77 North

Cleveland, OH

One of the forgotten features of old cars is how quiet they were. Not the engine, perhaps, but the interior. The dashboard of the modern car blares, flashes, and otherwise emits constant visual and audio warnings and updates; your every movement is monitored and evaluated by the car. The car is constantly of the opinion that you are a sloppy and dangerous driver. An old car is the opposite: no complaints. You can drive an old car off a bridge and you won’t hear a single alert or alarm; you get to die in peace, with only the wafts of wind against the window as your best signal that you are not on Earth anymore and, likely, will never rejoin it, alive. I should know: I drove my old car off a bridge at seventy miles an hour.

It was the most peace and quiet I’ve ever had.

I was driving two friends to an early-season Indians game in April, which is a time of year when cold weather cities like Cleveland have started their baseball season but still have snow. My friends and I debated about driving all the way to the stadium and paying for parking, or wondered if instead we should drive to the train station—The Rapid (RTA)—park for free and take the train into the stadium? Eventually we felt there wasn’t enough time to park and transfer to the train—mainly because had I left work later than expected—so, a drive to the stadium it was, and quickly.

Cleveland fans were warned that weather would be terrible at this game—a blizzard was expected—but, as my 124 Sean Bair-Flannery friends and I departed, it was but a drizzling, spitting rain and we laughed about how our weather forecasters were always so histrionic. We were about halfway there when I noticed that not a single car had passed us; what’s more, we seemed to be the fastest car on the highway! This was NOT how it usually went. I drove a 1987 stick-shift Chevy Cavalier where one door was attached with chicken wire. I rarely passed highway traffic in that junker. It started shaking like a NASA vessel reentering the atmosphere every time I entered the fast lane to overtake someone. This was weird; this was rare.

“We are making great time!” my buddy exclaimed as we zipped by all the other cars in the slow lane.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “it’s pretty easy to make good time when everyone else is driving like an asshole, right?”

And, with that, we hit a patch of ice and I immediately lost control of the car.

When you drive in engulfing snow—something Clevelanders are accustomed to, as the city averages nearly five feet of snow a year—drivers tend to switch to the slow lane and follow the tire path of the leader, like elephants plodding trunk to tail. Clevelanders drive well in the snow due to a combination of heavy annual accumulation and the fact that our municipal services make no effort to plow or remedy the situation. The city’s policy on plowing and salting seems to be: “Well, you made the decision to live in Cleveland, didn’t you?”

Our ability to drive in bad weather has created a genre of Cleveland “justice porn,” where we enthusiastically laugh, to the point of ecstasy, while watching videos of warmer cities reacting to minor dustings of snow. A few years ago the city of Atlanta shut down all of its high-ways, activated the National Guard, and shuttered all non-essential government buildings due to what the city’s meteorologists called “Snowpocalypse.” Drivers abandoned their cars on active highways as panicked citizens hoarded food and supplies.

One inch of snow had fallen.

There’s a certain type of Midwesterner who cannot eat spicy foods. We are terrible dancers and we apologize four times per sentence; we probably seem bland and unadventurous to most of the country. But we will drive in anything. I was once at a wake that took place during a series of terrible storms, including several tornadoes. I overheard one of my uncles say, “Oh, yeah, I saw the tornado. It wasn’t too far from me, right over at Pearl Road, but it was hovering above the turnpike and I wasn’t about to pay those damn tolls anyway so, no big deal for me.”

When Clevelanders saw the footage of Atlanta closing its entire city and requesting a standing army due to an inch of snow, we achieved metropolitan karma: finally, we were laughing at a major city as joyously and patronizingly as they normally laughed at us, at Cleveland.

But at this time, on our way to Opening Day in bad weather, I was young and I was about to hit snow for the first time. I was only seventeen—funtionally, an Atlantan—driving headlong and happy into a blizzard, until I hit the right amount of ice and lost control of the car.

As the car skidded off the patch of ice, it initially snaked back-and-forth, mostly within our lane, but had soon built enough momentum that it suddenly banked hard right. We darted out of our lane, between two barely moving cars to the right of us and with no deceleration, flew off a bridge.

We went from happily passing all traffic on the road, rhapsodic in the “great time” we were making, to flying in the air.

“Huh,” I remember thinking, as we floated away, “I didn’t even know there was a bridge here. Also: Wow! What a view!”
 

