Marshall is pushing his Volvo nearly as fast as it will go–he’s making his own choices, but lets not lie–I’m egging him on. Chrissy is in the back seat, behaving somewhat reserved considering the fervor up front. We’re acting a bit irresponsibly, for several reasons, not the least of which is we’re entering an unfamiliar metropolitan area. The roads are wide and sparsely littered with cars, but intersections are few (if at all?) and therefore traffic lights are not an issue. The horizon, as well as our peripheral vision slowly fills with behemoth structures of metal, glass and concrete, each looking (architecturally) a bit ahead of our own time.
We’re applying rubber to asphalt at a phenomenal rate, and cresting the peak of a small hill when we’re suddenly faced with the excruciating truth that the opposite side of this “small hill” is many times taller and proportionally steeper than that part behind us (and perhaps this is why all the other cars around us are going so slow). As the car angles forward into the decline, we can see that this section of the road creates as a mental bottleneck–cars are lined up ahead of us and the backup continues all the way to the bottom of this treacherous descent. There is no possibility of stopping in time.
But our momentum solves that for us as the car lifts off the asphalt and separates from the earth, plunged skyward by our irrational speed. My point-of-view switches back-and-forth from first person to third person as the vehicle begins to twist and tumble, just clearing the rooftops of the cars and trucks patiently queued below.
I can’t stop laughing. A full-chested mouth-jacked-open bottom-of-the-stomach laugh from heaven and hell. Marshall has lost it too, eyes pinched shut from the pure hilarity of it all. But Chrissy, whom I am now mistaking for my sister Sharon, is still quiet in the back seat. “Sharon,” I choke out between bouts of laughter. “Don’t worry about dying. Everything will be okay.”
All the while the car is thinking about reuniting with the earth, and finally does so ever-so-lightly. (Well, relatively…) I’m sure there are many broken parts, but we “land” unharmed, and are now moving again (although I think we may have crunched a few innocent cars on our way down). How thankful am I that we landed on our wheels and not on the nose, or either side!
(wobble wobble wobble)
Now I’m driving Jorge’s BMW down a twisty mountain road with tight switchbacks. We’re in the car (he’s in the passenger seat), but we can’t see the car…we’re very close to the ground and there’s nothing obstructing our view. I’m still trying to get the hang of his car and oversteer and overspeed a few of the switchbacks, and he’s very nervous about this. At one point our route takes us around a swimming pool full of kids. Weird.