Where we lived, Aiken, SC, used to be beachfront a few million years ago. A friend of mine has actually found shark teeth in the lot behind his house. There’s even a place in town called Sand River: a long, rolling swath of sand that looks like a river and moves like one too—just on a geological timescale, not a human one. If things break our way, my wife and I might have made a brilliant investment in this house; all we need is for global warming to melt Antarctica, and—voilà—beachfront property.
One evening I had to run an errand. I don’t remember what it was, only that I had just enough time before dinner and decided to take the long way. I barreled into a left turn I’d taken a hundred times before, and suddenly I was in a four-wheel drift. Yikes. Instinct—or some old driver-training memory—kicked in and I steered into the skid. By the time I had the wheel turned all the way right, the car scrubbed enough speed to regain traction and—plunk—slid straight into the ditch on the right side of the road.
This ditch was a tidy V-shape, about fifteen feet deep, sandy, and conveniently free of trees. I came to a gentle halt halfway down as the car settled to its axles. Thankfully the road was deserted: no one to hit when I drifted over the yellow line, and no witnesses to my brilliance. There was no way I was backing out of this. I climbed up the ditch and started the half-mile walk to the quick-stop to make some phone calls. (This was 1992—I didn’t have a cell phone.)
The first call was the hard one: telling my wife I’d be a little late. She took it better than expected—probably shock. It’s not that I haven’t done dumb things before; it’s that this time I’d driven our only, 18-month-old car into a ditch. Meanwhile, someone with a cellphone had already called the police to report a car off the road.
The second call was the expensive one: a tow truck. I told the driver where the car was and where I was, and he said he’d pick me up. While that was happening, a police officer arrived at the scene, ran the plate—conveniently angled upward for easy reading—and called the registered owner. Unfortunately, that was also my wife.
His call came only minutes after mine, so she assumed it was me again. By then the shock had worn off and the anger was fully warmed up. When the officer asked why her car was in a ditch, she let him have it: “Dinner’s ruined… when he gets home…” and so on. Once she’d vented, she told him where to find me.
The tow truck and police cruiser pulled into the quick-stop at the same time. The officer asked if the car in the ditch was mine. I admitted it was and explained what happened. He said he’d normally write a ticket for “too fast for conditions,” but after talking to my wife, he figured I was in enough trouble already and let me off with a warning.
A couple minutes later, the tow truck had the car out of its sandy parking spot, and my Visa was $80 lighter. The car suffered only a few scratches under the bumper and a $6.82 plastic part. I, on the other hand, am only now—eight years later—trusted to run errands on my own.