I’m not ashamed to admit that one of the happiest days of my life was in high school, and it was a revenge day. What’s worse, it was a revenge day exacted against an innocent person who had no idea I even had a stake in his tragedy. For those of you as old as dirt, you may remember that in the '80s we had a series of wild winters in Idaho. My family lived three-quarters of a mile back on a dirt and gravel road, more dirt than gravel, and we were regularly snowed in. Our lane was so touchy we could be marooned if someone just sneezed in the wrong direction when the flakes began to fall. That’s when Dad decided we needed snowmobiles. I’m sure he didn’t need as much convincing as Mom did, but somehow they came to the conclusion that snowmobiles were a necessity of country life.
I was relatively new to my driver’s license when one night we were blasted, not with snow but with sleet. As Grandpa would have said, the roads were slicker than snot. Mom and Dad had a lot on their plates the next morning, but I needed to get to school, so they hotly debated whether I should drive myself in. Mom was a no, but Dad was a yes, and in the harried pressure of the day’s schedule, Dad won out.
I did all right at first, creeping along in my Chevy Citation like an armor-plated snail, holding onto the steering wheel as if it was a life preserver, until I tried to turn a corner at the blistering speed of 20 miles an hour. In s-l-o-w motion, I slid myself sideways right through a barbed wire fence. This is not the part of that day that shines all sunny and bright in my memory. The good part came later, when I was driving home after school and saw that David Coleman had also slid his ride off the road. His bright orange Ford Fiesta was still wedged deep into a drifted barrow pit. It’s important to emphasize that this was the vehicle of not just any ordinary David Coleman, this was the David Coleman who had been named “the only freshman who should be allowed to have a driver’s license” a year earlier by my carpool.
For background, my freshman carpool consisted of four people: myself, my sister who was a senior and two neighborhood boys, another senior and a junior. They were our neighbors in the way that anyone who lives within a 5-mile radius is a neighbor. My sister always drove because we lived the farthest out. To my freshman self, those three upperclassmen were the arbiters of sophistication and knowledge. All three probably would have agreed. So when I got my driver’s permit, it was as if disaster struck. For reasons beyond my understanding, my sister took it upon herself to make sure I had driving experience. I’m not even going to think about the legality of that decision. It can’t be denied, though, that I needed practice. As you might expect, the young men on board had plenty to say. They held court in the back seat, yammering away about my deficiencies and correcting every move I made, which strangely, did nothing to improve my performance. From the lofty vantage point of 16 and 17 years old, they discussed the absurdity of giving ninth graders driving privileges. That is where the grand declaration originated that forever stuck in my craw, “There is only one freshman who ever should be allowed to drive, and that is David Coleman.”
Later it was my privilege to be on a church snowmobile outing with said Golden-Boy-Coleman. He had brought his snowmobile, and my family had brought ours. We were riding out at Johnson’s Hill, and the plan was for the snowmobilers to pull all the teenagers around on tubes and sleds. The activity director gathered us all together and gave orders. “No teenager,” he said, “will be allowed to drive or even touch a snowmobile – only adults. No teenager, that is, except for David Coleman.”
Can I be blamed if the later sighting of a Fiesta-topped snow cone put a little lilt in my heart? A little spring in my step?
Of course, the great irony of the universe is that now the two of us sometimes have reason to drive together. Like last week. I’m usually fixing supper when David feeds, but he was fresh out of drivers one night, so dinner for us had to be put on hold while we went and served supper to the cows. I was driving the UTV and David was on the trailer, cutting twine and pushing off bales to a waiting and impatient clientele. Admittedly, I was bumping up the muddy field at a brisk clip. When David finished and jumped into the Kubota with me, he was irritated. “How fast were you going?” he said. “You had to be going at least 7 miles an hour!” It was actually more like 8, but I wasn’t going to quibble.
“How fast would you have gone?” I asked.
“I like to keep it at 4 to 5 mph. Were you trying not to get stuck?”
“That’s exactly what I was doing.”
“Well, I thought to myself back there that if you were trying not to get stuck, it was OK that you were driving too fast.”
Well, thank you, your majesty. Now I was irritated. “If I was going too fast, why didn’t you say anything? My word, we stopped three times!”
“I wanted to see if I could keep up with you.”
There are real and valid reasons why Dave and I drive separate vehicles.
