The Alligator

Last February, my little Honda and I took a brief spin through the snow and down into a ditch. Last month, driving very late at night, I hit the biggest alligator that I’ve ever seen. An alligator is what truckers call a piece of tire shed on the highway. I was told years ago that the term originated from the real alligators encountered on Florida highways. Highway alligators are usually retreads off 18-wheelers, and most often they fly apart on the road, normally in pieces no bigger than 2 or 3 feet.

This one was a monster. It must have been the whole tire. It had peeled off in a single strip, coiled up and twisted, lying there sideways across the entire lane of the Indian Nation Turnpike, about an hour this side of Tulsa. It was one o’clock in the morning, pitch black outside. I was engrossed in some radio show far away.

Suddenly, there it was in my headlights, dead ahead. In those first fractions of a second, I thought it might be a deer. Or even a human being. Maybe a dead cow. While I was trying to figure out what it was, part of my brain said, “Swerve!!” The other part said, “You don't time! Hit it straight on!!”

I hit it straight on. The built-in recorder in my brain went into slow-motion. First, a sickening crunch, then about 2 or 3 Gs of downforce, the car is launched about 2 feet off the ground, and I’m thinking, ”Aw, ****!!" But the car lands perfectly straight. Not a moment of lost control, unless you count the time in the air. Four of the five senses, already at DefCon One, listen and smell and watch and feel how the car is driving. I detect a tiny rumble in the front end, but drive on for 20 minutes ‘til a state trooper gets me doing 83 in a 75. I told him about the monster alligator. “Someone could get killed,” I said. He left to check it out.

I was happy that the car was undamaged. Only later did I see the impact scar on the front bumper, and notice that some piece of thin metal was rattling under the car, the transmission was shifting oddly and the air conditioner was blowing hot.

Three thousand dollars later, the Moral:

Live alligators bite; highway alligators bite your wallet.