Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army, 20 Jan 2013 by Captain Michael Ramsay
The weather has been strange here lately: Snowy and then –20 and then Sunny and +2 or +3. With all this snowing and melting, there have been some days when it has been pretty icy the last couple of weeks. I admit that more than once I even accidentally did a 180-degree turn, put my car into a spin, and wound up facing the other direction in the other lane. This makes for a bit of a different winter experience than I was accustomed to when and where I grew up.
I remember once when I was teenager; there was ice on the roads. I know that’s not too memorable around these parts but on the Island that was a big deal. Alex, a friend of mine, showed up at my house in the middle of the night once when we were teenagers and the two of us took our cars to the university parking lot where he would show me one way teenage boys could have fun in the icy weather: he would drive quickly on the iced-over parking lot and then slam on the breaks put his car into a spin. I sat and watched in my car. He then came over to my car and showed me how to do the same thing. He had a 1975 Chevy Nova and I had a 1974 Pontiac Ventura at this point. These were basically the same car and we often used the parts from one car to repair the other because it was rare when we could actually both afford to have a car on the road at the same time. So now we were having a great time just racing and spinning our cars around and round in circles in the parking lot – seeing who can get their car to spin around the most times. We then naturally become braver and braver even if we don’t get brighter and brighter as we go along. We begin to drive towards each other at faster and faster speeds and slam on the breaks and spin every which way and we are having a lot of fun and getting pretty good at this when Billy shows up in his little Honda Civic. He is watching us and he tries to join in but for some reason his car won’t spin so I think that I will help Bill the way that Alex helped me. I get out of my car and go over to his car. He tells me to be careful. I tell him not to worry. We have been doing this for about an hour now - driving our cars full speed at each other and spinning in circles - and we are okay. Billy says ‘be careful I just got this car’.
I tell him not to worry. ‘I have a whole hour’s worth of experience driving on the ice. What can go wrong? If you can’t make you car spin, you probably just aren’t driving fast enough’, I say.
‘Be careful’, he says. I then race as fast as I can across the parking lot in his car. At the last possible moment with the concrete barrier before us – Bill exclaims ‘be careful!’
I say, ‘don’t worry about it’ – as we are going straight towards the concrete at a good clip, I slam on the breaks and… guess what happens?
