Greensboro in 60 seconds.
by Liv | Published on November 5th, 2005, 4:32 pm | Sports
I'm driving down I-40 at over 130 MPH. What am I doing, you might ask? I'm In A Cop Chase.
Really? Who you chasing?
Um.... it's me they're chasing.
Your kidding right?
No.
Of course this was 11 years ago. Today we could probably barely do the speed limit on interstate 40. Back then a large grass median separated the measly 4 lanes of highway.
So back to the story.
I'm travelling down the freeway. My best friend at the time is riding beside me. We're travelling in a primered 1979 Mustang Indy Pace Car that has been heavily modified with about 300+ Horsepower. The freeway is clear with very little traffic, and being a teenager with no sense of consequence; I decide to go for it?
Go for what?
I'm not sure now that I'm older... but I knew what it was then.
With the ram-air gate on the hood opened the engine roars to life as the accelerator is pushed to the floor. What would normally appear to be the outskirts of Greensboro become a faint blur as we pass the speedometers 85 MPH limit and continue to accelerate.
My passenger who happened to instantly become a mathematical genius began looking at the tachometer on the vehicle trying to get some approximation of speed by figuring it out in his head.
As we approached an off-ramp of Guilford College Rd, a cop of some sort was sitting on the on-ramp with his little laser gun. The 4 little lights on my radar detector illuminated and the alarm sounded. I looked over at my passenger, and without any words, he knew what I was thinking.
It was kind of a silent. "we can out run him?"
Mouth wide open, I don't think he expected such a notion from me. I could see in his eye he was thinking only one thing....
"oh (expletive)."
Already travelling at triple digits speeds. I was confident we could do it. As the cop turned on his lights and began his chase. I grabbed the gear shift for the transmission and forced the transmission down into the lower gear. The rear tires spit a cloud of dirt trying to gain traction as I slammed my foot on the gas peddle. Quickly what seemed like a life altering moment faded away as did the cop in my rear view mirror. I felt a little more at ease. We turned to one another with a smile and a grin, about to break out in laughter when he yells "Stop" and my attention quickly turns to the stopped traffic in the middle of the road and the accident scene in front of that.
I slam on the brakes, smoke plumes from all four tires as we come to a halt. A moment of complete silence and we both turn to look out the rear window. The road is clear behind us. We both turn around and slump in our seats. Its at this point we take the first breath in almost 5 minutes. Then a flicker of blue out of the corner of my eyes. I glance up to the rear view mirror and see not one cop but three bearing down the horizon a mile or so back. It was at this point, I made the decision. I turned the steering wheel full to the left, pulled off into the center median, looked towards my best friend who had already grabbed the "oh (expletive)" bars on the door and nailed it. The dirt just spewed from the back of the car. Grass chunks and gophers flying out from behind the car we began passing the parked cars in the road.
Shwoosh......................shwoosh
Shwoosh.........shoosh
showoosh, shwoosh.
The shwooshes got faster and faster as eventually the car accelerated down this grass median in the middle of Greensboro. Occasionally I would look to the right and watch the faces of the people in the cars beside us. Faces of fear. Faces of shock, and a little poodle yapping from a opened window. Unaware as we passed them they would be covered in dirt and dust... we severely pissed some people off.
My best friend at this point lost grip with reality as he was now laughing hysterically in his seat.
At this point I could see the faint lights of the cop back at the end of the line. Both us and them could not see a whole lot from all the dust in the air. I knew we'd be able to lose them if I could just make it back to pavement. But as we approached the site of the accident, I quickly had a problem. The accident was right under an overpass. Our make-shift dirt freeway we had been driving on, was ending. To the left we had head on traffic and would have to make it through the ditch part of the median. To the right a wall of parked cars, In front of us a cement barrier and behind us Greensboro's finest ready to put me in Juvenile hall.
Girls don't do well in Juvee.
So I did the only thing I could...
I floored it.
I looked ahead to see the paramedics at the accident scene now running across the freeway with their hand in the air, screaming...
"She's Freaking Crazy!!!"
...scared as anyone could be in a situation like this.
My mind is moving at the speed of light calculating, measuring distance, then I see my opening. The on ramp in the oncoming side of traffic is clear and theres a huge gap in freeway traffic. I aim the raging Mustang towards the left side of the median. All at once we dip down to the center of it, hear a lot of bumping and grinding then see the front of the car rise back up the incline on the other side of the median. It was at this point I realized we where going way too fast and the went airborne a foot or so into the air.
A second of silence, it seemed like minutes. My friend was now doing the holy cross thing on his chest & he wasn't even religious. The sunlight almost blindingly poured through the front windshield. I could hear a voice...
Is that you Jesus?
Whats that Jesus? You sound like your barking.
I looked into the side view mirror to see the poodle jumping out its cars window, chasing after us, and its owner in pursuit of the dog. In a slo-mo voice you could hear its owner say "NO-O-O-O-O-O-O!!!!!! GET FLUFFY!!!!!"
Right about then my friend yelled "YEE-HAW" and stuck his middle finger out at fluffy & the cops.
The car slammed onto the pavement and sparks shot out from the underbelly of the car as the suspension tried to deal with the abuse. The car began to stall, before it finally smoothed out and downshifted, as we rolled up the empty on-ramp
I look back to see the cops now out of there cars, unwilling to risk what we had in order to capture us. Their faces like stone you could literally see steam come out of their ears. A couple of them ran off to check on the accident victims.
We pulled up to the intersection at the top of the ramp, and quickly made our way to my friends shop only minutes away expecting at any moment for the police to show up behind us.
Open the shop door, drive the car in.
Close the door.
It was over.
Later that night we'd make a run to Walmart (In my friends car) for spray paint and gave the Mustang a good paint job with 88 cents a can black.
Nothing ever came of the situation. Thankfully this was before they had cameras in the cars. Several years later I was at a party at UNCG and got talking to this guy, who told me this story about how one day there was this car on I-40 that looked a lot like mine, and then told me about some odd circumstances that had occurred to him. I never did tell him it was me. Just goes to prove... don't underestimate this girl & don't let your teenager drive.
