‘Stupid’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you’ve been launched like a rocket out the driver’s-side door of the Volkswagen beetle you were driving down the 401. Nor does it come to mind as you watch the car tumble down the embankment beneath you, shards of glass and assorted artifacts flying out the open doors and smashed windows. Or when you notice the tires spinning frantically as if they might gain some sort of traction mid-air through its demolition rollover.
It doesn’t occur to you at the apogee of your wingless flight as you arc into your death-defining decsent, wondering which boulder is going to smash your head, or crooked tree limb run you through.
The word that first comes to mind is, “Yaaaaah!”
But you don’t even get a chance to scream out loud. You want to, but time has downshifted into slow-mo, and you can’t get your vocal cords to synchronize with the stretched wavelength of your fatal trajectory. Your death cry is stifled. You’re a giant bean bag that’s been tossed off the back of a truck.
Later, once you’re sure you have survived, you will review millisecond by millisecond the instant replay of your flight. Then you will have time to insert thoughts into your version of events, pause and shuffle the sequence into frames that might be numbered like a book’s: Stupid-Page 1, Stupid-Page 2, and so on.
It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning, middle and end of such an episode. Stupid-Page 1 could have been pegged to the day me and my girlfriend stuck out our thumbs and headed west, on the first leg of our hitch-hiking odyssey from Montreal to the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Or when we piled out of the car after our first ride and stuffed half our worldly belongings into a culvert to ‘lighten the load.’ Or when we decided the load would be even lighter if we went our separate ways because each of us came to think the other stupid in some way-shape-or-form.
Let’s fast-forward to a coordinate somewhere between Toronto and Cornwall Ontario on the last leg of my solo return trip. It’s five or six o’clock in the morning and I’m already on the shoulder of the 401, hitching. A guy in a faded blue VW Bug pulls over and offers me a ride. But before I can get in the opened passenger side door, he says, “Hey, I’ve been driving all night. Can you take over for a while?”
That’s Page-1 in his stupid portfolio; my acceptance of his request Page-101 in mine. I mean, would you ask a complete stranger, who looked like he’d just climbed out of a ditch—because in fact, he had—to drive your car while you took a nap? But pots can’t call kettles black; would you take him up on the offer if you didn’t even have a learner’s permit and the only time you’d actually driven a car you were sitting in your father’s lap?
Don’t answer.
“Never driven a standard?” my sleep-deprived companion asked when I tried to grind the shifter into first. “Push down the clutch… That’s the pedal on the left… now slip the shifter into first.” Being a quick learner doesn’t disqualify you from the ranks of stupid. I got the hang of the ‘H’ sequence after a couple of times through, and my instructor settled in for his snooze.
Stupid isn’t a word that has any significance in a squirrel’s lexicon. Some homo sapiens think of them as stupid, but those boastful members of my own species are stupid themselves if they believe their IQ goes up in reverse proportion to the amount they downgrade the intelligence of another. Just try living off the land even for a week, eating nothing but acorns and berries, with no roof over your head, and predators crouched behind every bush and you’ll be able to make a more informed comment about who’s stupid and who isn’t.
However, squirrels do have a blind spot when it comes to cars. So it was I found myself barreling down the fast lane, bearing down on a black squirrel that was hippity-hopping across the highway toward the ditch on the other side. I eased into the slow lane—where I should have been in the first place—and hoped he’d remain frozen until I zoomed by. No such luck. He hopped right in front of me at the last second…
Being the smarty-pants you are, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I eased further to the right, then farther again when the squirrel continued its suicidal progress. And again, until the passenger-side tires hit gravel. The VW lurched right, I overcorrected left, next thing I knew we were skidding sideways down the highway, a spray of gravel rattling under the floorboards and the front tires screeching over the asphalt.
My companion woke up with a start and looked out the front window, confused that the scenery was sliding by side to side instead of scrolling toward some vanishing point up the highway. I’ve lost count of the number of stupids that could be counted in that lick of time. All I can say is, none of them were the squirrel’s fault. It was just being a squirrel.
“What the…” my co-pilot managed.
Before he could complete the expletive, the back fender of the VW hit a post someone had carelessly planted in a spot they might have expected an errant, out-of-control Volkswagen to be sliding by. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! That was enough to tip us, sending the V-Dub into the clattering, shattering roll that would eject me out of my seat… no seatbelt, stupid… into my graceful arc.
I could describe my flight as a form of kinetic ballet; it did have a certain elegance to it if you could ignore the likely denouement. In retrospect, my slow-motion high dive seemed to be taking place in air that had thickened to the consistency of water—it felt as if I was swimming through the sky…
That ethereal sensation ended with a thud.
Next thing I knew I woke up in an ambulance, being prepped for a trip to the hospital.
Neither me nor my companion were seriously injured in the crash. And I do believe the squirrel survived unscathed. Our gurneys were parked side by side in the hospital emergency ward. His last words were: “Don’t tell them who was driving.” I deduced from the instruction that he had been tossed from his tumbling vehicle too, and preferred to accept full responsibility for my share of the overall stupidity.
I can’t say I learned my lesson that day… but that’s another story… well several of them, actually.
