When 90 MPH Was Too Slow For 419

I cannot remember the last time I was in a land vehicle going over 100 miles per hour.

(Insipid statement sponsored by Mountain Dew Throwback. MAN this stuff is good!)

I suppose birth certificates should come with disclaimers. For me, that disclaimer would have read, "Warning:" (The German instructions, of course, would have started with that Kaiser helmet-sounding "Achtung!") "This infant is designed for future unsupervised acceleration trials only. Any warranty herein is null and void." Such an official notice would have gone a long, long way toward avoiding aggravation on the part of the Roanoke County Sherrif's Office long 'bout 1977 or so. For the uninitiated, when I was a teen and doing dumb things like spying on the girl next door (they were pink, as it turned out) and putting Pop Rocks in my beloved Boxer dog's mouth to watch his reaction, taking a nightly study break was always a temptation for my very short attention span. Typically, it went something like this: "Dad, can I borrow the keys? I need to go to Hop-In for -" "You need to go to Hop-In? Here's five bucks. Bring me back some cigarettes and a six pack." Daaaaad, you KNOW they won't sell me that stuff!" "(Grumble, grumble) All right, but take it easy with the car, okay sport? That last engine cost me $900."

Going to Hop-In was great, but who wants to head straight back home when you're sixteen and have wheels? Electric Road, known by locals as 419, has a wide, sweeping turn between Keagy Road and all those nondescript office buildings overcrowding the highway these days. The nightly goal, while you were studying trig and writing a paper for English Lit, was to blast toward that sweeper at, oh, 90 miles per hour or so, then slow waaaay down to a very sedate 70 through the turn (diving down to the fast lane from the right hand lane ala NASCAR; it's called "riding the apex" because you wanted to know). Then, coming out of "turn four" this future savior of Petty Enterprises would upshift back to third gear or, as it's called on automatic transmissions, "drive".

Then the fun would begin.

Dogs ran.

Children cried.

And a leadfooted, dumb kid with 400 horsepower under his right foot would blast back up to 120 miles per hour as though heading down the Mulsanne Straight with the smell of the checkered flag hanging heavy in the air. Think of it as the high performance equivalent of Ray Charles singing "Shake Your Tail Feathers" in the Blues Brothers. Let me tell you, Margie, that county library came up FAST! Telephone poles began to look kind of like a picket fence. Deputies stirred from their boredom in time to hear the wailing of a fast-approaching 440 Magnum engine (and a police interceptor engine at that). Often, the Doppler effect distracted them before they could adjust their radars. (Remember when they looked like two Clorox bottles glued together and hung on the passenger door's window? I bet Bert Tyler does! Sorry, Bert -haha!) When the deputies weren't distracted by the Doppler, they would pull out of their favorite hiding places and give chase. I learned automotive escape and evasion techniques that would have wowed SEALS Team 6.

Well, all good things come to an end when you're sixteen and hot-footing dad's car around Southwest county. An overwhelming sense of guilt always followed such impulses. And a vow to myself to take studying geometry seriously when I got home. (Yeah, right.) I had already studied geometry. I had calculated the degrees of the curve in "turn four" -at 90 miles per hour. I had also summed the total number of degrees required to take the fewest number of 90 degree turns to get back home undetected.

And the best part? I was a kid, and there were no required postulates and theorems.