 

Cleveland’s first nickname was The Forest City, which was taken from Alexis De Tocqueville’s 1830 work “Democracy in America,” which in turn referred to how leafy and verdant the town was, while still being a bustling, emerging port. About 100 years later, this vine-covered marsh was the fifth biggest city in America, and busy erecting huge skyscrapers. As we dropped to our deaths, and I noticed the tree-covered hills leading into downtown with its glistening towers, I said (in what, I thought might be my last words), “This city is prettier than people realize.”

There was a second or two of nice silence. The slide off the highway happened so fast, that my passengers were muted by total confusion. Plus, back then, there was no in-car GPS to complain about the sudden route change. No irksome “Recalculating...RECALCULATING!” So, I enjoyed the scenery for a few seconds hearing only the hum of the engine and the occasional plop of a new snowflake landing on the window, peacefully floating to my death, while taking two additional lives with me.

When I recall this incident, I oddly spend less time thinking about how things felt inside the car and more time wondering how it looked to the other drivers. For the last ten miles, we were flying past all other traffic; whizzing by scared, careful people, plodding along in the slow lane, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, probably complaining that their wipers weren’t working well enough to even see. Then suddenly, a flash of blue—a car with a street value of $800 driven by a idiot—jets past them, recklessly launching itself into a blizzard. And what does every careful driver say, when passed by that kind of person?

“God, I hope he gets into an accident.”

I like that, no matter how much gender politics evolve and change in this country, Americans can always agree: we assume “He/Him” is the correct pronoun for asshole drivers. And that, additionally, it is okay to wish for “him” to crash. It is human nature; you want to catch up with that reckless idiot after he slides into a ditch along the side of the road or crashes into a semi. You want it so badly, you will trade the stability of your own trip for it: “God, please put that jackass in an accident; I will gladly sit in the extra two hours of traffic it will cause! I need to see HIM suffer consequences!” Outside of war, humans make no wishes more despicable than what we desire upon other drivers. I believe it is for this reason that genies hide in the desert, because, if discovered in a city, the genie knows you would waste your first two wishes on killing other drivers.

I find myself yelling abhorrent things when stuck in unusually bad traffic: “There had better be a dead body up there!” as though a human life must be sacrificed to the gods of commerce in order to justify all the time lost in this gridlock. Often, it’s the first time you’ve spoken to God in months, maybe years: “Lord, I’m sorry I haven’t prayed to you in a while—probably not since I asked for that horse to finish in the top three last year—and I know I haven’t been perfect, but I have a proposal: I will become a better, more-caring and understanding person if you could kindly just kill the driver of that black BMW for me. Thank you. Amen.”

So when I retell this episode, I think first of those other drivers on 77 North, who begged a Higher Power for me to get in an accident, then watched me fly off a bridge disappearing into the sky. For the first time in their lives, a prayer was immediately and decisively answered and they were left with the guilt that the one prayer God decides to act upon instantly—as though responding to a text message—is the one where they asked for three people to die.

“Oh wow,” I imagine them saying, in shocked self-recrimination, “I...wow...I just...Lord, I didn’t mean for you to erase him. I mostly just wanted his insurance rates to go up a little bit; maybe be really delayed for work; not be tossed to a fiery death!”

Meanwhile inside my car, people might be surprised to learn, everything was quiet. People say time slows down when you’re about to die, but that’s not technically true: it’s not so much that time slows down before death. It’s more that it’s the first time you realize how many separate thoughts your brain can have at once when it wants to. When you’re in a calamitous situation, like, say, driving yourself and two friends off the edge of a precipice, you process more unique thoughts in a fall of a few seconds than you compile in the average month. I pondered everything from childhood memories, to arcane baseball statistics, to financial misgivings like, “I should have checked ‘yes’ when asked if I wanted to deposit two percent of my paycheck for a life insurance policy.”

If humans really use just ten percent of their brain, as the old saw goes, then at the moment of death the active ten percent of the brain—the module that’s supposedly been doing all the thinking since birth—must knock on the door of the other ninety percent and yell, “OK it’s now or never if you want to clock in!” Because in that moment you progress mentally from a person who can’t balance a plate to a juggler spinning an entire dinner set, a chainsaw, and a live bobcat all at the same time. If I operated at that level consistently, I would own kingdoms. Maybe that’s how Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun dominated the world? They were the smartest humans on Earth because their mind believed it was dying half a dozen times per day, giving them moments of purest clarity. The domain of what your brain oversees in those moments is vast, beyond the memories and calculations and predictions, your brain is also observing a bafflingly complete picture of what’s around you. When we left the bridge, it was so quiet and my brain—faced with the very real prospect of imminent oblivion—was now so nimble and perceptive I was able to notice a giant delivery truck for Little Caesar’s on the highway beneath us and I remember thinking, “Do they still give you a second pizza for free?”

