The drive here was long but mostly uneventful. I’m on this new Adulthood Level Up grind so rather than my usual nap-in-a-rest-area-that-looks-like-prime-horror-movie-material routine, I spent the night in a hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota. Bask in the glow of my adulthood!
I crossed into Montana and it almost immediately proved to be both gorgeous and treacherous. I had gone north of the wall and nature was no longer fucking around. The night is dark and full of terrors and also the day because snow.
But, you know, inspired by my new role as Adult™ I slowed down. Cars passed me. I’m not used to cars passing me, but this is the beginning of a wild new life. Who knows who I’ll be in my wild new life. Maybe I’m now the kind of person who chills in the slow lane. I’m the kind of person who gets passed by other cars on the highway! In my new life I go to bed before midnight, have a workout routine, and drive slowly enough to get passed by other cars on the highway.
I slowed down all the way up until I, um, didn’t.
About 15 miles shy of my exit I got a little cocky. I had successfully passed a couple people (still going well under the speed limit, mind you) and tried to pass another while coming around a bend.
What happened next is one of several events in my first week in Missoula that I can’t articulate in a way that makes sense. I fishtailed, spun out into the big grass median and bounced back out of it on the eastbound side. The bounce had to have been pretty hard because once I stopped I could tell that the space was deep enough that if I had stopped down there, the roof of my car would have been below the road.
I didn’t flip, thankfully, and the semi coming up the hill was far enough away that I didn’t get hit. I got myself straightened out and moving. I listened as my navigator told me to get off the highway in 4 miles, figuring that I could go there and then survey the damage. Almost immediately I could feel that things weren’t quite right with my tires, but before I could dwell on that I noticed that my car was overheating. I would not be making it to that exit. I pulled over onto the shoulder and began the tortuous series of phone calls. My parents, a tow truck, the police, the insurance company.
My parents in between all of these calls because I didn’t pre-enroll in Adult™ and so the car and insurance are still in their name. Nobody could talk to me without an intermediary step of confirming with my parents – who were 1500 miles away from the car – that they were allowed to talk to me. You know, the person actually present with the car.
While I was waiting, I got out to go see the mile marker sign, but I decided it was farther than I felt like walking in that cold. Once out of my car I could see that in addition to the one tire that had almost completely lost its tread, both of my bumpers were falling off and things underneath the car were sticking out in ways they were not meant to. Back inside my car, it only took a few minutes for my battery and everything else to die a slow, sputtering death.
15 miles. I was 15 miles from my exit. After two days of driving, I got that close and fucked it up.
When I wasn’t making those phone calls, I spent a good chunk of that hour wallowing. There are two kinds of skills that are useful to have in crisis situations: the first set is all about how you handle it in the immediate. How quickly can you come up with solutions to the problem in front of you? On this front, I typically excel. I can usually keep my shit just together enough to get myself out of messy situations. (This is a necessary skill for anyone who has ever traveled alone.)
There’s a second set of skills, though, which is all about patience. Can you patiently accept the things you can’t change and move on? This is the one I suck at. The time I had to spend waiting, the time where I couldn’t be doing something to fix the problem? That time sucked. That was time to wallow. I’m a super good wallower. A+ wallowing skills.
On Friday night after I left, my family went ice skating. My dad fell and broke his shoulder. Over the phone, my usually game-for-anything mother explained to me that she had felt so silly and stupid hovering close to the edge, but she knew she didn’t have it in her to get out on the ice like she used to. I was thinking about that as I drove through most of Montana. Cars were passing me as I creepy crawled along with my hazards on because I couldn’t see anything and I was about equally as terrified of getting hit as of hitting someone else.
And when I started passing cars it occurred to me that I was doing the opposite. Not more than a minute before I lost control I was thinking, “This is exactly what you’re not supposed to be doing. Going 30mph would be better than going 0, Nicole.”
But that’s just not how it happened.
So now I wait. After my car got passed around until the insurance company could find someone in town who was actually interested in taking the insurance company’s money (an unexpected challenge) repairs finally got underway. The good news is that it’s not totaled, which I genuinely feared. The bad news is that my car and I will ultimately separated for a grand total of 19 sad, lonely days.
And, you know, sleeping helped end the wallowing. Starting a job and moving into a new apartment has given me plenty of other things to do in the intervening time. Keeping in motion.