Bubba
One stormy warm spring night, my 19 year old daughter Marie and I went to do a couple errands and then were planning to go to Walmart. We went to the Trumansburg library, and then on to Interlaken to deliver flowers to a member of our church. They didn’t answer their door, so we left the flowers and went to the son’s house nearby to let them know and to ask how to get to Walmart from their house. They gave us directions and said they would call his parents to let them know we left the flowers. We headed down the road, with Marie driving, as I was tired. We turned from one highway to another in the village of Lodi, and Marie started speeding up as we were going out of the village. It was raining a little harder so the roads were wet, and as she speeded up, we started to hydroplane, right towards a pickup truck driving the opposite direction. I hollered “Marie!” and she tried to steer the other direction to avoid the truck, and we went spinning off the side of the road, swiped a fence post and skidded into a corn field about 50 feet. When we came to a stop, we breathed a sigh of relief as we talked about all the possibilities that could of happened and didn’t, such as head on, or rolling, either of which could have resulted in death or a trip to the hospital. The man in the pickup truck came back to check on us, to make sure we were all right. A couple other people stopped also. I got out and tried to push while Marie tried to drive out, but the tires were in such bad shape that there was no traction, part of the reason we were where we were.
I called AAA, and was on hold for almost 15 minutes before getting someone, and told them where we were, approximately. While on that call, one guy creeped Marie out, but I told her she needed to talk to him as I was still on hold, and that if he did anything I would hang up and call 911. AAA told us it would be at the most one and half hours before the tow truck got to us. Marie called home and extracted a promise from each of her two sisters not to tell their father what she told them, and she told them we were in a corn field, waiting to be pulled out. So, as the sky got darker, fewer people noticed us, and we started telling about the books we were reading. Marie had just been reading an Ann Rule book that day. She is a true crime writer and can be scary in a situation like we were in to think about. I tried to get our minds off of her book by telling about the book I was reading, “My Name is Mary Sutter.” At some point we locked the doors, and felt a little bit more secure, but then we were remembering a show we watched the night before where a man hit a metal bat into a guy’s truck window and beat him to death, so we didn’t feel totally secure. Every once in a while, the sky would light up so bright it hurt our eyes, but showed us that no one was around us. It was a little terrifying when that happened, but fortunately neither of us is afraid of lightening.
When it became totally dark, a car started to pass us, and then shone a big spot light on us. It was a Seneca County Sheriff, and it was amazing he noticed us in the dark. He kept that spotlight on us almost the rest of the time, and it was blindly bright. We had to put our visors down to tolerate it. He came to see if we were all right, and we said yes, and that we had called AAA and that we had been there one and half hours already. He said that was unacceptable, and told me to call them back up and cancel the tow truck and he would call a tow truck and AAA would reimburse us. I called AAA back, and was on hold a shorter time, and they contacted the tow truck, which was out of Stanley, around the lake from us! The sheriff then talked to the AAA operator and told them he called us a tow truck and that they were going to pay the bill. So we sat and waited for another half hour or so. Marie realized she needed to go to the bathroom, but there was no way we could figure out how to do that without the spotlight shining on us and/or the sheriff checking on us.
The tow truck finally arrived, from Romulus, and checked on the car, and hooked it up to winch it out. Winching is very slow, especially when you are standing there in flip flops and short shorts like Marie was doing. The guy steering the car was the smaller of the two, and Marie and I about died laughing when the big guy called him Bubba. They got the car onto the side of the road, and looked it over. They pulled off one piece of plastic that protected the windshield washer reservoir that looked like it might be able to be put back on, and said it looked like it would be fine, just be prepared for clunking sounds till the mud was all off. I drove the car to Trumansburg, after making one stop because of a noise. Marie got out and pushed something back under, then we went to the car wash to wash off as much of the mud as we could before going home. I wrote a note for my husband that said “So, Marie and I are ok, the car is almost ok except the bumper, will tell you more later.” He saw it the next morning and didn’t get all upset like he usually does about most things. I told Marie that I didn’t really want to go to Walmart anyway, and she said that is why we were in the corn field!
