In a ditch

In spite of all the fun I was having in Bend, I needed to head out in order to meet my friend Bruce in Salt Lake City. He was in town for the Olympics, and I wanted to snowboard the Utah snow. The plan: Drive to Boise and spend the night, and finish the drive to SLC the next day. I got to Boise around dinnertime, and didn't feel like stopping, so I went on one of my driving binges and kept going. My luck had been good for 2 weeks so what the hell. I got to Ogden, just north of SLC late, found the Wal-Mart and went to sleep. The next day I got up and headed into the mountains to go snowboarding at Snowbasin. I was blithely driving along, listening to CD's, thinking about how my bizarre luck had gone on sabbatical. Driving slowly up the mountain road, I pulled onto the shoulder to let a car behind me go by. Only it wasn't a shoulder. It just looked like one. It looked like about a 4 foot snow covered shoulder with a mound of plowed snow on the side. Well, as soon as I moved over, the entire right side of the van fell off the side of the road.....

If you look out of the windshield in the photo above, you can see what I mistook to be the shoulder. Well, as soon as I stopped, I sat there for a minute, then I began to wonder if it was going to go the whole way over. Oh yeah, the people I let pass, they didn't stop. So I sat there for a few seconds with that look on my face that actors always have when their car is halfway over the cliff. I sort of leaned to my left, opened the door and jumped out. If you look at the bead necklace hanging from my rearview mirror, you can get a sense of the angle. I had to laugh, what else could happen? To make a long story short, I called AAA (I think I have something like a 500% return on that investment), they winched me out, everything was fine, and I drove away. I decided to not snowboard that day, that morning I had dreamt that I wrecked my knee snowboarding and figured that my little mishap in the van was the Universe keeping me off the mountain that day.

A few weeks later, I did go back to the mountain, most of the snow on the side of the road had melted, and looking at the ditch, I have to believe that if there had been no snow under and beside the van to hold it up, I would have tipped right over.