It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the concept of dumb luck, that the only really neat car I ever owned was the only car I ever wrecked. In 1993, I purchased a 92 Ford Probe GL with only 13K on the odometer. It was the newest and nicest car I had owned to date, and I loved it. It was a very bright, nearly electric shade of blue with aluminum wheels. The car was hard for the dealer to locate because I had insisted on a five speed… I had looked at a lot of Probes and had only seen one with a five speed besides this one. It was well worth the trouble and the wait.

Two months after I bought this car I met my wife-to-be, and less than a year later we were married. Two months after that, we discovered we were going to have a baby. As a result, my wife began to hint that we should look for something bigger. Naturally, I resisted. I couldn't bear the thought of losing my Probe. Three months after that, I lost my job and trading the car in became the least of our worries. Six weeks later, I finally found other employment.

The new job was forty miles away, but at least I was working. I was assigned to the night shift and began working from twelve p.m. to twelve a.m. The commute was bad in the daytime, but downright frightening at night. I had to drive ten miles of interstate, then get off and drive through a very rough area of town, then eight or nine miles down a dark treacherous country highway then battle a tractor trailer- ridden main highway. I usually arrived home around 1:30 AM if I was lucky.

After being out of work for six weeks, money was, of course, very tight. If it had not been for family we would not have had any food. Many things went unpaid… we spent a week without water and two weeks without a phone, and we narrowly averted having our power disconnected on two occasions. Then I did something I had never done before… I let the auto insurance lapse. We trudged through the days never knowing what to expect next.

Then it happened.

I left my place of employment around twelve thirty on that cool October night. As I slowed down to exit onto that dark country highway I mentioned earlier, I noticed that the area just past the exit was extremely foggy, even darker than usual. I slowed down to around thirty-five and entered the ramp, letting off the gas and trail braking a little. It was darker than usual, I couldn't see more than ten feet in front of the car.

What happened next still plays through a nightmarish aura in my own memory, so I'll describe it as best as I can. I never saw a thing. All I caught was a vague impression of movement directly in front of me. The movement looked like a pair of legs. THERE'S SOMEONE IN THE ROAD, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HIT HIM! My panicked brain yammered at me. I stomped the clutch and brake and swerved to the left because it looked like the movement was going the other way. It occurred to me weeks later that swerving like that saved my life, even though the move put me at risk for losing control. The impact was enormous and teeth jarring. I saw a flash of something landing on the hood then going over the car, and I knew immediately what it was….. I had hit a cow. The car continued to move forward without losing control. With a nerveless hand, I dropped the shifter into second, let the clutch out, and was amazed to find that everything felt and sounded fine. Nothing rattled or clunked as I had expected and all the gauges read normal. No idiot lights shone on the dashboard. It seemed, for the moment , that I had escaped serious damage.

I knew I had to stop and call the police. The only business on this stretch of road was coming up on the right, and I turned into the parking lot of Charlie's, a very popular strip club. When I shut the car off, I listened for any hissing or dripping noises and heard none. Dreading what I would see, I got out and walked to the nose of the car. It was a mess, but not as bad as it could have been. The passenger side headlight had been ripped out of its socket and was pointing straight up. The hood was buckled, looking as though a giant had smashed a meaty fist down on it. This was the only damage. Unless you count the huge glops of cow poop that streaked up the hood and windshield, over the roof, down the back window, and onto the deck lid.

Looking at this, I could tell exactly what had happened. The nose of the Probe was set low enough to the ground that instead of striking the animal head-on, I had knocked it's back legs out from under it, slammed it's rump onto the hood, then bounced it over the car. I know now that if I had not swerved to the left, the animal would have rolled up onto the hood and smashed through the windshield, and I probably would not have survived.

I checked my pockets and discovered that I had no money at all. Surely, I thought, the bouncer would let me in the club where I could use their phone. I turned and entered Charlie's.

There was no bouncer, but there was a table full of drunk patrons directly in front of the door, hooting and hollering at the half-naked, bored-looking women on stage. One of them turned and saw me, then bellowed: "Hey buddy! C'mon in, there's some hot ladies here tonight! Somebody get this man a beer! C'mon and sit down!" I thanked him for the invitation, then told him that I had just been in an accident, and needed a phone.

"An assident?" he slurred. He got up and came toward me. He was a big man with a goatee and a necktie hanging loosely around his neck. "Wha happened? You okay buddy?"

"Yes, I'm fine." I said. "I hit a cow." The men at the table roared with drunken glee. The man with the goatee was guffawing and whacking me on the back.

