Driver's Ed in Anchorage in 1978 or "I wasn't driving when the car rolled..."

Often people will tell stories of their driver's education experience. While people tell many amusing stories, no one has ever told one quite like mine. And I have listened to a lot of stories from a lot of geographical areas.

I turned 16 in 1978 and was living in Fort Richardson, Alaska at the time. I took driver's education through the post so the insurance would be less and I could learn to drive. (If you had the opportunity to meet my mother, you would know that the insurance was the most important part of the class; me learning to drive could always be taken care of later.) I took a three-week session that was driving the first week, coursework the second week, and driving the third week.

The class drove all over the Anchorage area and the few roads leading outside of Anchorage.  The first time I drove solo on a real road was along the road from Anchorage to where the road forks and you decide if you're going to drive to Seward or Homer.  If you change your mind and want to go to the other, you have to drive back to the fork and go the other way that isn't back to Anchorage.  The road was two-lane at the time (and may still be for all I know), was along an inlet and your choices were to stay on the road, drive into the water, or drive into the side of the mountain.  The road was really the best option but shoulders were mostly theoretical and there were few guard rails because this was Alaska and if you were going to depend on a guard rail for life, then maybe it was not the place for you.  I stayed on the road. We learned to drive in Anchorage traffic, which was real traffic.  There were two added quirks to the driving.  One was that Anchorage had been expanding quickly and sometimes lanes would disappear without much signage.  But one of the biggest ...quirks was that there were statistics to show that by 5 p.m., 1 in 4 drivers was legally drunk.  (This was before MADD but if you read the poem "The law of the Yukon" by Robert Service you will find that North likes to destroy people who can't thrive there and I would argue that is still true.  While I can recite many Robert Service poems (and he wrote a lot) he might not be the best representative of Canadian poetry but don't tell the Canadians.))  So I did learn to anticipate drivers regardless of the signals or lack thereof. Towards the end of the three-week course, the car I was in decided to drive up to Eklutna Lake, which involved driving up the unpaved Eklutna Road that went partway up Eklunta Mountain to Eklutna Lake. (There are a lot of mountains and lakes in Alaska. Consistency in naming is useful.) There was a sign showing the incline of the road to be 17 degrees.  At the time, I didn't think that could be right because, to me, the road appeared to go straight up but in driving terms it is a heck of an incline.  Because it had rained all summer, whatever shoulders had existed were either gone or decorative and waiting to fall away.

I drove up.  There was a Trans-Am on our tail of which I thought uncharitable thoughts and may have verbally expressed a few as I drove around tight curves and avoided being too close to the shoulder, where most of the time that was all that was between the road and nothing (well, lots of feet of nothing and then hard things like rocks and ground...)  So I stayed on the road and didn't let the Trans-Am make me go faster because...well...living...I was a fan of living even then. We got up to the lake, got out, looked at the lake, and switched drivers.  I sat in the back seat behind the passenger seat.  I had my seat belt on.  (This piece of information will be noteworthy in a little bit.)  The Trans-Am followed.  The driver, another 15/16-year-old girl, was cursing the Trans-Am and coming off tight curves pretty well until we hit a particular section.  This section was more of an interior curve, on the mountain and close towards the bottom.  The section was a sort of lower meadow from the height of the road with bushes and trees.  It was atypical of the road.  But the issue was more of coming off one tight curve and getting ready for the next tight curve and she hit one of the theoretical shoulders which crumbled and the car started sliding sideways down and then physics took over and the car rolled.  When the car stopped rolling, we were upside down and I was suspended by my seat belt. A few things about the experience:

1. I'm a big believer in seat belts. 

There's nothing like being okay and suspended by a seat belt to make you believe they are a good idea.  If I am driving, you can only be in my car with a seat belt on.  My nephews are trained, when I pick them up, to put on their seat belts and then get their headphones and phones situated.  My paternal grandmother hated seat belts because they wrinkled her dress but would wear one when I drove because it was important to me.

However, one of the Lancaster cousins from my generation (we share common great grandparents and our grandmothers were sisters) was in an accident in his late teens and only survived because he was thrown from the truck and not crushed in the accident.  He never wears a seat belt.  I get that, but I don't believe we have ever ridden in the same car.

