When you see me doing something stupid, I’m sure there’s some part of you that has to be at least a little impressed. Wow, I bet you think to yourself, that level of idiocy is really remarkable, and he seems so comfortable with being a moron. I bet he’s been at it a long time! And you know what? You’re right! I have been an idiot for a long time, which is why I manage to pull of impressively dumb things with the cool aplomb of a well-trained chimpanzee-astronaut. Today I’d like to share with you a particularly stupid automotive thing I did way back in 1989, a time when there was CompuServe but not the internet as we know it, and you could still legally buy Certs with Retsyn, before it became a controlled substance and destroyed so many lives. It was a wild time, and I was a product of my era, an 18-year-old dipshit full of hopes and terrible ideas. One summer day in that year when both Heathers and Crimes and Misdemeanors came out, I wrecked my 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle by flying it 84 feet in a wreck.
I’ve written about my high-school car, the 1971 VW Super Beetle before, because that was the car that was so loud I had to turn it off when I picked up my girlfriend because her mom didn’t like Jews, especially ones like me, in loud cars and reeking of Retsyn. That car was my primary high school car, purchased from a friend’s sister for $600 because she never once put oil in it or even checked the oil or, I think, even opened the engine lid. So, I bought it with a seized engine, but, as luck would have it, I happened to have a re-built engine from my first car, a Wrigley’s gum/band-aid-colored 1968 VW Beetle that was wrecked when some dummy didn’t yield while turning at a light, smashing into the front of my Bug, hard.
The wreck wasn’t my fault, something surprising considering I was barely 16, but when my dad drove by and saw me there in the intersection, he still screamed JJAAAAASSSSOOOOONNNN like I was in big trouble.
Anyway, I had a perfectly good engine, even if it just has single intake ports. VW switched to dual intake ports in 1971, which, combined with those 1584 cubic centimeters of displacement, made the ’71 Beetle a screamer at 60 wild, ravenous horsepower. The rebuilt engine from my ’68 had only the single ports, which meant it only made 57 hp. That’s just a three horse difference, but I made up for that with my youthful vigor, no problem.
This was also a Super Beetle, in fact the first year of the Super Beetle, also known as the 1302. The Super Beetle differed from the standard Beetle mostly just in the front end; the Super had MacPherson strut front suspension instead of torsion bars, and that, combined with a widened and re-shaped hood, allowed for an 80% bigger front trunk! It was a big deal! The trunk was pretty damn big!
In 1973 VW updated the Super Beetle to the 1303, which featured a curved windshield and “real” dashboard as well, because VW thought they may have to cram airbags into these things.
This isn’t really important to the story, but it’s not bad to know, in case you’re ever confronted at knifepoint and asked to explain the difference in the two generations of Super Beetles. You’re welcome.
Anyway, that’s just introducing the car, which sort of is important. I really liked my silly little banana-cream-colored Beetle, and enjoyed driving it, often stupidly, which included things like putting it in first gear and letting it just idle and move slowly forward and then standing on the running board with the door open and steering from up there in an idiotic stunt I liked to call “Road Captain,” or just driving too damn fast and too damn recklessly.
I had one street in particular that I really liked to tear ass on; it was in Greensboro, NC, where I grew up, and it was called Green Valley Road. At the time, it was a long, winding road with lots of curves, a big center island, and golf courses on, I think, both sides. I liked it because you could really wring your car out and go hard into those turns, and it was just a lot of fun.
For whatever reason, I decided that nobody but nobody would beat me on that road, so if there were other cars on the road, I made sure I was faster. I mean, sure, 99% of them likely had no idea they were in a race with a shitty little yellow car with the same horsepower as the number on the Heinz bottle, but I knew, dammit, and that’s what mattered.
The road was curvy enough that I got to learn a bit about oversteer, because the Beetle, being rear-engined, was more than happy to do that. I learned what that tail-happy sensation felt like, but, significantly, I resisted actually learning what to do with an oversteering car, really. I just knew it was fun and made lots of exciting screeching sounds.
Anyway, one summer early evening, I was driving with my friends Charles and Jeremy, who were both well aware of The Way Of The Green Valley: if I’m on that road, I’m hauling ass. They knew this going in. This was how it was.
Still, this time “how it was” should have been a bit more flexible, as the road itself was not “how it was,” at least not normally. You see, Green Valley was in the process of being re-paved, and the surface of the road was scraped up, and was now covered in fine gravel, punctuated with the occasional metal lump of a water meter or manhole cover. It was a very different surface than the usual asphalt.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really appreciate the significance of this, because when I hit the road that dusk, I didn’t change my approach at all, which was a grave mistake. I launched myself onto the road with the usual madness, only this time the road had much, much less grip than normal. I’m not entirely sure when I realized this, viscerally; it was probably as soon as I hit the first turn, way too fast, and my back end started fishtailing around wildly.
