Get The Car Back Onto The Highway.
Shane and I were having a great time on a college road trip last weekend. We were talking casually about his breakfast when Shane said “Mom” with a look of horror in his eyes.
I looked up and realized that our car had careened off the highway.
With the speed set at 75 mph, we’d been cruising in the left lane, all good. A split second later we had veered completely off the road – not a little, but all four wheels heading in an unwanted direction.
We were gliding sharply downhill at an alarmingly high rate of speed.
Grass, I thought. There shouldn’t be grass.
Then I thought only this: get the car back onto the highway.
I turned off the cruise control but never once hit the brake.
Still flying down the hill, bumping over whatever lies in a median strip on a highway, I kept a death-grip on the steering wheel. Get the car back onto the highway.
We couldn’t go uphill until we stopped going downhill. I turned the wheel slowly to the right, still bumping along at a high rate of speed, trying to position us sideways on the bank.
I remember no sound. Just: grass.
The car was completely out of control, like steering on ice. Too fast, too fast, too fast – but no brake. I needed the momentum to carry us back up the hill.
No gas, either: I didn’t want to get stuck in mud.
Get the car back onto the highway.
The car swerved – sideways – downhill – grass – like ice – uphill – grass – sideways – it felt like we were spinning…. Get the car back onto the highway. We’d been on the hill for 10 minutes, 10 hours maybe, 10 seconds – who knew? – with me pulling at the steering wheel, aiming to get back onto the black – seeing only green – time demolished by the feeling of being utterly out of control.
We were facing diagonally uphill, the back wheels still skidding, trying to grab hold, when I saw it: the highway was within reach.
I couldn’t see what was at the top of the hill, but I saw something that wasn’t grass. My goal was in sight.
And that’s when I realized with horror: we are pulling onto an active highway.
If I could get us out of this grass – and it seemed suddenly like I might – we’d be in even more danger. With the car barely able to climb the lip of the asphalt, I didn’t have even an instant to turn my head and check for traffic. I was pulling the car directly into the path of whatever was up there.
And my baby was sitting helplessly in the passenger seat.
Please God, I thought, without any time to finish my prayer.
The car clonked up onto the asphalt, out of the grass – one wheel, two, then four.
Nothing hit us.
I checked my speed: 38 mph. We’d slowed down considerably, and now we needed to speed up to avoid getting hit by oncoming cars. Tentatively, I pushed on the gas pedal.
“Are you okay?” I breathed at Shane.
“Okay?” he asked, incredulous.
“Are you okay?” I asked again, begging.
“Physically, I guess.”
Just after we reemerged on the highway, while I was still shaking, a sign announced an upcoming rest area. Five miles later, we pulled off to check the car’s status.
It wasn’t clean. We lost a small piece of trim from one door and there was a dent that I found hours later. The wheels and the undercarriage were caked in sod. We rescued a lone grasshopper who sat baffled next to one tire. With the exception of a four-inch chunk of wood stuck between one tire and its hubcap, everything was copacetic.
Thanking God at this point seems necessary – but entirely insufficient. It was a miracle.