Thankful to Drive

I love to drive, but I didn’t always. For a long time I was terrified of driving except out on the highway, or in places I was very familiar with. I’ve also lived without a car, while we were in Beijing, and walking, riding a bike or taking the bus worked just fine in a flat city with good transportation systems in place. But here, where I live between towns and often carry kids and baggage I adore having my third Dodge van. Soccer mom van vibe and all.
But my first car? It had been my parents, and I loved driving it but it wasn’t exactly sporty either. It was a dark brown station wagon.

A Mercury Zephyr. It made me have zero learning curve because the dashboard was exactly the same as the Ford Fairlane that Cody High School used for our Driver’s Education Classes. I loved the teacher of that class, and I was a good test taker on paper and we didn’t have to drive to get our first driver’s license if we had passed Driver’s education. I was in the top 4 in our class on points earned in Driver’s Ed so I won a trip 100 miles away driving to Billings Montana for a day at the mall with three other students and the instructor. He was a grizzly, teddy bear of a an ex-military man who had had an accident on a hunting trip, when he leaned his shotgun against a tree and then bent to tie his boot. The gun fell, his chest and arm took the blast and he had to hike out over a mile then drive 30 miles to town. Cartilage encapsulated shot was all over his bicep and clearly visible through his shirt along his chest. I think his name was Coach Wallace. It’s been 44 years though.
The best thing about the station wagon wasn’t the way it drove, though that was easy. It was the wide bench seats and the fact that the back one folded down. Fitting in lots of friends, or camping gear, or simply camping in the back was easy and frequent. Greg and I slept in the back the night we went to the winter Ball as college freshmen, out in Chapman bench. “Slept”
and we were sound asleep in it the night we were to graduate from Southern Oregon State in the morning. My family was sleeping in my house in Ashland, Oregon and my Grandma was really sick with the cancer she would die from in mere weeks. Suddenly a man slammed his car into the driveway nose to nose with mine. He jumped from the car, raced past us and dove over the fence and ran. Police officers, with guns out raced past where Greg and I huddled in our sleeping bags. Then they were back, dragging the man in handcuffs, pounding on the house door. We were terrified to startle them by opening the car door right behind them, but we did it slowly, “um… we’re over here”
After we explained why we were in the car, and that we had company in town for the graduation, they explained that the man had escaped the mental institution and they would send a tow truck for his car.
When Greg was driving, two infant car seats strapped in the back seat, about 5 years later, to pick up the boys from daycare, he was stopped at a stop sign when a man failed to make the corner and slammed into the station wagon. Greg was unhurt, but one of the rear doors was crumpled in and would never open again. That window was shattered and the car seats were full of glass. The next summer we sold it to someone back in Cody, Wyoming.

[Danette Thompson]

Quite the story!

[Pat Knowles]

Well Dixie that’s quite a tale! I enjoyed reading all about your car history very much. You have had some scares! I love driving too although our roads at the moment seem so full of traffic everywhere for some reason, mostly road works & temporary traffic lights it seems.