Racing with trains, parking on rocks

Don’t tell my teen daughters, but my ‘72 Chevy Impala with its sturdy V-8 engine would roar to speeds of 120 miles per hour or higher on the right kinds of roads.

In rural Wisconsin in 1981, the right kinds of roads were country highways, called trunks for reasons I don’t understand, named with letters of the alphabet. I lived on County Trunk DL, for example, but that road was too short and congested for high-speed driving. County Trunk U was fun with its mysterious twists and turns through long stretches of farmland, including an old hemp field that had gone to seed if you get my drift. But if you really wanted to take ‘er out and see what she could do, County W was your best bet.

Hypothetically, you could roar up those hills in the Impala, hitting 80 … 90 … 100 … 101—then crest the hill and zoom down. Foot on the accelerator. Van Halen pounding from the rear speakers. Arm dangling from the drivers’ window. Air feeling thick and humid, scented by freshly spread manure.

Not that I ever drove that fast. Except once or twice. And only to impress boys I was dating.

The upside to my recklessness was that the Impala enclosed my 115 pounds of teen brainlessness with something like a ton of real, live, pale-green steel. So if I hit a random act of livestock on the road, chances are that I would fare better than, say, the heifer. As a side bonus, most Midwesterners have never heard of an “open range.” In Wisconsin, handy stretches of barbed wire keep the cows off the country trunks.

I’ve never, ever hit a cow.

I’ve never been hit by a cow—or by a train, either. In case you were wondering.

Summer was almost over on the day I bought my Chevy from a used car lot on Eighth Street, aka Al Ringling Boulevard, in my hometown of Baraboo. (Baraboo, now home to the Circus World Museum, was once the wintering grounds for Al Ringling and Barnum and Bailey.)

My dad helped me pick out the Impala, the heavy steel frame foremost in his protective mind. “Not one of those tin cans you see nowadays,” he said. It was 1981. I had saved about $1,000 from working at my parents’ summer resort. The car was $600. Its former owner—a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays—traded it in when it turned over at 100,000 miles. I spent another $200 on the most critically important upgrade of all—the stereo and speakers.

My boyfriend, who’d not saved a dime in his short 17 years of shiftlessness, was admittedly jealous. But he wasn’t too proud to go cruising on the back roads. We drove to Wisconsin Dells, where I tempted disaster by running a red light at a busy intersection. We took the long way home. Up, up, up a hill we’d drive, shouting along to “Runnin’ With The Devil,” then down, down, down, with the shirtless, pre-beer-bellied boy on the seat next to me looking nervous, actually quite nervous because after all, I had just run that red light, and I was a pretty new driver.

I saw the train chugging across a field just before I noticed the tracks crossing the road. The road I was on. The road I was on, about 20 feet from where the tracks crossed—the speedometer needle driven to its right-most position. Ten feet, two feet. Whoosh. I didn’t even think to brake for the simple reason that, by the time I realized the train might hit me, I was already over the tracks. Feeling the heat of the train as it passed just behind my car. Barely able to hear the train’s loud, angry whistle over David Lee Roth: “I found the simple life ain’t so simple, when I jumped out on that road.”

“You could have killed us!” my boyfriend screamed, adding some of his favorite adjectives and expletives. I grinned at my clever, skillful driving, feeling I had somehow arranged the stunt just to make him crazy.

We later broke up.

My Datsun-driving brother made fun of my car’s size and environmentally disastrous gas mileage. Mom worried about petite (short) little me driving that big old beast.

“I can barely see your eyes over the dashboard,” she said, and forced me to sit on a pillow, so I could see over the steering wheel.

I didn’t have my first actual accident until later that fall, on the night of homecoming, the night I met the man with whom I’d spend the next 21 years. My drivers ed teacher had predicted that most inexperienced drivers would have their first boo-boo in a parking lot. Accurate prophecy.

My friend Barbie and I stopped to buy cigarettes. We climbed back in the car and I threw the pillow into the back seat. Sitting on a pillow to drive was uncool. I peeked over the steering wheel and attempted a right hand turn onto the street. Instead of hitting the street, I jumped the curb and ended up parked on a large boulder placed in a neighbor’s yard to prevent idiots from driving on her grass.

I spent most of the evening in my car on that rock.

Football players and cheerleaders drove by, hooting derisively, on the way to the game.

Someone stopped. “Looks like you need a tow truck.” But Barbie and I didn’t have money. We didn’t want to call parents. Anything but that.

“Maybe my brother has $20,” Barbie said, and we worked our way to a payphone to call her big brother, Dave. He drove a Pinto, and we were married about a year and a half after the nice tow truck man pulled my car from atop the rock. Can’t remember if I ever paid back that $20. Dave and I sold the Impala for $50 in 1984.

Figure we coulda sold it online, these days, for twice that.