(or); The Water Slide… not as much fun as it sounds…

Today I am going to try something new.

I am going to do a series of posts about just one subject… sort of. These posts will deal with a five year period of my life that ended about twenty two years ago. The subject of these posts is the five year period when I worked for Atlas Lithograph Company here in San Diego. This is the longest I ever held a job, and I quit just before Jessica, my oldest daughter, was born so I could be a stay at home dad.

I hear you all moaning and pushing your un-follow buttons. Why is he going to torture us with stories about working at a lithograph company, I can hear you all muttering. Oh ye of little faith. If you stick with me on this, you will gain keen insight into the strange workings of my art-sided brain function, and maybe even damage some internal organs as you roll on the floor laughing uncontrollably. Also, because of the fact that I drove thousands of miles a month trying to deliver everything from a small box of business cards to half a million deposit slips for Bank of America, some of my more interesting near death experience stories happened during this time.

So fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I will start with one such near death experience… (although I suppose there is a small chance that I might have just been horribly maimed but somehow managed to survive this one, but near horrible maiming story just doesn’t have the same ring to it)…

So there I was, driving the big, white Chevy work van, down on Sorrento Valley Road. It was a beautiful sunny day, and things were going smoothly… too smoothly. Sorrento Valley is a wide road in an industrial park area. I came around a wide, sweeping turn, and suddenly there was a lake in front of me. Not a real lake. There was a water leak of some sort from an irrigation system someone was putting in. The water covered a huge area, but it was only an inch or two deep, nothing that would make any of us nervous. Or so I thought…

The very instant I hit the water, I felt the steering go all mushy. We have all heard of hydroplaning. Most of us have probably done it. I know I have. But not like this.

It usually lasts for a split second or two and is over before you have time to do anything stupid. But this time I just kept going… and going… And the van started to turn sideways. I couldn’t remember what the correct procedure for hydroplaning was. All I knew was that you are not supposed to slam on the brakes, because that makes it worse. And I thought I recalled hearing that you should not try to steer, because then when you hit the dry cement again, your wheels might be facing the wrong way, and that could be real bad. As in rolling over and over bad.

Well, as I sat there trying to figure out what to do, I was still travelling at about 50 miles an hour, but now the van was turned almost completely sideways. I was shooting a huge rooster tail of water, sort of a wave, out in front of me, which I had a great view of out of my driver’s side window, because that was now my windshield basically. I didn’t want to make things worse by gripping the steering wheel, so I just sort of held my hands up in front of my face, like a surgeon drying his hands after scrubbing up.

At this very moment, I glanced out of the front window… (which wasn’t in front any more, but we may as well continue to call it that)… because I saw movement. I was going fast enough that I had caught up to another vehicle, which was moving about 30 miles per hour, a sensible speed to travel across a pond, as it turns out, because their car was still facing the right way.

So the driver of the other car, seeing my monster wave out of the corner of his eye, turns to see what is causing it. And for just a brief moment, we were looking into each other’s eyes. I still had my hands just held up in front of me, and something inside me, that wicked sense of humor that could still laugh in the face of death… (or serious bodily injury)… caused my to wave at him and give him a wink, as though this whole sliding sideways down a street had been my idea, and so far, the plan was working perfectly.

I wish I could explain the look on that guy’s face…

I also wish that I could say I did something brilliant to get myself out of this fix, but the sad, honest truth is that as the van slowed, it slowly spun itself back the other way, and when I hit the dry road, I was straight enough to manage to get it back under control after some fairly impressive fish-tailing.

I admit this story does not have a strong finish, but if I had died, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the story in the first place.

Stay tuned for the next installment of… The Atlas Chronicles.