"Well she didn't come from in here!" he roared, sweeping his arm at the ladies onstage. His buddies at the table were laughing harder and louder than ever before. He then pressed a quarter into to my hand, whacked me on the back one final time, and told me there was a pay phone outside around the corner.

Back outside, I decided the best thing to do with my donated quarter was to call my wife, tell her what happened, and ask her to call the police for me. After all, I was due home shortly, and I didn't want her to be worried.

Our baby was due in two months, and my wife had had enough of being pregnant. She was tired and cranky all the time, and our financial situation didn't do much to help things either. We had been grating on each other's nerves lately, and I was not one of her favorite people at the time. A good night's sleep was also getting hard to come by, so when I called at one thirty in the morning and woke her up, she was sleepy, disoriented and very grouchy. So I proceed to tell her this wild story about hitting cows and going in strip clubs, and its obvious she doesn't believe a word of it.

"So what you're telling me," she began. "Is that you're at Charlie's." The flat tone in her voice frightened me. She then proceeded to tell me that if I looked at any naked women, she would emasculate me. Only she didn't put it that gently.

"No, Honey," I said, aware that I sounded like I was backpedaling. "I've had a wreck, and I need you to call the police for me."

"Yeah, right." was her only response.

"Just do it, okay?" I pleaded. I told her exactly where I was, so the police could find me.

"Fine." she said, and hung up. Great, I thought. I've wrecked my car and she thinks I'm full of it. Well, at least things couldn't possibly get any worse from this point.

I was wrong.

When I walked back around the side of the building, I discovered that a crowd had gathered around my car. As I drew closer, I saw that the crowd was comprised mostly of the drunk men from inside, a waitress, and even one of the dancers who had thrown a Charlie's t-shirt over her g-string and bare chest and come outside to see what all the fuss was about. The big guy with the goatee was, of course, the first one to speak. He pointed at the manure on the car and shared the following witticism with myself and the group:

"Knocked the s*** out of `er, didn't ya?" He said, then started to guffaw and pound me on the back again, immensely pleased with his own drunken wisdom. The men all roared again, marveling at their witty leader.

It was about this time that the reek of cow dung slapped my nostrils. I noticed that the two women in the group were holding their noses, and rightfully so.

"Eww." The waitress said, and went inside.

"That poor cow!" exclaimed the dancer, and shot me an accusing look.

Meanwhile, back at home, my wife actually had called the police. And ten minutes later they called back and told her they couldn't find me. She told them to look again. Ten minutes later the police knocked on the door, looking for me. Five minutes after that the county sheriff's office called and asked where I was. She told them that I was "probably stuffing our grocery money in g-strings at Charlie's," and slammed the phone down. That time, they found me.

By the time the police arrived, I had spoken to fifteen or twenty more intoxicated individuals who informed me that I had knocked the s*** out of a cow. I thanked every one of them for pointing that out to me, and gave them an obligatory chuckle just to let them know their humorous observation had not escaped me.

The officers that responded were very helpful and courteous, and tried very hard not to laugh at me. I had come to find the whole situation rather humorous myself, and was chuckling while I gave the officers the information they needed.

"You sure are taking this well." One officer told me. "That's a good-looking car you got there… I'd be mad as hell right now if I were you."

"How else can I take it?" I said. "If I don't laugh, I'll start bawling." Another county car pulled up and a young officer got out, whistled at the damage to my car, then immediately wrinkled his nose.

"Pew." He said. "Smells like s*** over here."

"Did you get the carcass off the road?" one of the other officers asked the newcomer.

"Wasn't one." He turned towards me and asks; "Are you sure you hit a cow?" I didn't respond, but only nodded towards my car. The young officer noticed the doo-doo this time.

"Oh, I see." He said. "Anyway, there's no dead cow out there. Sucker must have lived through it. Almost had you a year's supply of beef there."

The officers finished their business and gave me a card where I could get a copy of the accident report, then left me alone with my thoughts in Charlie's parking lot.

Needless to say, my wife was no longer angry when she saw the car later that night. She even hugged and told me she was glad I was okay and that she was sorry about the car. She also told me that if I ever had another wreck in front of strip joint, I needed to walk to the nearest gas station.

I never could afford to get that car fixed, but I drove it for two more years, and it never suffered any ill effects from the accident. (Other than being one of the ugliest Probes on the road.) Two months after the accident, we brought our baby home from the hospital in it. That car carried me through more than thirty states when I worked as a customer service rep without a single mechanical failure. In March of 1997, I traded the Probe in on my very first new car, a Honda Passport.

I still miss that car.

2001 Steve Wingate