Eric, this is why it’s important (Part 2)

By starfcker

Thanksgiving is road trip time. My thanksgivings are spent up in Central Florida at big family gatherings that I’ve gone to since I was born. I have dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews on my mother’s side that I’ve known my whole life and yet I have absolutely no idea how I’m related to them. It’s just too complex of a web for me to untangle. But they are kin. I love them, and I feel very comfortable with them. But they are a different breed. They are a harder people. They are almost all involved in cattle or citrus production. Maybe one or two drive trucks for the phosphate mines, but in general they are basic Florida crackers.

I have lived in South Florida my entire life, but I have spent a huge amount of time up in this part of the state, picking oranges and every other kind of thing that you can pick. Strawberries, okra, black-eyed peas, you name it, I have picked it all. Driving cattle into chutes, shoveling feed, novelty to me, just another day to them. Back when I used to hunt, I spent lots of time up that way, my cousin Dwayne had access to huge tracts of land owned by a man named Ben Hill Griffin. At that time Ben was the largest private landowner in Florida, and the land we went on was intersecting 10 mile square blocks.

You could literally drive for an hour never see a building. Very wild, very Florida. My cousins all greet me with the same gesture, as old as we are. They invade my personal space, crush my hand and stare me in the eyes without saying a word. I’m not sure exactly what is significant about it, but they all do it. None of them drink. Of all the get-togethers with them I’ve ever had, nobody has ever brought a beer. The women all look at my hands, like they’ve never seen a man with clean trimmed fingernails.

These women drive Navigators and Caddilacs, but their men are a rougher breed. I get along fine with them, after all, I’m a farmer too. At least I think I am, they probably laugh at the idea of city boy getting his hands dirty. But it does give me a certain currency in that world, otherwise I would be completely alien. None of them have ever owned a foreign car. I doubt any of them has a passport. Like I said just entirely different world.

The meat in their freezers they butchered themselves, and probably hunted down most of it. Throwing a fish back would never occur to them. I throw back dolphin, I just hate to clean fish. But then again, I fish in saltwater, I’m not entirely sure some of these people have ever seen salt water. I can share their tea recipe. Brew a gallon of tea, add 5 pounds of sugar, and then you have tea. I love southern cooking, and trust me these gals are the best.

Thanksgiving was great, like it always is. I was stuffed and I was thankful. I love the drive up that way, my route goes through some very wild parts of Florida, I always keep my eyes peeled for interesting wildlife. The roads up there are magnificent. Two lane highways set up for high speed. Great surfaces, wide low cut shoulders, reflectors, rumble strips, all the goodies.

In my sports car and motorcycle days, we would go up there just to see how fast that stuff could go. You can comfortably drive at 80-85 miles per hour with little risk of tickets and a high degree of safety as long as you’re aware of oncoming traffic. During the drive over, halfway between Sebring and Zolfo Springs, I had a burgundy Explorer on my tail, which I kind of like, because I don’t have to worry about cops approaching from the rear.

I’m a very good high speed driver, constantly scanning all around out of habit. I noticed the Explorer peeling off as if he were going to turn right in a turn lane, and I immediately thought, we’re in the middle of nowhere, there are no turn lanes. Sure enough, he had drifted off the road. I don’t know if he fell sleep or was distracted by something, but he over-corrected and snapped back and forth a couple times before ending up in the worst of all possible positions. Sideways at 80 miles per hour in an explorer.

You know what happens next. The thing rolled like a chicken on a high-speed rotisserie. I counted five full rotations. I swear it picked up speed as it spun. At that kind of speed it was only hitting the ground every now and then, and debris was flying everywhere. There were no cars behind us, and no cars in front of us. I turned around as quickly as I could and drove back to see what I could do. I stopped a little ways back, in case something were to explode, and ran over to see if anyone had survived.

The Explorer ended up on its side. All the glass was gone. There was a guy standing with his head outside of one of the passenger windows, trying to climb up and out. He told me he was the only one in the vehicle. I tried to help him up, he was a big boy, so that wasn’t happening. I noticed the entire back end of the Explorer was blown out, so I suggested to him that he go out that way. He got to the back and realized he couldn’t really stand up just yet.

Other drivers had started to stop and a couple of them steadied the guy for a few minutes until he was able to stand on his own. He had a bloody mouth from the airbags, but other than that he was totally unhurt. Well I’ll be damned. Those fucking safety engineers always trying to take away our freedoms. This was the second major league wreck that I’ve witnessed in the past month or two, that I wasn’t sure anybody could survive, and both times, the driver walked away.

I doubt either one of these guys was on the plus side of the IQ median, I doubt either of these guys ever stopped to think about how safe their vehicle was in any kind of crash, just average people going about their day. But both of them walked away thanks to the outstanding engineers at NHTSA. Both drivers made small but significant errors, but we all have, and it shouldn’t be fatal. And it wasn’t. And that’s a good thing