Just a Little Jerk of the Wheel 1980 Part 3

Not long after homecoming, but before my “relationship” with Jamie had taken its final breath, I was in a car accident. Actually it was a pick-up accident.

It was early evening and I was out riding with my friend Sunny in her little yellow pick-up. She was a year older than me, a Sophomore, and she already had her learner’s permit. Having your learner’s permit meant you could drive to and from school or on any farm related errand. Since we lived in the country and everyone farmed, just about everything could be described as a farm related errand.

But we weren’t on a farm related errand, real or imagined. We were just out driving, for something to do. We were on a gravel road (all the country roads were gravel) and this particular road had a little bridge that went over a dried up stream bed. There was a hill just ahead of the bridge and if you drove pretty fast you could kind of jump the bridge with your car. It was fun and we did it several times, driving faster each time. We had just turned the pick-up around to do it again and were zipping down the road gaining speed.

For some completely unknown and insane reason, I decided to reach over and jerk the steering wheel. I guess I did it just to be ornery. I can safely say there was no thought what so ever that went in to that little jerk of the wheel. For years I told people I thought Sunny was about to go off the road and I jerked the wheel to save us. And for some strange reason, Sunny never questioned my story. But the truth was, I was just being stupid.

It’s not hard to imagine what happened next. The pick-up swerved from one side of the gravel to the other as Sunny tried to regain control. But we were going too fast and the little truck careened off the side of the rode and down into the ditch. Our front tires hit the bottom of the ditch with such force that it popped the bed straight up in the air and the truck flipped its back end over its front and then rolled side over side for what seemed like forever. The whole thing happened in slow motion, but it was probably over in just a matter of seconds.

When the little truck finally came to a stop, it was laying on its side, passenger side down. Sunny and I checked to see if we were each ok and then, because we could smell gas and had seen too many movies where wrecked cars promptly exploded, we scrambled to climb up out of the drivers side. I don’t remember if we got the door open or if we climbed through the window, although it seems we squeezed through the window, using the steering wheel for leverage. What I do remember is that I had to do it with only one arm because my left arm was in so much pain I couldn’t move it.

Free from the truck, we debated what to do. We were about a mile and a half north of town and about a mile south of Jamie’s farm. Never one to miss an opportunity for drama, I wanted to walk to Jamie’s house. (I was certain Jamie’s family would regret making me miss homecoming once they realized that I had just been in a terrible, potentially fatal accident!)

Sunny wasn’t so easily convinced. It was her pick-up that was totaled after all, and she was already worried about what her parents were going to do. She was anxious to get home.

We started walking and after only a few minutes some older kids drove by and picked us up. We drove back to see the pick-up on it’s side in the field and Sunny and I took turns relaying the details of our brush with death. It wasn’t long before my arm was hurting so much that I lost interest in telling the story, and Sunny was nearly frantic with the dread of telling her parents, so we headed back to town.

Sunny and I didn’t see each other again for a couple of days. I went to the emergency room in Larned that night to have my broken arm x-rayed and put in a cast. Sunny got to stay home from school the next day because her stomach was bruised and she was sore from bouncing around inside the pickup. And then it was the weekend.

Somehow without ever talking about it, Sunny and I settled on a shared version of what happened that night, although I suspect she knew as well as I did, that it wasn’t true. I hadn’t been trying to save us from going off the rode, I caused us to go off the road.

That little yellow pick-up sat in Sunny’s backyard for several months before they finally got rid of it. The windshield was shattered and the skin was bruised and dented and crunched all over. People would drive by and point and say things like “That’s the truck the Ellis girl and Nelson girl were driving the night they had that wreck. It’s a wonder they survived it. The Lord must have been lookin’ out for them.”

I think he might have been.