Truck + Trees = Thunk

I crashed the truck last night.  I had been enjoying a nice relaxing drive – darkness had fallen in Yellowstone National Park and Duke and I were heading home.  Duke was resting his chin on the console and I was listening to an audiobook about the Donner Party as we drove through the woods on a narrow, snow-covered lane.  When a truck came from the opposite direction I moved to the right to give plenty of room to pass, and I accidentally edged a tire off the pavement.  Big mistake.  The tires that remained on the snow-covered pavement didn’t have enough traction to pull the off-pavement tire back over the lip of the asphalt, so I started sliding.  Slowly, slowly slipping further down the roadside embankment.  I cut the wheels left toward the road, but that didn’t help.  Normally, as any experienced red-clay driver knows, you turn into a slide to pull out of it, but that only works if you’ve got space to slide a little further before regaining traction.  Here the bank was steep and the shoulder nonexistent.  No space.  As the narrator on the audiobook was reading excerpts from the diary of James Reed, who was bringing provisions to the stranded pioneers, it occurred to me that I was going to slide down the bank and into the trees and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Shit,” I said.

The truck slid slowly, two tires still on the pavement.  I could see an orange road marker ahead and knew I would run over it.  I gripped the wheel tightly and hoped the orange marker was made of plastic.  The grille guard slammed the marker to the snow and my truck slid over it.  It thunked on the undercarriage of my truck.  “Here I met Mrs. Reed and the two children still in the mountains,” said James Reed.

Maybe, I had time to think, I should step on the gas.  I had the truck in four-wheel-drive, so maybe the front tires would get enough traction to pull me back on the road.  But I doubted it.  Likely that would only accelerate my inevitable descent into the trees and make me smack into them harder.  I looked down the bank.  Ten or twelve feet of a seriously steep descent.

“Damnit,” I said.  My left tires followed the right ones off the road.

The back end swung downhill faster while the front tires, which were still angled toward the pavement, resisted the slide.  Now I was sliding sideways.  This wasn’t good.  I watched the trees approach.  I cut the wheel into the slide so the truck wouldn’t roll over.  Even if the truck rolled, I thought, I was moving slowly enough that I probably wouldn’t be hurt.  All the same, it would be more convenient to remain upright.  “I cannot describe the death look they all had,” said James Reed in a serious voice.  If I’d known I was about to crash I would have chosen a more encouraging soundtrack.

I looked at the trees that I was about to strike.  Some were small and would probably slide under the truck without doing too much damage, but a couple were pretty big.  Too big to give way.  They might leave some nice dents.  I wished I were heading for a forest of gentle saplings instead.  All in all, events at that time were not proceeding as I would have liked.

“Shit,” I said.

“ ‘Bread! Bread!  Bread! Bread!’ was the begging of every child and grown person except my wife,” commented James Reed.  With a crunch the back of the truck struck some small trees, and the nose continued to slide downhill.  I heard the whump of another tree sliding under the side of the truck and reflected that this was probably the slowest-moving car crash I’d ever witnessed.  The nose of the truck slid until it crashed into the outward branches of a big tree.  It slowed as the branches shattered progressively, then came to rest against the trunk.  Spruce branches lay across the windshield.  The truck was still.  The engine cut off because I hadn’t pressed in the clutch.  For a split-second there was silence, then James Reed interjected, “I give to all what I dared and left for the scene of desolation and now I am camped within 25 miles which I hope to make this night . . .”

I looked at Duke.  He was resting his chin on the console, which was now uphill of him but still appeared comfortable.  By mutual agreement we shut off James Reed and relaxed for a moment before getting out to assess the damage.  In the end it wasn’t too bad – some dents and tears, but mostly on the camper.  A tow truck hauled me back up the bank, then I drove the truck back home.  On the second leg of the journey we did not listen to Reed.