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There’s an old saying that you can’t teach someone to swim,
unless you can do it yourself. The same certainly holds true when
teaching someone how to drive.
I’ve started teaching my daughter how to drive. She will be turning 15
this winter, and most driver’s training instructors have told me they
would much rather have a student who has spent a little “supervised”
behind the wheel training, than someone who has never even sat in the
driver’s seat. When she’s riding with me, I always point out the
different ways of being a good defensive driver, ie: checking for
clouds of dust on side roads that intersect with the road we’re
traveling on, never trusting a vehicle’s turn signal, always allowing
enough space between the vehicle in front of you, and always
anticipating the worse-case scenario in every situation, and how to get
out of it.
A worse-case scenario, that I was involved in more than three
decades ago came to mind, as I was moving along at about five miles per
hour with my daughter at the wheel in an abandoned parking lot last week.
While I was attending Golden Valley Lutheran College back in the 1970s,
I was one of the lucky students who had a car. It was a 1967 Plymouth
Fury and we used to put quite a few miles on that old boat. Because I
had grown up less than an hour from the Twin Cities, I thought I knew
my way around the metro area. Notice I used the word thought.
One evening two of my buddies from Detroit Lakes and two others from
Alexandria decided that we should go for a cruise to a shopping mall
about 10 miles away. Naturally, I was the one who volunteered to supply
the transportation. My buddies were pretty good about chipping in for
gas. We found the mall without any trouble. It was right off 694 in
Brooklyn Center. After making the few meager purchases one can make
while living on the thread as most poor college students do, we piled
into my car and headed for the college dorm. It was about 10 p.m.
“Are you sure we’re on the right road?” my buddy Bob asked me as we
drove down onto a concrete roadway. I replied that I knew where
we were going but couldn’t seem to spot a road sign. We crested a hill
and the oncoming vehicle flashed its brights. “You must have your
brights on Charlie,” Mitch said. “No I don’t,” I replied and pushed the
dimmer switch on and off to prove it. We crested another hill and an
oncoming vehicle flashed its lights off and on and honked its horn at
us. “Are you sure you’ve got your lights on, Charlie?” Brian asked.
They were most certainly on. I kept looking for a road sign and
couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any.
All of our questions were answered when we crested the next hill and
saw eight sets of headlights coming right at us in both lanes. “We’re
on the wrong side of the freeway,” someone screamed. “We’re gonna die,”
screamed someone else. Luckily, there wasn’t a median divider at this
portion of the freeway, only a flat grassy area. I cramped the steering
wheel of the Plymouth to the right, off the shoulder we went, down
through the grass and up onto the roadway that was running parallel to
the one we had been motoring down.
Someone must have been watching from above. We were able to make the
successful jump from the northbound lane to the southbound lane without
putting a single scratch on my car. Had our timing been off by about 30
seconds, we would have met that string of cars head-on at the top of
the hill and we wouldn’t have been laughing about the crazy mistake
that I had made. When you’re 18 and feel invincible, you laugh at
things like that. It was an honest mistake. We hadn’t been
drinking or trying to do anything risky.
Now, 30-some years later, all I can do is shake my head and wonder just
how many lives I’ve used up. I just hope my daughter never ends up
driving south in the northbound lane of 694 in the Twin Cities.
But if she does, I hope that same guardian angel is looking over her
too.
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