The Bolt

It was the winter of 1991, and I was working full time in Kelowna. It was a Friday evening, just shortly after work, and I was heading to Vancouver on the Coquihalla Connector, highway 97C. The roads were quite slippery due to the snow that was falling, plus the temperature was hovering just around freezing point. Before I left work for the day I told everyone that I was heading to Vancouver for the weekend, and my boss told me, "drive very carefully!" Of course I promised him I would.

About 30 minutes up the mountain highway, I went to change the music I was listening to. I reached down, grabbed Tom Cochrane's Mad Mad World disc, and popped it into the CD player. I pressed play, and then looked back to the road ahead of me. No sooner had I given my full attention back to the road when my van started drifting on the road. I looked carefully down at the road, and realized that I was on sheer ice (glare ice, black ice, whatever you want to call it). Uh-oh.

Using all of my available driving knowledge, I applied a few steps in turn: ease off the gas pedal - no change, the van was still drifting. Shift the transmission into neutral - no change. Turn the steering wheel very slightly - no change. Shift back into drive and apply a bit more gas - no change. Nothing that I tried made any difference to the path that the van was on, it just kept going. There was no traction at all.

About this time, the music was getting into the main verse: "Life is a highway / I want to ride it all night long..." In spite of the situation, I was fairly relaxed, and I got to enjoy the perverse appropriateness of the music, as the front left tire of the van inched closer and closer to the meridian that was dividing the highway.

As the tire finally caught the meridian, and sank into the snow, the whole van was pulled down and proceeded to dive into the ditch. Then the angle of the vehicle was just too much, and it rolled. And rolled. And rolled. Well, it seemed to roll for a long time to me, but it was actually only one full revolution, coming to rest again right-side up on all four tires.

I shut the engine off and paused, reflecting on what just happened. I noticed that my head was bleeding, but I knew that head wounds tended to bleed a lot without actually being too bad. My neck didn't seem sore, nor did my back or anything else. I undid my seat belt and stepped out of the van into a foot of powdery snow. In spite of rolling the van, it was quite a nice night out, with flakes of snow still gently falling around me.

I gathered the things that I needed to take with me and hitched a ride back to Kelowna. A few stiches to the head later, and I was no worse for wear. The next morning when I told my boss what happened, he said, "I thought I told you to drive carefully?"

"Yes, I was," I said, "the speed limit is 110 and I was only doing 70."

"Obviously that wasn't careful enough."

OK, point taken.

So the two scary things about this story are: first, I had only buckled my seat belt about 5 minutes prior to rolling the van. At that time in my life, I wasn't wearing my seat belt all the time like I do now. My injuries would have been much worse without that seat belt.

Second, there was no guard rail on that section of highway, and my van could have just as easily drifted to the right instead of the left. If it did, I would have rolled down the side of a mountain.

I guess this wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the story I have about the car that almost killed me. I think the universe needs me alive for some reason unknown to me.