My own lil' Christmas miracle ... sort of.

My own lil' Christmas miracle... of sorts.

This morning, we had a weird mix of rain, ice and what I can only surmise to be some sort of non-stick alloy falling from the sky here in Pittsburgh. Christmas Eve morning and I hopped into my Subaru Outback, or as I call her, The Mountain Goat, the most sure-footed car that I have ever owned. Seriously. I have to try really, really hard to make her slide on snowy or rainy roads.

With sleep snot packed into the corner of my eyes and my giant mug of scalding hot coffee clutched in my hands, I set out for the office. My morning commute is generally filled with screaming, ranting, fist shaking and obscene finger gestures and this morning was no exception. Besides, it's Christmas and I am all about following traditions. I was exceptionally annoyed this morning because it was Christmas Eve and I was going into the office to work the skeleton crew. I was, for all intents and purposes, the only liability adjuster working today and I was annoyed by the fact that I am employed by characters straight out of a Dickens novel.

As I took my normal route into the office, I managed to get myself calmed somewhat as I came up on the Beaver Avenue exit. Since they have torn up the North Side of Pittsburgh I can only get to my parking area at Heinz Field by taking this exit and following Beaver Avenue around through the construction area for the new casino (a casino is precisely what we need here. A place for aging Yinzers with Pall Malls jammed in the corners of their mouths, wheeling their oxygen tanks, stabbing forward on their walkers six inches at a time to piss away their meager SSI and disability checks one dollar at a time...). The Beaver Avenue exit is really a poorly light and horribly maintained stretch of industrial highway that rolls down a rather steep bridge to the roadway below. It's a single lane with guide-rails on either side of the ramp. It's quite a long stretch with a rather gentle downward slope at the beginning, which gives way to a roller coaster-like dip at the end.

The road surface was wet and the ice/rain/space age polymer mixture was still coming down steadily. As I started down the exit ramp, I noticed taillights ahead of me, just over the starting edge of the 'dip'. "Someone stopped up there," I thought. Yes, I am brilliant. A true master of the obvious. So being that I noted that there were stopped vehicles up ahead, I applied the brakes.

Nothing.

The Mountain Goat kept right on going. At first I thought that I had missed the brakes and had been applying my foot to something that might have felt like a brake pedal. Oh I don't know; perhaps an errant boot that had slid up to the drivers' side floorboard. Maybe the floor mat had become bunched up. So I fished around for a second and gave the brakes another gentle tap. Again, the car failed to slow down. As a matter of fact, as I began to descend along the ramp, I was picking up speed.

Okay. The light bulb went off. ICE! The roads surface was covered with ice. As this realization came over me, the car began to slide to the left. I used my considerable 'guy' skills and attempted to steer into the skid and work the brakes. Nothing was working. NOTHING. Well nothing other than an increase in speed and I was quickly approaching the stopped vehicles and the 'dip'.

Now, you know that thought that in life and death situations like this that time seems to slow down? It's true. This was all happening very quickly in real time but in my head, it had all slowed to a crawl. I looked at the speedometer. When I first exited the highway, I was doing about 35 mph. As I was riding the giant slalom of insanity, I was now hitting close to 50 mph. I could see that I was approaching two vehicles with their four way flashers on and two men standing besides their vehicles. Another accident!

At this moment, I had three basic thoughts running concurrently through my head. Well, two concrete ideas and the third was nothing more than a random jumble of thoughts, questions, sounds and images. First, I knew if I hit the guardrails on either side and went over, it was a 30-foot drop to a concrete roadway below. Not good. So rather than risk getting myself killed, I would throw the car into park and see if the exploding transmission would somehow stop the car. Before I could act on this thought, I had a second thought; a Hail Mary of sorts. I put the car in neutral and grabbed the emergency brake and pulled it as hard as I could figuring that if that did nothing, well then, goodbye transmission.

The random thoughts...etc that were racing through my now wide awake mind were as follows: "do you think I'll be sentenced to a really, really minimal security prison for vehicular homicide - the sort of place where I could be the toughest con?" " If I die, not only will I have never visited Europe, I will have never had sex with Linda Fiorentino." Then there was the image of myself as a child making up elaborate stories between my G.I. Joes and my sisters Barbies. None of them very nice. Joe liked to get drunk and drive Barbies pink convertible wildly through a town made of shoeboxes. And the day I made my sister cry when Joe lost his temper and struck Barbie for serving him an undercooked roast. The final thing running through my mind was just a long, sustained scream; the white noise of my own fear.

I slid the transmission into neutral and grabbed the emergency brake handle and pulled. In a split second, the tires caught purchase (I am assuming) and I did a complete spin and an almost instant stop at a slight angle to the right on the ramp. When I looked up, I was about 10 feet away from the previous accident. I sat there, shaking, hands on the wheel trying to figure what the hell had happened. After about 30 seconds, I started to laugh. Unreal. All that and I had hit nothing! Nothing! No one was hurt. The car was fine. Whew. But I will tell you this much; when James Bond does the high speed 180 in the movies, it looks cool. When it happens in real life? Not so much.

Now I was pinned where I was because I couldn't move until the accident ahead of me cleared and moved on. As I waited, I happened to look behind me and then I saw the headlights. Oh man. Another car was approaching. As I watched, a young man in a Mazda slid over 40 feet and clipped the right front end of my car with the left front end of his before coming to a stop.

Fortunately, neither of us sustained injuries. When we exited our vehicles and exchanged information, we looked and happen to notice that had I not been where I was, he would have struck me in the rear of my car and shot me right into the other vehicles and quite possibly, the men standing on the side of the road.

So in a way, it worked out the way it was so supposed to I guess.

One other thing though; I think Moms can quit telling kids to wear clean underwear because "you never know when you might be in an accident". Trust me on this - even if they were clean when you left the house, even after close calls, they aren't clean anymore.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.