How does someone describe the feeling of helplessness? Please bear with me for just a moment or two. Utter helplessness is a condition where you are rendered virtually incapable of action. The situation around you is totally out of control and you are helpless to do anything about it. It is as if you are a puppet on a string or strings, but the strings are all broken. The puppeteer has no control over you. The only difference between you and sand or you and water is that you have a physical form and shape. You have arms. You have legs. You have a head. You have a torso. What’s a torso? Seriously? Who asked that question? You don’t know what a torso is? Okay. That’s your body. That’s the part that the arms and the legs and the head are attached to. All right. Now that we have that cleared up. Yeah. I could mention the hands and the feet, but we don’t want to get bogged down in the weeds. Anyway, you have a form, but the water is just sloshing around all over the place in a puddle. And the sand is kind of blowing and drifting around all over the place. They don’t have any real form. Do you see the difference? Until you pour water into a glass, it doesn’t have any form. Until you build a sand castle, sand doesn’t have any form. You get the idea. Alrighty then. Why did I bring that up? Well, suppose you’re driving down the road at 50 or 60 or 70 miles an hour and everything looks fine. Except, everything isn’t so fine. You look at that road and it looks like a normal blacktop. The asphalt looks like asphalt. The lines on the asphalt look like lines on the asphalt. Everything looks copacetic. Then you see the stop sign up ahead. So, you take the next logical action. What’s the next logical action? I heard it. That’s right. Over there. You hit the brakes. Very good. Not so fast, hotshot. As soon as you hit the brakes, the car goes slip sliding down the road at 50 or 60 or 70 miles an hour careening out-of-control. The harder you hit the brakes, the more that car careens out of control. Now you’re totally helpless. What do you do? What anybody does in the same situation. They panic. So, you panic. If you live through this harrowing event, you’ll live and you’ll learn how to deal with black ice. In time, you may even learn how to play in black ice and have a helluva good time. Just make sure the donut patrol ain’t anywhere around when you’re doing so. The first time I experienced black ice, I was a mere teenager in North Dakota. The first time I experienced black ice, it scared the living shit out of me. But I and the boss’s wrecker truck both survived with no damage. Thank goodness. I was more worried about the boss’s wrecker than I was about me. I really liked my job and I probably would’ve gotten fired if I had wrecked his wrecker. No doubt about that. He liked me but not near as much as he liked that wrecker. But I perfected my black ice slip sliding technique with my Fiat spider 2000. That car could careen and slide out of control on ice with the best of them. Going into a hairpin turn, I loved to put that car into a side slide around the corner just to see if I could correct in time to maintain momentum down the road toward my destination. Since the car had a manual transmission, 99 percent of the time I was able to maintain momentum and traction by simply downshifting. The key was to control the steering and not overcompensate for the correction in the slide. That usually worked. Like I said the secret was to make sure the donut patrol was nowhere to be found when you were performing these theatrics. I was careful never to attempt a side slide when I was near a cliff or on any road near the Puget Sound. And I gotta tell you that this only worked after a good soaking rain and a sudden clearing overnight when the temperatures fell into the low 20s. Usually when that happened, we could expect black ice conditions to form in secluded areas where sunlight didn’t reach. For example, in areas where there were tall trees and there were curves, you could bet your biffy that you were going to find black ice. Such situations were conducive to a side slide exercise for the brave of heart. I had a couple of those areas on my normal route to work. All I had to do was make sure that the local county Mountie was nowhere to be seen when I attempted my circus theatrics. I know that you’re thinking what’s the big deal. Well, the big deal is simply this: to have fun and blow off steam on the way to work. It was a way to forestall a potential exercise in futility before it even happened.
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