I understand other people's perspective, however, if I'm driving and you're in the car, you're wearing a seat belt whatever the law is.

2. I remember the silence of the slide and being suspended.  And remember very calmly thinking, "Crap.  The car could explode and I could die and that would be a shame because I have such potential."

I remember the driver crying but it didn't sound like hurt crying, it sounded like "What have I done" crying, which is what it turned out to be.

I remember bracing one hand on the roof/now floor of the car and undoing the seat belt and letting gravity take me down and then trying to open the door.  It didn't open on the first attempt and then the other girl in the back seat reached over and unlocked the door and it opened fine. But the only sound was the soft weeping of the driver. (And now I'm better at looking at locking devices on doors.) I'm not sure that the other car doors opened.  I know the front doors didn't open.

The instructor got the driver unstrapped and pushed her through the gaps in the headrests to the back seat and out the open door and we all stood looking at the car, which was upside down, and confirmed that we were all okay.

3. Alaskan geography and technology of the late1970s are important to this story.  We were still miles from anywhere with a phone.  There were no pagers or cell phones owned by the public and certainly not among us.  Also, it was early August and there had been reports of bears in the area as it was before climate change and bears were doing hibernation prep about this time.

Normally, this close to Anchorage, bears were not an issue but Anchorage was smaller, there was real wilderness and everyone knew about the bears because no one was doing serious hiking in these woods because...bears. Was I not clear? Bears. You don't mess with them. They're fine in a zoo (Unless you're stupid. There was an issue in Anchorage in the 1990s where some dolt from Australia climbed over the first fence and got right next to the second fence containing Binky the polar bear. The dolt was first elated when Binky came over to the fence because the photo could be even better but then horrified that Binky got his jaw through the bars to grab the foot of the dolt and began knawing on it. Staff were able to distract Binky and get the dolt out of the area and to help but Binky did retain the bloody sneaker for three days before the staff could retrieve it. Six weeks later, two drunk 20-year-old guys decided to swim in the bear pool, broke into the zoo, climbed over the first fence and one of them got his leg mauled while the other remained unscathed at the second fence. Which led to an Alaskan style joke of "Don't prosecute the kid; the bear already got its pound of flesh." The fire department in Fairbanks sold "Bad as Binky" t-shirts with a cartoon of a bear playing with a bloody sneaker. Nobody blamed Binky and there was a tighter security developed to keep people out of the bear enclosure.) That's a bear in a zoo. These sighted bears.... Unless you are hunting bears, actively avoid situations where you might run into any. Living. It's a lovely thing.

4. Trans-Ams.  Gotta love 'em.

Remember the Trans-Am of which I thought uncharitable thoughts?  Okay, these guys (a couple with a five or six-year-old son) came around the curve and didn't see us but did see waving bushes and backed up and stopped to see if we were okay. There were no other cars around. We had driven up to the lake and were almost to the Glenn Highway and the only car we had seen was the Trans-Am.

Based on where we were (the middle of nowhere) and that bears had been sited (because it was a hot topic and they too were aware), they crammed the four of us into the back seat of the Trans-Am. Yeah, it was a tight fit but they were not going to leave anyone in the woods when there were bears in the area. I think three of us were jammed next to each other on the backseat and the lightest sat on a lap and draped her legs across the other two. The kid sat on his mother's lap in the front seat. I'm not saying this was safe driving except...have I mentioned the bears? For the late '70s, this was safety. (So, I can be flexible on the importance of seat belts if bears or some sort of apocalypse is involved and we need to cram a lot of people into vehicles. But this was the last time I had to think about bears in real life so seat belts have been in use since then.)

They drove us to the main entrance of Fort Richardson and dropped us off. The Military Police manning the entrance let the instructor call for a car to come get us. The car that came to get us took each of us home.

The next day the instructor in charge of the program took us driving and had each of us drive for at least an hour so we didn't remain spooked by the situation, which would have been easy to happen.

Because of the incident, the driving class changed and they could no longer leave the post, which was a shame because I really learned a lot driving around Anchorage but I would like to point out that I did not roll the car.  I stayed on the road. But most people don't have a story about rolling a car inadvertently in driver's ed...