The story I am going to tell you about takes place about 13 years ago back in 2001 in a town called Cowiche Wa. Cowiche is a small farm town dominated by the apple industry. It’s about a group of high school kids who thought they were just going out like any other Friday night and of course didn’t think that anything bad could happen to them. Little did they know they were about to experience something that would change the way they think and drive for the rest of their lives. It’s just too bad it took a car crash to do it. This started earlier that day at Natchez High School.
It was my senior year. One of our friends was having a party at his house in Gleed. His name was Rob. Rob was older than we were. He had graduated about ten years ago and was thirty years old. He threw a party almost every weekend because his parents were always gone. Yes he still lived with his parents. We never knew why they were gone so much. I was excited all day for school to get out. I told my friend Ricky about it and we decided I would pick him up and we would go together. Ricky was a small good looking guy. He was pretty good with the girls.
He had blond hair and blue eyes and was definitely a lover not a fighter. When I got home my cousin Ty called me to see what was going on that night. I told him about the party at Rob’s house and he wanted to go. Ty was one of those guys who thought he was a ladies man and would have been if he wasn’t such a dick because he did have the looks but not the right words. When Ty showed up to my house he already had a bunch of beer with him. Busch beer is what we always drank back then. Nice and cheap. Ty was 21 so we didn’t have to worry about getting alcohol.
We headed towards Ricky’s house which was about a 5 mile drive. When we got their there were two more people with him that wanted to go as well. It was Ricky’s sister Kristen and her Friend Michelle. They were both freshmen and both pretty hot. I made out with both of them at the same time earlier in the year on the way back from a mountain party up the chinook pass so I knew it was going to be a fun night. It was still pretty early and the party didn’t start for a couple more hours so we just hung out at Ricky’s and drank beer until it was time to go.
We played some beer games and listened to music. We listened to mostly rap back then. When we decided to head to Rob’s we were already pretty drunk but I thought I was fine to drive. I had had around 6 beers already. We all jumped in my dad’s truck which was a 1990 four-runner. It was black with 32 inch tires. We were in Cowiche and were going to go down the grade into Naches and get on the freeway into Gleed. We didn’t even make it to Naches. We were about 2 miles from the Naches grade when we passed a sheriff going the opposite way.
It was dark out but when we passed him all I saw were the words sheriff fly by my left side. We were speeding so I immediately looked in my rear view mirror and noticed that he was hitting his breaks. There wasn’t any turns for him to take, it was just a straight away, so I knew he was planning to turn around and pull us over. I instantly panicked and floored it. I was coming up to the last turn before I would’ve made it to the grade but I took the corner a little too fast and I rolled it. We rolled multiple times and stopped only because crashing into a huge boulder.
There was a drop off about 30 feet or so that we would of went off if the boulder hadn’t of stopped us. We would’ve landed on the grade; not quite the way I imagined making it to the grade though. I was knocked out for a moment. When I awoke I noticed that nobody else was in the car. The truck was sitting upside down so it was very strange. I crawled out and everyone else was standing there and were unharmed but very scared. I had a broken collarbone. I was thankful that I was the only person who was hurt. That could’ve easily killed everyone in the truck. I know someone was looking over us that night.
The truck was completely destroyed. Everyone decided to run because we were all drunk and under age. The only person that stayed with me was my friend Ricky. We decided to tell the cops that we picked up a hitchhiker and we let him drive. We said he took off running and pointed in the opposite way my friends went. We pointed towards Naches. Everyone ran back towards Ricky’s house though in Cowiche. I don’t think they believed us but who was to say anything else? The ambulance showed up and put me in the back. I remember laying there and my dad swung the doors open in a panic.
I will never forget the look on his face. He didn’t know if he was going to see me dead or alive when he opened the ambulance doors. Instantly, I started saying how sorry I was for crashing his truck and he told me he was just relieved that I wasn’t dead. I went to memorial hospital where they gave me a sling and sent me home. I also had just missed my kidney so I was very lucky. It looks like a gunshot wound today. My dad kept the truck in the driveway for a very long time so I wouldn’t forget how easy something horrible can happen to me in this life. It worked to.
I had to see that truck every time I left the house and when I got home so I thought about it a lot more than I would of if he would’ve just junked it. I have never been in another car accident since. Till this day I still think about that night when I take a corner. It’s something that stays with you forever. It taught me to be more careful when driving for sure. I hope my friends that were in the car with me learned as much from it as I did. I’ve talked to them about it and they say they still think about it so that’s good. You don’t want to forget something like that. Learn from it instead.
