For ten minutes one afternoon in 1986, I thought I had killed a little girl.
This is my story. It involves a van, the military Hummer, and 25 80-pound buckets of frozen glue.
I worked my 19th summer for my aunt Betty’s delivery service. Her small company shuttled papers, packages, and supplies for industrial clients all over northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. She did a good business with maybe a half-dozen drivers and an assortment of cars, vans, and straight trucks. She issued me an old Ford Pinto for most of my runs, but I got some experience driving the vans, too. Most of her vans were new heavy-duty Fords tricked out for delivery, with rub rails in the cargo area and a wall behind the front seats. She had an older van, too, a used-up, rusty regular-duty Chevy that lacked the wall and rub rails. It sat idle most of the time.
AM General photo
Betty’s biggest customer was AM General, which designed and built the Hummer for the US military. (Yes, I know, it’s Humvee; the Hummer was the consumer version. Well, in 1986 in South Bend, everybody called them Hummers.) They used a particular glue somewhere in assembly, and it was kept frozen until needed. Betty’s company delivered the glue from the supplier, a company called Artificial Ice. All the pro drivers were on other runs one day when AM General called so Betty sent me, the driver of last resort. And all the Fords were on runs so I had to drive the unloved Chevy, the van of last resort.
I drove to Artificial Ice in downtown South Bend and loaded 25 80-pound buckets of frozen glue into my van. It was a hot day, so frost on the buckets immediately began melting into puddles on the van’s metal floor.
I headed out with my thawing 2,000-pound payload. Seven miles lay between Artificial Ice and the Hummer plant in Mishawaka, all on one long road with many stoplights. It took a long time for that loaded van to get any speed. Stopping that much weight was a real problem, too, as I learned when a light changed to red and the van plowed through the intersection as if my braking were a suggestion.
I was treading slowly and carefully across South Bend’s east side when a little girl stepped off the curb right in front of me. This was the first time I experienced how time slows down in a crisis. I was able to think, “I’m about to kill a little girl, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” sink my foot into the brake pedal, and gasp as I watched her take that first step away from safety.
Unfortunately, the bucketed glue was traveling at 25 miles an hour on a nearly frictionless surface. Wham! Buckets slammed into the back of my seat. As I felt the wind leave me, I watched the passenger’s seat pop off the floor, smack the windshield, and bounce around along the tops of some of the buckets.
I managed to get the van stopped. Still trying to get a breath, I hopped out to look for the little girl, but she wasn’t there. I even checked under the van, because with all the excitement in the cabin I wasn’t sure I would have felt it if I had hit her. She had simply vanished.
I sat for several minutes, shaking, until I was sure the urge to vomit had passed. Then I crept at ten miles per hour the rest of the way. To hell with the cars honking behind me.
I was still very shaken when I pulled up at AM General’s loading dock. The guys there steered clear of me and unloaded the glue without a word. They laid the passenger seat on its side in the cargo area, but didn’t ask me about it. Betty didn’t send me on any more runs that day. She never had the passenger seat reattached.
Oh crap, more vans. And I was bored by Town & Country. Can not wait for the week of riding lawn mowers!
I suggest a week of…(rolls dungeon dice)…electric cars, let’s call them ‘Socketside Standards!’
Think I read somewhere of another start up electric auto. Seems to be a kind of retro styled car called for now ‘Extension Cord.’
Be careful what you wish for……
Beats a week of unreliable British cars… oh, sorry, didn’t mean to be redundant :D.
Coming soon on the Speed Channel…..Van Week!
Your wish is our command. Next week at Curbside Classic!
Yikes. That is one close call I managed to avoid during my delivery driving days.
Come to think of it, the only time I was ever afraid I was going to hit a pedestrian was when I was driving about 35 mph along a one-way street in downtown Fort Wayne street in my 67 Ford convertible. I was talking to my sister and suddenly noticed that an old woman had stepped off the curb into the crosswalk, and started crossing the street in front of me. Shit.
I was in the far left lane and with the cat-like reflexes you only have as a teenager, decided that my only escape route was to go around her on the left. The front suspension on my car made the awfullest “BANG” as the left front wheel climbed a 7 inch curb on the far side of the intersection. The left two wheels went several feet onto the sidewalk, but I managed to miss the old girl who looked more confused than frightened. I have not thought about this in years. Damn, but that was close.
Jim, remind me to tell you sometime about the time I spun my car halfway through the little town of Fulton, Indiana trying to avoid hitting an old lady who stepped off the curb.
What a terrible experience. But a damn fine story!
Van The Man
I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a pedestrian near death myself. Driving along a divided four lane city street, at night and in the rain, no less. After taking off from the previous stoplight and getting up to the 30 mph limit, my friend in the passenger seat out of nowhere screams “Acid wash jeans!” (I am not making this up). In a panic, without yet seeing anything, I slam on the breaks. As my car is screeching to a stop, I now am able to make out the figure of a man crossing in the middle of the road wearing a black coat with the hood up over his head. After what seemed like an eternity the car finally stops, just a couple feet away from the stunned and frozen pedestrian. My friend and I were speechless. The man gathered himself sooner than we did and went on his way. He was wearing acid wash jeans indeed…
Wow, great story (yours too cjiguy)!
