Love & Profanity

Power Drift by Jon Scieszka

I am eighteen years old. Rocketing down the gravel road in my faded green, only slightly rusted, 1968 Chevy Impala.

The ’68 Chevy Impala is a thing of beauty—3,623 pounds of Detroit automotive engineering powered by a 307 V8 engine that can produce the 385 horsepower to get you from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 7 seconds. If you mash the gas pedal to the floor.

Which is exactly what I am doing.

By my own estimation, I am an amazing driver. I’ve driven these back roads millions of times. Okay, maybe thousands. Actually, probably only hundreds. But still—I know every twist, dip, and turn. I could drive them with one hand.

Which is also exactly what I am doing.

As an amazing teenage boy driver, I must always set a new world land speed record for any trip. Every trip. So while it might seem crazy to be driving 50 miles per hour on a gravel road that is going to turn a very sharp 90 degrees left in about 3 seconds … I have a plan. And it goes like this:

There are two ways to take a sharp turn in a fast-moving car.

The first way is to brake gently before the turn. Slow the car. Turn the steering wheel gradually. Guide the car smoothly around the curve so the tires do not slip or slide on the surface of the road. Clear the corner, straighten front wheels, and resume safe speed.

The second way is to accelerate into the turn, yank the steering wheel hard left to swerve your back end right and send the whole car into a rear-wheel-spinning, dirt-and-gravel-spitting power slide drift. Clear the corner, straighten front wheels, punch gas, and blitz the straightaway.

Which is exactly what I intend to do.

But this time, as I clear the inside corner, I see something that isn’t usually there.

A horse.

A horse in the road.

A suddenly bug-eyed and very freaked out horse right in the middle of the road with nearly 2 tons of 1968 Chevy Impala sliding over the gravel right at it.

When you are driving, you never want to hit anything. But if you are going to hit something, you are much better off hitting something small—like a cat or a dog or a squirrel. They bounce off—or disappear under your car.

A horse is a whole different, and much more dangerous, story.

An average horse weighs about 1200 lbs. That alone is bad enough to seriously mess up you and your car and the horse in a crash. But the other very bad thing about a horse/car wreck is that a horse is exactly tall enough to slide right on top of your front hood, through your windshield, and head-on into you in a very nasty explosion of broken glass and flying horse pieces.

That is one of the thoughts flashing through my mind when I see the horse.

The other thought is AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I crank the steering wheel right, throw the car into a wider slide, blow just past the horse, and power drift completely off the road and into a field of dead brown cornstalks, still flying at top speed.

Engine roaring, wheels spinning, bumper snapping cornstalks plowing dirt cloud blowing ... I can’t exactly remember if there are trees? a rock? a fence? ahead.

I turn the steering wheel slowly left so the car won’t start fishtailing back and forth and flip over, and I keep blasting a Chevy Impala-sized tunnel through the cornfield, hoping to find the road again.

Down a ditch, up a bank, tires spinning, BLAM! I am suddenly back on the road.

I straighten the wheel. Ease off the gas. Position myself correctly and carefully in the right lane.

Stop sign. Brake. Full stop.

I look behind me.

Nothing but empty road. Well, also a huge new path of decapitated cornstalks through the field just past the 90-degree turn.

I’d like to say I take a deep breath, realize how close I have just come to being splattered out of existence by 1200 pounds of legless horse bombing through my windshield, and vow to never do something as crazy as drifting around a blind corner on a dirt road at top speed again.

But I don’t.

I let out one long single-syllable curse word.

Then punch the gas pedal to the floor for 7 seconds.

Jon Scieszka: Born in Flint, Michigan. The second oldest, and nicest, of six boys. No girls. Author of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!, The Stinky Cheese Man, Knucklehead, and a mess of others. New series with Abrams about Frank Einstein, kid science genius.With robots. And a chimpanzee.