I remember one day when I worked in Oregon when we got a heavy snow. I worked about 30 miles away, and my neighbor was also a colleague with the same workplace so we commuted together.
We got to the workplace, but we were the only ones there including the people who lived onsite at the Ranger Station. So we turned around and went home.
I got one speeding ticket in NY with my 442 in 1967, one ticket in 2005and one in 2006 with my RAM. It's so big and heavy it's hard to tell when you're going too fast so you have to watch the speedometer. All three tickets were for illegal speeds about 20 mph over the limit, in rural areas. None were actually unsafe driving.
My only accidents are backing accidents where I can't see what's behind me. I almost had a doozy in 1966 with my brand new 442, which I wrote about here in my family book "Survival."
SURVIVAL IN SOUTH DAKOTA
It was 1966. I graduated from college, got a professional appointment with the U. S. Forest Service in Columbus, Ohio, and bought a muscle car I’d had my eyes on for months.
That car was an Oldsmobile 442: Four on the floor, 400 Cubic Inches under the hood, and dual exhaust out the back. Boy could it fly. Way faster than I was willing to go. In fact, when I finally got on the job in Ohio, my boss said, “One of those new guys drives a car that looks like a jet!”
After saying goodbye to Mom and Dad and everyone in Missoula, I drove east in my shiny new 442 with the vinyl roof and an insatiable urge to go fast. Pretty much I stayed within 20 mph of the speed limit (oh yeah, Montana had no daytime speed limit then), not yet entirely trusting my ability to handle that much power.
I think it was my second day on the road. Montana, after all, is a huge state and took awhile to get end to end in those days before the interstate system was completed.
I dropped down to Wyoming and east to South Dakota. At that time, the interstate didn’t exist in South Dakota, but that was OK because I could go pretty fast on their two-lane highways, which were straight as an arrow for hundreds of miles.
The 442 purred along, maybe 90 miles per hour, nearly effortlessly. I was happy and headed where I wanted to go. The road surface was good and the road was straight. I must have driven 75 miles without a single curve behind me.
Then I saw an eighteen-wheeler coming at right angles to my own direction! The only problem: he was on the same road I was, going the opposite direction.
That road, headed straight east for the 75 miles that were behind me, made a right angle turn to the south. That eighteen-wheeler was headed north; I was heading east, on a collision course with a combined speed of maybe 120.
I braked as hard as I could putting the 442 into a four-wheel drift around that right angle turn in the road. I could see the side of the eighteen-wheeler passing by me inches away.
I finally came to a stop with the 442 pointed west on the north-south leg of the highway with the rear wheels on pavement and the front wheels on the bank. The eighteen-wheeler stopped before going around the turn. Obviously, he was a pro driver and I was just out of college with a muscle car.
There had been no collision and no damage. But when I realized I was still alive I relaxed my foot on the brake and the proud 442 rolled off the bank through a barbed wire fence. That damn fence parted enough for the 442 to stick its nose through. The barbs scratched deeply in the red paint of the hood. This was the only damage.
The driver of the eighteen-wheeler came running up. “Flyin’ kinda low, weren’t cha?” He said. I had to agree. After that I kept my speed down to the limit, except after midnight on the Pennsylvania turnpike driving west from Upper Darby to see Margie.
Those barbed-wire scratches on the hood stayed right there until after Margie and I got married and moved to Bonners Ferry. Finally I traded that 442 off on an Opel, getting $600 trade-in for it. At the time, it seemed like an essential bargain for my young family. Gas was starting to get very expensive, and the mighty 442 burned one gallon for every 12 miles.
The Opel suited our needs for a while. I even hauled an elk out of the woods in the back of it one day. But it turned into a devil. The gas-line was made out of plastic and started spouting leaks. After moving to Estacada, we were on our way to close on our house in Portland when the Opel failed one too many times.
We got to Portland in a Datsun B210.
I wish I still had that 442. Once I saw a book on muscle cars at Costco. The 442 depicted in that book was identical, except that it lacked the vinyl roof that set mine apart.
“To really live, you must almost die,
“And it was just that way with me.” |