Then we landed heavily, mud and dirt spraying everywhere. We bounced a few times, and began sliding down a ravine.

“My God,” I thought, “we survived! We are alive!”

As it turned out the bridge we had driven off was actually an extension of the existing bridge, designed to meet with what would be a new, raised on-ramp. It was under construction and did not have guardrails installed yet. What looked like it would be a plummet of several hundred feet, was a drop of but a few feet, to a steep ridge that we were now sledding down.

We were alive!

I slammed the breaks, but the car barely responded; we continued to skate down the hill, swerving left and right. My passengers, who finally realized they were alive, began to scream. When you hear people scream from real fear—not the stuff you hear on roller coasters or when watching horror movies, but real, honest-to-goodness fear—it is a sound you can not ignore. One of the reasons we evolved so successfully as a species is that when we hear a real human scream, our brain will not allow us to concentrate on anything other than helping that person.

They screamed so ear-splittingly that I felt they required an update. So I turned fully around to face them, and stated, calmly:

“I have lost control of the vehicle.”

“What?” they scream-asked.

“I. Have. Lost. Control. Of. The. Vehicle,” I repeated, more deliberately this time.

“NO. FUCKING. SHIT!” came the reply.

My passengers seemed to “get” that I did not intend to drive my car off a bridge and toboggan it down a ridge. It was, in retrospect, a pretty redundant update.

“How are we holding up, back there?” I asked, thinking a new question would break the tension and silence.

“Look ahead, you fucking moron!” was said back to me.

I turned around and noticed that we were descending rapidly and heading directly towards a separate, active highway.

“Out of the frying pan, into the frog pot,” I announced and grabbed the wheel.

“Buckle up!” I screamed, as though we were in a damaged helicopter spinning toward the ground. During this entire tumble, I had my foot pressed down hard upon the brake pedal, to no avail, so I yanked up the emergency break, hoping that might add some resistance. Then I did what any driver should do before landing on a crowded highway after careening down a grassy incline: I put my blinker on.

As though, five months later, I would find myself in the office of an insurance lawyer and, when they bemoaned the fact that we appeared to be liable for a huge amount of damage, I could counter, “Oh, no. No, we have nothing to worry about. Did I not share this before? I had my blinker on.”

“Mr. Flannery,” he’d explain, “you landed on two vehicles.”

“No one is denying where I landed. But that was a valid merge, clearly signaled and everything. The law is pretty clear here, I feel.”

At the bottom of the hill we were slaloming down, there was a small gully that curved up to meet the berm of the highway we were approaching. We hit the end of the hill, still gliding at a pretty good clip, so the other side of that small gully acted as a ramp, and launched us into the air.

It was in that instant—soaring, about to land on another interstate highway—that I was certain we would die. And it is nothing like how they describe it in movies. In movies, they say your whole life flashes before your eyes and, because of that, you have important, final epiphanies: you realize you haven’t traveled enough or been honest enough with people; maybe there was an unrequited love who you never shared your feelings with; or there was a family member you abandoned due to the small, silly grudge. And because of these flashbacks and the emotional insights from them, people die with powerful last words like,

“I never stopped loving you.”

or:

“I’ve never been to Paris!”

But that’s not what really happens. All you really think about when you are going to die suddenly and unexpectedly is about the clothes you are wearing. In that final second of life—when your brain is finally entrusted with its full range of computational powers—ninety percent of your closing thoughts are on what embarrassing item you may have left in plain view in your bedroom or what unflattering outfit you’ll have on when they pull you lifeless from the wreckage.

This was particularly true for me, T-minus three feet from impact, because I was wearing my work uniform. Where did I work back then? Lady Footlocker.

That’s right. I was about to die, dressed as a referee.

Furthermore I remembered: I was wearing women’s size 12 shoes (my employee discount made it significantly cheaper for me to purchase women’s tennis shoes) and I wondered, if this accident is bad enough, are the cops going to release a bulletin stating, “If you hear of a sporting event that’s waiting on a very tardy, very tall female referee, well, she killed herself by driving off a highway.”

