Sometimes it takes only a few minutes for the world to jerk you from one stage of your life to the next.
In 1977, I was twenty-two and about to graduate from a small college eighty miles north of Minneapolis. My parents were making their first-ever trip to the school to watch the ceremony.
On the day before their arrival, I hitchhiked back to campus from Saint Paul, where I had just completed the CPA exam. Hitchhiking was dependable transportation for me at the time, and this trip back to school was just another milk run for my thumb.
Over the previous four years, I had hitched all over Minnesota. I took rides from guys who had pistols on the front seat and rifles on the back seat. One driver kept his Colt .45 between his legs (“Calling Dr. Freud…”). A trucker proudly showed me his god-awful porn library that included smut that would have made Larry Flynt blush. Drivers often passed me a joint or a beer. Once my chauffeur fired up a bong while dodging a bridge abutment; we missed certain death by about a foot.
I trusted them all.
My route back to school took me on US-10, which angles northwest along the original route to Fargo. This stretch was an old-time divided highway paralleling a set of train tracks and the Mississippi River. There were no bridges where the country roads crossed the four lanes.
Every little town we passed through had a traffic light, which was great for hitchhiking. Drivers were more likely to pick you up if they were already stopped and you could look them in the eyes. Standing on an interstate entrance ramp was for suckers.
I made unusually slow progress that day. Around 3:30, I got stranded among the cornfields between the towns of Big Lake and Becker. I watched cars fly by for forty-five minutes as I started to worry about my obligations, my parents, and my graduation.
My savior arrived in a 1971 AMC Gremlin.
About the Gremlin: I did the research, so you don’t have to. The original designer sketched the first Gremlin on an air sickness bag during a flight in 1966. He should have stopped, shoved the bag back into the seat pocket, and forgotten the whole thing.
Unfortunately, in 1970, AMC introduced the Gremlin to compete with the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega. All three cars appear on every list of the worst automobiles ever produced.
My hero’s Gremlin was robins’ egg blue and featured a wide black racing stripe, rally wheels, and an air scoop on the hood. The car had a 4.2-liter six-cylinder engine and a manual transmission. In summary, this sorry excuse for a car had too much power, weak drum brakes, marginal suspension, and lots of sharp-edged sheet metal on the dashboard.
Now, about my good Samaritan: he was just a Minnesota farm kid. He was a very good-looking guy, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, who was trying to grow his first mustache with limited success. The skinny blond hairs on his upper lip were like a football game, eleven on each side. A gym bag, bat, and softball had been tossed into the back seat. The eight-track player blasted out heavy metal anthems, but that was normal teenage guy fare at the time. He did not trigger any of my standard warning signals, so I readily jumped into his car.
I wanted to jump out again the second we pulled onto the road. He had a death wish, a death want, a death need—my death.
The speed limit was fifty-five, but almost immediately we were tooling along at close to ninety miles an hour. He jumped between cars and trucks with one hand on the wheel, cutting in front of semis with inches to spare and riding up on the rear bumpers of cars. He passed one car by veering onto the shoulder of the highway.
Too late now—I was trapped.
Bug-eyed and speechless, I realized that there was nothing I could do except hang on and hope it wouldn’t hurt. I pictured my parents seeing my charred corpse the next day. They most likely would have brought a nice pen or watch as a graduation gift, now to be tucked into my coffin.
After a few miles, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. jerked his head towards the rearview mirror and muttered, “Oh-oh.”
I asked, “What do you mean ‘Oh-oh?”
“The sheriff was headed south, but he turned around right after he passed us. He went through the ditch in the middle of the road instead of waiting for a turnaround spot. I think he’s after us.”
Us?
I looked through the rear window and saw flashing lights about half a mile back. I guessed that the sheriff had overheard the truckers on their CB radios complaining about the blue Gremlin. Goddamn busy bodies.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Speed Racer simply laughed and said, “Don’t worry.”
When this guy says, “Don’t worry”…well, you know what to do. You worry.
With that, he stomped on the gas and took us up to 115 miles an hour. This was the fastest I had ever gone in a car. I wished we weren’t in a Gremlin and that Route 10 had much better pavement. I wished I had inspected the tires for wear, checked their inflation, and reviewed the manufacturer’s speed rating. Too late now. It was sphincter clenching time.
College be damned, this was the beginning of my real education.
I wondered why this kid wanted to avoid the police. Were there warrants for his arrest? Did he have drugs in the car? Was the car stolen?
Would I get arrested?
Wouldn’t that make my parents proud, bailing me out of jail so I could go to my graduation? My four brothers would have considered it the funniest thing in the world because, to them, I was Dudley Do-Right.
But I kept all that to myself —no need to discuss life choices with my own personal Richard Petty now. Maybe, if we didn’t die, we could hash it out in the jail cell.
What happened next was straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. At the first rural crossroad, my driver slammed on the brakes and snapped the wheel to the right. We fishtailed through the turn and veered toward the opposite ditch. The right side of the car rose off the ground for a moment and we were flying along on only the two left tires. The appropriate soundtrack for this maneuver would have been “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
The car settled back onto all four tires, and he punched it back up, but only to a hundred— better safe than sorry. I looked over at him.
He was changing the eight-track tape, turning up the volume, and lighting a cigarette while he checked the rearview mirror with a sick grin. His head rocked back and forth to the beat. I thought it best if he kept both hands on the wheel and held his head still, but what did I know?
It occurred to me that in classic poor white trash fashion I was about to die listening to Black Sabbath.
I glanced behind us. The cop had made the turn, but he wasn’t keeping up.
After about two miles, the pavement went from blacktop to gravel. We slowed to seventy-five. The cop was falling further behind, probably because he didn’t want to die.
The road began to twist and turn as it took us more north and west. My newfound friend Mario Andretti skidded through the turns like a pro. The Duke boys would have been proud of him—but I knew that Daisy would have snubbed me for being a wimp.
The next twelve minutes felt like two hours, and then we were on blacktop again. The sheriff was gone.
We slowed down when we popped up in the next town on the highway. Becker had only one stoplight, and when we hit it, I vaulted out of the Gremlin.
My hero said, “Get back in—I’ll take you to Saint Cloud.”
“No thanks. I’m visiting my dying aunt in Becker.”
I hoped Becker had a nice petting zoo because I needed to calm down, feed some goats, and pet a rabbit.
My driver turned back onto Highway 10 and burned some rubber as he took off. I sat there quietly for half an hour before moving on.
My parents were happy to see me the next day—especially Mom. She was so proud of her graduate! She never knew that I was a moron who played fast and loose with the precious life she’d given me.
Years later, I concluded the farm boy was addicted to the thrill of it all. There were no drugs, just a cross-wired adolescent mind—a wannabe fighter pilot. Maybe he joined the Air Force.
But that kid and his Gremlin cured me. When I jumped in that car, I was willing to let strangers take complete control of my life. North of Big Lake, Minnesota, that all changed.