Day 274/365 - Auto Accident Abstract

This is neither my car nor my accident. I sold my Jeep about nine years ago and let my driver's license expire around eight years ago. Now I'm strictly a passenger and a ride bummer (bum-a-rider?). I passed by this car parked in the lot of my apartment building when I ambled home tonight after my post-prandial stroll.

I've only been involved in one serious car accident, thankfully. Less than a year after I bought my Jeep, I drove it home to Missouri from Norfolk, Virginia when I was on leave from the Navy. While I was home, my Pops took my Jeep over to the regular mechanic he'd used since he was a hot-rodding teenager to get it fine tuned. It was running better than it ever had.

On the morning I left to drive back to Norfolk it started snowing lightly. The roads were fine. However, the bridges were not. When I drove across a short bridge over a small creek about 20 minutes from my house, my Jeep started slipping and sliding and shimmying like a drunk rattlesnake. Unbeknownst to me, the bridge had iced over. Duh, I should've guessed that one. I knew not to slam on the brakes in that situation. I'd done that once before in my old AMC Hornet when it started to slide going around a curve in the rain and it spun 180 degrees and slammed into the curb. Lesson learned. Or so I thought, anyhow.

But then as I got to the far edge of the bridge my Jeep started heading off the side of the road. Tapping or pumping the brakes would probably have been the smart thing to do. Either that or just letting it go off the road and steering back on once it regained traction on the grass. Unfortunately, I did neither. I stomped on the brakes. Bad move.

For the second time in my life, I sent my car spinning into a 180. Go figure. The driver's side of my Jeep hit a row of deer reflector posts that lined the side of the road. Then it tipped over on its side. I clearly remember thinking at the time "I'm rolling." Oddly enough, it wasn't a panicky or startled realization. It was more like a "hmm, imagine that..." kind of moment. As my Jeep toppled over, my head hit the soft vinyl window and thumped off the ground. Fortunately for my noodle, there was no rock there. Then my Jeep slid on its side down a 30-foot embankment and landed on its roof in a ditch at the bottom. Just a week earlier the ditch had been full of water, so I guess my timing isn't always dreadful.

I had my seatbelt on, but I don't remember hanging upside down or unfastening it. I think the bump on the head stunned me for a second. The first thing I remember after the Jeep landed upside down was trying to open the driver's side door and discovering that it was wedged against the side of the embankment and wouldn't open. So I crawled past the console, which had previously been between the seats but which had come loose and fallen down to the roof in the accident, and got out through the passenger side door.

One image that I think will be fixed in my memory forever is looking back up toward the road and seeing the silhouette of a man running back up the side of the road to check on me framed in the misty haze. Bless him. He asked me if I was all right and I said I thought I was and then he suggested I turn off my engine. Oh yeah. Guess that would be good, huh? Then he gave me a ride to a McDonald's at the next highway exit so I could call my folks (this was in the days before everyone over the age of 8 carried a cellphone).

My Mom freaked out a bit when I told her what had happened, even though I tried to make it sound like it wasn't a big deal. They came and got me and took me to get checked out at the hospital. Apart from having a knot on the side of my head I was fine, so then we drove to a towing company and had them follow us out to the accident site so they could retrieve my Jeep. They flipped it back over and winched it up the embankment and towed it off to the nearest Jeep dealer. There were two other accidents due to that icy bridge that day, but neither of the other drivers were dumb enough to turn upside down.

The next day I caught a flight back to Norfolk. For some reason the insurance company didn't total my Jeep. They should've because by the time the repairs were finally done they wound up paying more to get it fixed than the blue book value. It took nearly six months before it was finally repaired and my folks drove it out to Norfolk to give it back to me.

My Jeep never really ran worth a damn after that, although I still kept it for about six more years. There was always one thing or another going wrong with it. I think it was just pissed at me for wrecking it. Now that I think about it, maybe it's a good thing that I don't drive anymore. Although with the current state of the Metro, the subway is not exactly the most reassuring mode of transportation either.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 86/365 - Break Out

I think my 365 Project has been good for me in a couple of ways. First, it's gotten me to play around with my cameras and try some experimental shots that I might not have considered otherwise. Second, it's motivated me to 'get up, get out and do something' on days when I might otherwise have just been content to stay at home. Like today, for instance.

After getting sucked into the 'Bones' marathon yesterday, I nearly got trapped by the 'I Love Lucy' marathon today. I swear, sometimes I think couches were invented by television manufacturers, broadcasters, and snack food companies in order to snare us into consuming more of their products. Or maybe that's just me. I didn't want to shoot another photo of something laying around my apartment today, though, so I decided to go hit a museum and grab some grub. I did stick around on the couch long enough to laugh myself silly at the 'Vitameatavegamin' episode of Lucy, though. That one is one of my all-time faves.

I was debating between checking out either the Newseum or the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, and I finally decided to go with the cops and robbers. I love old gangster and g-man movies. That was one of the reasons I rented a tommy gun when my brother and I went to a shooting range in Las Vegas last winter. Man, those things are heavy.

It costs $19 to go to the C&P Museum. I think $13-14 would be a more appropriate entry fee, but the place was pretty full so I'm guessing they aren't feeling any pressure to cut their rates. The museum was pretty interesting. It covers the history and tools of crime and punishment from medieval torture implements up to modern computer crime. A lot of the museum's display objects are replicas, but they do also have some nice original artifacts, such as guns used by various members of the James Gang, the State of Tennessee's former electric chair Old Smokey (creepy, btw), and one of John Dillinger's getaway cars.

That's it above, a 1933 Essex Terraplane. It's weird how you used to be able to open up the windshield in order to get a breeze while you drove. I remember once watching a documentary on Depression-era bandits that explained why they were almost always able to outrun pursuing lawmen -- they spent their ill-gotten gains on high-power, high-performance automobiles like this one and most local police departments made do with rattletrap old beaters. Ford Motor Co. even took advantage of Dillinger's use of their vehicles as a sales pitch by stating that the police would only catch him once he stopped driving their V-8s. Maybe they were right, because this Terraplane is one of the last cars he drove.

It's a bit odd that I broke out of the soft prison of my apartment just to go and browse a museum dealing with the penal system, but it wasn't a bad day out. Plus it gave me a chance to swing by Matchbox for a late lunch/early dinner. Yum! That's definitely not prison food.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)