As soon as I felt the back end break loose, I entered that strange state of focused panic that sometimes happens, where your concentration narrows to a tiny point and, even if you have no idea what to actually do, you’re really committed to doing it. I was sawing at the wheel trying to get control of the car back, and I’d have moments where I thought I was, but then lose it. Braking just made it worse, so we kept gaining speed. At one point I thought maybe if I put it in neutral and coast, I’ll have better luck, but when I grabbed the gearshift it broke off in my hand.
This could be because at the time my gearshift looked like this:
My friend Al had gone somewhere tropical and brought back this wooden tiki-like head, which I drilled a hole into and used for a gearshift knob. It was a little too big and heavy, and I think that may have been a factor in why the stick snapped off at the base. But, at the time, all I knew was that I was holding my un-tethered shifter in my hand and everything seemed to be going very, very wrong.
Then, I have a memory of seeing one of the front tires improbably going between two raised water meter things, snagging for one brief moment, which really made me lose control on the loose gravel. I then hit the median’s curb, popped onto the median, and hit a young, springy tree right where the front fender met the running board.
Something about how I hit that tree let the tree act like some kind of level or leaf spring or catapult, because at that moment I saw out the windshield the green of the grass and the deep blue of the sky exchanging places, rapidly. I think we flipped on both axes – at least that’s what witnesses told us afterwards.
That tree-assisted launch sent us flying – I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing Jeremy, un-seat-belted in the back as was the style of the time, bouncing around like he was a ferret in a dryer. There was a moment of odd silence and then a deafening BOOM as we landed, thankfully, on the wheels.
From what I can gather, the whole event played out sort of like this:
I mean, this is a modern map and the path of the street may have changed and it’s not like I really remember the path, but this is generally what went down. The important part I want to note is that when the police came to do their police business, the measured where the skidmarks (the external, non-trouser variety) ended and where the tree was hit, and then where the car came to rest, and they said that distance was 84 feet.
I think I flew the car 84 feet.
The first flight of the Wright Brothers, which occurred in the same state, just out by the coast to take advantage of the favorable winds, was only 120 feet. I managed to fly my Beetle only 36 feet less, and I had two more passengers and a hell of a lot less time to plan! Where’s my plaque?
After we landed, we all took a moment to look at each other, make sure we were all okay, and then we exited the car, now perched on the grassy hilltop of the median. There was a crowd of plaid-panted golfers around us, as they’d seen the Beetle Cirque d’Soleil-ing through the air and they must have heard the boom of 1800 pounds of Teutonic engineering smacking into the ground.
They seemed surprised to see three uninjured teenaged dumbassess emerge from the car, and for some of them, maybe just a little disappointed. I was in shock, but thrilled no one was hurt. I remember walking around my car, which really didn’t look too badly damaged, but that was deceptive. The impact was hard. In fact, one deeply strange detail I remember was that there were blades of grass trapped between the tire and steel wheels, presumably because when the car hit ground, the wheels must have deflected enough to come off the rims, and then when they rebounded back, pulled out grass that had been in the ephemeral gap between tire and wheel.
I mean, I think. I can’t figure out how else that would have happened?
I got very, very lucky. I mean, yes, I lost my beloved car (I kept the engine, though, and very soon put that in the 1973 Beetle I still have today) but I was fine, and my two friends were fine. Had that gone any differently I have no idea how I’d have dealt with that. But, thankfully, it didn’t. The tree hit the Beetle at a particularly strong point where the floorpan spreads out to full width, and I think that’s why the body remained so intact; we landed on the wheels instead of the roof, so all of the suspension parts could do their job to absorb some of that impact, and, perhaps most thankfully, there were no other cars around me that could have become part of this ridiculous disaster.
For years after the wreck we talked about the 84-foot Flight of the Beetle, marveling at how lucky we were, feeling perhaps a bit invulnerable, thanks to the wonderful delusions of youth. Now I look back on it and see not invulnerability, but the haphazard hand of chance, swinging around wildly, and, somehow, at that moment, we managed to avoid getting slapped too hard. I don’t know if there’s any actual reason, but I do know I’m wildly thankful that’s how chance played her hand that day.
This remains – and I hope will remain – the biggest wreck of my life. And I, along with two friends who I still know and love to this day, all walked away, for the most part without a scratch. By modern automotive standards, that old Beetle was about as safe as a modern Volvo, but only if you’re currently getting stabbed in that modern Volvo, over and over again. It was, charitably, a deathtrap. Almost everything on the road was a deathtrap. And yet, somehow, when I needed it to hold together, it did.
I don’t think there’s a way to completely avoid driving like an idiot when you’re a 17 year-old dummy. But, it’s probably worth trying, because the sort of luck I managed to get is not something you can count on.
Also, I still claim to be the Undefeated Champion of Green Valley Road. So there.
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