I think Steve Allen once said that he loved vans, because if you wanted anything out of the back you could slam on the brakes and it would hit you in the back of the head….I think you and the kid were very lucky to escape with just a fright there,Jim!
Time does indeed slow down in these situations. I once struck a cyclist in my Ford pickup. He wasn’t badly injured, and accepted full responsibility for the accident as he should have. The actual time elapsed from the moment I realized what was about to happen until I jumped out of the truck to help him was maybe 5 or 6 seconds, but it seemed a lot longer than that. And I remember exactly how it feels to hop out expecting to find a person under your vehicle.
In my case I think it was karma catching up with me for perhaps the worst thing I have ever done to another person in my life. One Halloween when I was 13, we got hold of a child sized mannequin and dressed it up as a trick or treater. Then we hid behind some trees and threw it in front of a car. The man who hit it believed he had run over a child.
The immediate aftermath of all this was unpleasant for all concerned, although the driver involved was pretty understanding of dumb kids after he regained his composure. Parents involved, not so much. It was almost 10 years later when the cyclist incident mad me realize exactly what we had done to that poor man. I did a lot of things I wish I could take back when I was young, but if I could have only one….
Yeah, kids can be unbelievably cruel without the intention of being so. Closest I came to that was my and my best friend deciding it would be fun to dress in all black, including face paint, and shoot his new air pistol at things. Including a kid.
Not trying to hit him, just scare him, which it did. He took off running.
Feeling empowered, we set our sights on passing vehicles. We had no sooner laid down in some ivy for cover than I heard a rig approach. I lazily pointed the pistol at the car and fired. The drivers door window subsequently exploded inward and outward. We looked at each other for a terrifying instant and bolted back to his house.
Ugh.
During my college years (hint, hint) a friend of a friend rented a house out in the country. He bought a new refrigerator and needed some help getting it to and in the house. We all worked on the beer standard back then, so several of us helped out for a couple of cases of beer and a backyard bonfire that evening. The road in front of the house was a very tight s-curve (due to the previous landowners’ property disputes from years gone by), more like two 90 degree turns in quick succession and drivers had no choice but to go very slow or end up in one cornfield or another.
While consuming the beer, we noticed that a full sized human being could occupy the refrigerator’s cardboard shipping carton. One of the revelers then climbed into the carton and was able to walk around with it on him, as if the carton had sprouted legs on its own. In our state of mind, we found this incredibly amusing.
Our compatriot then had the idea that it would be very amusing to station himself alongside the s-curve as if this were an abandoned shipping crate, then to hop up and run across the road just as a car was approaching. Again, in our even more deeply intoxicated state of mind, we thought this positively hilarious.
We watched with childlike glee as the first car approached, and roared with laughter as they swerved and swayed avoiding our friend in his tiny cardboard prison. We repeated this joke a couple of more times, but we were pretty far out in the farm fields of Northeast Ohio and there were precious few travelers out that night. One guy got pretty p!ssed at us and tried to confront us, but he changed his mind. After the joke got stale, we resumed consuming mass quantities of beer and burned the shipping box as our final amusement for the night.
In retrospect, we were very lucky that:
A) no one DID hit our friend in the box, although one of the cars did get completely crossed up and stopped to confront us. When he saw he was facing off with four strapping young men (who had obviously been drinking) he thought better of it and left.
B) That the p!ssed-off guy didn’t call law enforcement or we didn’t just happen to pull our little stunt on a LEO by accident. It’s reeeeaaaallly dark out there in the middle of the cornfields, we really couldn’t tell what was coming our way until it was upon us or
C)That the p!ssed-off guy didn’t have a weapon and try and use it on us or
D) That we didn’t actually cause an accident and either injure or kill someone with our stunt.
We were really playing with fire that night, totally unawares…
I should write something profound here about the folly of youth, but it could have been a real disaster. Plainly, we were lucky that night.
It’s truly amazing what we survive. I’m sure that in alternate universes, I’ve died four or five times already, from stupidity.
Or E) that the car your friend parked himself in front of was not driven by someone on the way home from the same kind of party you guys were at and had consumed as much as you guys had (or maybe this is (A)(1) ). Isn’t it amazing that when we were doing stupid things while intoxicated while (hopefully) young, we always assumed that everyone else was stone cold sober.
Once, I stopped before making a right turn onto a one way street. Looking to my left, no cars were close; looking to my right, I observed an older lady approaching. Looking back to the left, I started to pull out, when to my horror, the lady stepped off of the curb directly in front of me! As I slammed on the brakes, she actually bumped along the front bumper, and NEVER even looked my way. She continued on as though NOTHING had happened, leaving me frozen behind the wheel. It is truly amazing the number of thoughts that go through your mind in that “nth” of a second !!