This thinking is an amazing insight into the human mind’s real power: its ability to give you fifty thousand ways to doubt yourself. Perhaps that’s how we dominated the planet. The Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals probably had the happiest, most self-encouraging brains in the world: “Hey, that’s a great, near-spear you built!” or “Even if you can’t start a fire, everyone values you!” Whereas even the first humans had our brain: “What are you doing idiot? If you don’t build a functional fish net in front of all these people, your life is over! People will think you are stupid, because you are stupid.”

And, as you are about to die, your brain’s odd, neurotic focus on what you are wearing or what you forgot to do at home, completes its final purpose; it makes death awkward by choosing last words that baffle everyone.

I was no different.

Just before we landed, I raised the whistle from my referee’s costume, and told my passengers,

“This whistle doesn’t even work.”

Yep. That’s what I selected as final words: that my close friends, people I’ve loved since childhood, should know the whistle around my neck is a fake. That is the info they should take to their grave; not that I have always had fun with them or that I regret killing them but that, should it ever matter, they cannot count on using the article currently dangling from my neck to call for a foul.
 

We hit the other highway. The other cars all scattered, like mice after a cat jumps out of a bush. It was the closest I have seen in real life to what a racing video game looks like when a new player suddenly enters mid-match. We bounced a few times and, now on pavement, I was able to slow down the car and regain control; we merged easily into traffic.

For the next few seconds, I sat in what felt like the longest silence of my life, as everyone in the car absorbed the fact that they had survived. As we sat, dumbfounded, the other cars on the highway started to pass us and each driver stared unblinking into our car as they did so. There seemed to be a lot of judgment in their stares. I waved to them; the standard showing of gratitude when another driver provides room for you to merge onto the highway; even (and especially) if that merge was airborne.

I should probably describe my car at this point: it was a 1987 Chevy Cavalier with several large dents and holes but, most prominently, a giant image of the Cleveland Indians mascot—“Chief Wahoo”—was hand-painted over the hood and “GO TRIBE!” was written (messily) along the car’s two doors. I painted that car, with friends, after we watched the Indians win a game in the bottom of the ninth with a three-run homer and we were convinced they would win the World Series that year. Therefore, we reasoned, our group needed an appropriately decorated car for reaching the games (we were wrong then and have been wrong since; Cleveland has not won a World Series since 1948).

So these other people were watching not just a car slide down a ridge towards them, but one that looks like a Cleveland General Lee with a referee behind the wheel:

“Jesus in Heaven, WHAT is that car doing? Is that Chief Wahoo? Holy...They are going to land on us...Is that a fucking ref?”

Some of them might still think about that accident, particularly those drivers who were on the bridge above who never saw the resolution.

One of the numbers I am most curious about is: how many people are out there, walking this Earth, who think they witnessed my death? People who have either had or will have conversations with their children years after the relevant incident, that go:

“Mom, have you ever seen a car crash?”

“Oh, yeah, I saw a bad one. I saw the world’s biggest Cleveland Indians fan drive a car off a bridge to his death.”

I’d like to believe that, at least for this incident, the number of people who thought they watched my death fell a bit each month. My car was (surprisingly) not damaged in the fall off that bridge so I continued to drive it around Cleveland for two more years and, it being a memorable vehicle, I hope there were a few times someone from the accident passed me, exclaiming inside their vehicle:

“Holy Shit! I thought that guy was dead!”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“That dude, up ahead! It’s a long story, but just give that guy with Chief Wahoo a lot of space. Trust me.”
 

I don’t know if you have ever nearly killed half a dozen people, but there is an awkwardness after everyone survives, a kind of—almost mousy—silence where none of the survivors know who should break the tension and speak first.

It was I who broke the tension:

“Well, it’s not how I would have drawn it on a map, but...this is going to be a quicker route.”

I think when I said that, I could hear a “click” in my head which was the other ninety percent of my brain going back to bed, slamming the door shut and saying, “He’s your problem again.”

My passengers were now yelling, rather vocally, at me. I put the whistle in my mouth and blew as hard as possible.

Nothing.

“See?” I told them to utter confusion and accelerated into traffic, determined to make the first pitch.

We arrived before the first pitch. But, we learned, that was because the first pitch was in Detroit. I had read the schedule wrong, and the Indians were out of town.