Posts Tagged ‘rollover’
Contrasting Visuals
I’m so happy that Cyndie carries her phone on walks and shares the views she captures. This first one has the cool effect of blurring around the center focal point that adds energy to the scene.
We have reached the time of year when there are a lot more hours of darkness than light but she didn’t let that stop her and I love the murky mysteriousness of this next one.
There is a lot of action in some of those tree trunks. I don’t quite understand the source of light behind those clouds. Was it really just the last traces of sunlight so many minutes past sunset? I cannot confirm.
A couple of other shots she showed me from the night walk revealed the snowflakes that were blowing around at the time.
It was brought to my attention that this happened seven years ago:
That was when Cyndie rolled the old farm pickup just a few days before she had hip replacement surgery. When responders fretted over her painful limping, she had to tell them that was how she walked even before the rollover.
In contrast, now I’m thinking about what we’ll be taking pictures of seven years from now and how different it might look.
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It’s Gone
Now you see it, now you don’t. On Friday, Cyndie was able to trade in our beat and battered red pickup truck while making a deal on a used 2019 Honda CRV. That truck served us perfectly well during our years of hauling hay, but it was falling apart from rust –literally, hunks of rusted metal were sloughing off and clanking to the ground while the truck was parked in front of the shop– and we don’t need to haul hay anymore.
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We were a little surprised the auto dealership was willing to accept the truck. It had been through a lot, including the time Cyndie slid off the road and it rolled over onto the roof. With a bare minimum of insurance coverage on the pickup, we elected to have equally bare minimum repairs done to get it functional again.
It looked like they pounded out the roof with a ball peen hammer to get a new windshield installed and then painted it with dull red spray paint that quickly faded. There was a resulting air leak that whistled as we drove.
The truck also had a phantom drain on the battery that we were never able to solve. The final solution in dealing with that was to install a disconnect on the battery that required we open the hood every time we needed to drive anywhere.
It was a farm truck, and it served well enough for that. I never felt bad when driving through tree branches that might scratch the paint. There was frequent evidence that mice and squirrels sought shelter beneath the hood. There were probably as many acorns stored in it as there were bales of hay hauled over the years.
I’m happy that we had it around when needed, and I’m even happier to have it now gone from our driveway without having had to try to convince someone it was worth buying.
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Spin Happens
Ya know that theory I was jesting about yesterday? Well, it works from both directions. If you are under-prepared, that is when you will face situations that challenge your preparedness. Case in point: if you plan to use your pickup truck for commuting on the roadways during inclement weather, make sure you put some weight in the back to balance the vehicle and add traction to the rear wheels. If you don’t, the truck just might spin out on an icy patch of road and slide off the pavement, where the wheels can catch on the gravel of the shoulder and cause the truck to roll over.
Cyndie captured this on-the-scene cell phone image of the dramatic outcome.
Cyndie didn’t intentionally test that theory, but by making an unplanned decision to drive the Wintervale Ranch truck to work yesterday (since her car was in for service and she didn’t want to risk driving a rental car on the icy roads), she subjected herself to an incredible dose of adrenaline and tested her seat belt when the truck spun and slid across the oncoming lane, and off the pavement. As the truck reached the shoulder, sliding sideways, the wheels stopped and the momentum of the vehicle kept on going. Up and over it rolled, passenger door down, then over onto the roof, breaking the door window and smashing the windshield as the roof of the cab buckled.
Our illustrious hero dodged suffering any blows from impact, lucky that the truck missed a sign post as it moseyed past, and luckier still that there was no vehicle approaching from the north as she lost control.
Of course, I assumed she was probably going too fast for the conditions, until she described where the accident occurred. If that is as far as she had gotten in the time since she left the house, she must have been driving very slow. Plus, that spot is just after an intersection with a stoplight, and it is an uphill slope in the direction she was driving.
Cyndie is quick to state that the Good Samaritans who were driving immediately behind her witnessed the whole event and corroborated her claim to responding police officers that she wasn’t going fast at the time.
Spin happens.
Be careful out there. And, always wear a seat belt!
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Relative Something 