a.m., chased after girls, dabbled in black tar heroin, you know, the usual.
We also often would see what kind of trouble we could get into, as we grew up in a very small town with very little to do. At certain times, this included attempted cow-tipping (we never got one pushed over, as the cows started stampeding), driving through a blizzard to pick up two cheerleaders (nearly died but it was worth it) and watching his pet piranha try to eat a lake trout in DH's aquarium (it seems we liked abusing animals, but we didn't.)
One summer night, before our senior year, DH wanted to check out the house of some guy he thought was doing shady stuff. I never quite understood what the shady stuff was, or what we were supposed to be looking at, but hey, sure, I'll go along.
It was about midnight when we got to the house, set alone on the top of a grassy knoll, as houses are prone to do. DH wanted to be secretive, so he backed his car down a dirt path at the bottom of the hill, amidst rows of trees, until we couldn't go any further. We had the car on, but the lights off, and waited. And waited. Soon, a car appeared at the other end of the path, facing toward us, with its high-beams on.
Being manly men, we were screaming like girls at the very real possibility it was this crazy guy coming after us. The car sat there for several minutes; we couldn't go anywhere. Eventually, he backed out...we slowly pulled out of the dirt path and onto the main road, which wasn't that much wider. This is in back-country Pennsylvania, after all.
When we started driving away, we noticed the other car was behind us. It was on like Donkey Kong. DH, at that point a regular, reckless teenage driver, started flying down back roads as I kept checking behind us. We decided to go down a seldom used road, called Book Road. It is there where our fortunes turned for better or worse, depending on your view...
The thing about Book Road is it crosses over a creek, or, as some of us western Pa. people say, a "crick." There is a short, sharply-angled wooden bridge on the road. A week before this adventure took place, DH and I came down that road, DH driving, and hit the bridge going about 40 MPH. That just about wrecked his car- we got some air and I ripped his rearview mirror off trying to hold on for sweet, beautiful life.
Back to the chase. DH is cruising down the road, but just before he gets to the bridge, he slows down to about 25 mph, bouncing us over the bridge, before accelerating. At that point, I turned around to find the other car.
What I saw I'll never forget, either by memory or by lore. The other car's headlights, all I could make out in the darkness, rapidly approached us as the car reached the bridge.
I saw the headlights crest toward the sky, as the car must have been going extremely fast by that point...
... And I never saw them hit the ground. Ever.
DH and I did check back the next day to see if there was a car. We saw nothing, and yet there should have been something. It was the Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman of car chases. The mystery remains unsolved, pending an investigation by Robert Stack.*
* That show used to freak me out, as did "Rescue 911" with Captain Kirk.
Most people in high school have that one person you do everything with, from hanging out to playing sports to going on late-night escapades.
Mine was a guy we'll call DH. We played basketball together, went to amusement parks together, went to diners at 3 a.m., chased after girls, dabbled in black tar heroin, you know, the usual.
We also often would see what kind of trouble we could get into, as we grew up in a very small town with very little to do. At certain times, this included attempted cow-tipping (we never got one pushed over, as the cows started stampeding), driving through a blizzard to pick up two cheerleaders (nearly died but it was worth it) and watching his pet piranha try to eat a lake trout in DH's aquarium (it seems we liked abusing animals, but we didn't.)
One summer night, before our senior year, DH wanted to check out the house of some guy he thought was doing shady stuff. I never quite understood what the shady stuff was, or what we were supposed to be looking at, but hey, sure, I'll go along.
It was about midnight when we got to the house, set alone on the top of a grassy knoll, as houses are prone to do. DH wanted to be secretive, so he backed his car down a dirt path at the bottom of the hill, amidst rows of trees, until we couldn't go any further. We had the car on, but the lights off, and waited. And waited. Soon, a car appeared at the other end of the path, facing toward us, with its high-beams on.
Being manly men, we were screaming like girls at the very real possibility it was this crazy guy coming after us. The car sat there for several minutes; we couldn't go anywhere. Eventually, he backed out...we slowly pulled out of the dirt path and onto the main road, which wasn't that much wider. This is in back-country Pennsylvania, after all.
When we started driving away, we noticed the other car was behind us. It was on like Donkey Kong. DH, at that point a regular, reckless teenage driver, started flying down back roads as I kept checking behind us. We decided to go down a seldom used road, called Book Road. It is there where our fortunes turned for better or worse, depending on your view...
The thing about Book Road is it crosses over a creek, or, as some of us western Pa. people say, a "crick." There is a short, sharply-angled wooden bridge on the road. A week before this adventure took place, DH and I came down that road, DH driving, and hit the bridge going about 40 MPH. That just about wrecked his car- we got some air and I ripped his rearview mirror off trying to hold on for sweet, beautiful life.
Back to the chase. DH is cruising down the road, but just before he gets to the bridge, he slows down to about 25 mph, bouncing us over the bridge, before accelerating. At that point, I turned around to find the other car.
What I saw I'll never forget, either by memory or by lore. The other car's headlights, all I could make out in the darkness, rapidly approached us as the car reached the bridge.
I saw the headlights crest toward the sky, as the car must have been going extremely fast by that point...... And I never saw them hit the ground. Ever.
DH and I did check back the next day to see if there was a car. We saw nothing, and yet there should have been something. It was the Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman of car chases. The mystery remains unsolved, pending an investigation by Robert Stack.*
* That show used to freak me out, as did "Rescue 911" with Captain Kirk.
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