Third Run
I don’t remember who I intended to visit. It had to be someone in Montgomery Village. That was the only reason to try Brink Road.
At the time, Brink was a narrow, winding lane. A student at Seneca Valley showed me how to drive it. She compared it to my home street, a similarly constricted path, bounded on either side by steep berms of dirt. Twists in the road ended in cliffs, sometimes with gaurd rails, sometimes not. In a few places, the edge of the road fell off into a grove of trees. Brink left no margin for driver error but, to me, cruising on it felt like home.
I was so comfortable, I picked up speed and started having fun. I raced into tight turns, going from fifteen to thirty, thirty to forty, forty to fifty. As I blasted through a straightaway and headed into another hard corner, I passed a police car coming the other way.
The police hit the siren even before we passed.
We were driving in the early days of speed radar. Police kept their units turned on all the time, it seemed. I figured, on a winding road like this, I could run. After all, there wasn't even a place for cop cars to turn around. I hit the gas.
As I spun into another switchback, I heard a squeal of tires behind and to my right. The police were risking it. They were turning around in the middle of the road. After a few seconds, I realized, oh no, I'm in a Volkswagon Rabbit.
Before, when I had managed to escape tickets, I'd had a car that had speed on a straightaway. This vehicle had nothing. Good gas mileage, that's what it had. With a second or two to think, I glanced up and saw a housing development sign on my left. This was my chance was to lose them. I turned into the freshly-paved development. This would be the kind of place where I would soon be lost to any pursuer in other traffic, other people, and maybe a few other cars like mine.
Instead, I realized I was alone. A hundred yards after I pulled in, I could see this wasn't a development at all. It was just roads. It was the promise of a development.
Someone was planning to put houses here. They had built some of the infrastructure, roads and streetlamps, plus a few green transformer boxes in the grass. And then construction had stopped. Lots of the grass was young and pushing through a layer of straw. The neighborhood-to-be was currently just rolling, green hills and weaving, weird avenues with cross-streets that looped into other cross-streets. After the first street sign, the roads weren't even marked.
This place was a fractal mandelbrot of suburban promise. To avoid a dead end, I turned left. A tenth of a mile later, I tried to turn back but there was no good way to do it. Behind me, I noticed flashing lights. The police car was pulling into the development.
I drove while gazing backwards. The police, in their hurry, sped into the dead end I'd avoided. Good. I had a few more seconds. I took a turn that promised to hide me behind a hill for a moment.
My hope had been that the cops wouldn't figure out I was hiding at all. Obviously, they knew. If I had seen them, they had been able to see me. I was driving the only other car in this lonely maze. They knew I was in a Volkswagon Rabbit, almost certainly, and that I was hoping to evade a speeding ticket.
Over the span of a few minutes, I got myself even more lost. Without landmarks and with no road signs, it was hard to judge how much the loops of the roads were turning me away from the exit. If I hadn't been a frantic teenager, panicked about possibly losing my driver's license, I would have seen the comedy routine in what I was doing. Even at the time, I had a dim awareness of it. If this were a Benny Hill skit in fast-motion, both cars bumbling around and popping up in stupid places, it would be funny.
As it was, the police and I caught glimpses of each other when we both rose to the tops of hills at the same time. I remember being puzzled as to how they hadn't caught me yet and then seeing them bolt down an obvious cul-de-sac. As many wrong turns as I was making, they were making even more.
At one point, I rose high enough on a hill that I could see the police car on a different rise far away in the development. We both slowed to glance at each other. In the pause, I became aware of how, only a few minutes before, we had stared at each other from exactly the opposite positions. In my frantic turns in the asphalt loops hoping to escape the police pursuit, I had switched to the set of lanes from which the police had come. I had never left the development switchbacks. And yet, somehow, I'd gotten here. I felt sure the police had to be realizing the same thing.
The sight of us in opposite positions made me realize I had to be close to getting out. I turned south. It only took one extra turn. Suddenly, there was Brink Road again at the intersection in front of me. I had reached a different exit to the development than the road I'd used to enter. But I didn't care. This was freedom. I came to a full stop, realizing I had time. Gently, I turned left out of the development.
#
If I went on to visit someone, I don't remember. My time with a friend must pale in my memory when compared to the chase, I suppose. What I do realize in retrospect is that I had already told myself I wouldn't get into this situation again. But I did. Obviously, I had some sort of adrenaline reflex I needed to beat.
And somehow, I did. For my next encounter, I pulled over, waited, apologized, gave my information, and took my ticket. I never tried to avoid the encounters again.
#
Years ago, I told one or two of these stories to my wife, trying out the idea they might be told in a funny way. Well, I made her laugh. But in trying to be more serious and accurate about them now, I found myself confronted by an odd idea, which is that the repeated narrow escapes eventually taught me to not have narrow escapes.
All I had to do, after all, was be slightly less reckless. It took years for me to manage it, but I as I inspect life patterns in retrospect, I think this was the way it happened. Eventually, I did learn.