In my senior year of high school in Utah, I befriended a blond construction worker named Darrel from Oklahoma who had graduated the year before and moved to the state. He owned a brand new, bronze-and-white ’56 Chevy that he had souped up.
While Darrel wasn’t the smartest person I ever met, he did occasionally come up with some outrageous thoughts. One such idea came to him in January while we drove into the mountains to see how much snow had fallen the previous week. Linda, my high school sweetheart, was with me in the back seat and friend Ellery was with Darrel up front.
We passed the massive concrete dam of the Mountain Dell reservoir that holds Salt Lake City’s water supply, and drove around the far end of the 5-mile-long lake. As we drove by one of the snowed-in roads to the boat ramp area, we could see the snow-covered ice of the reservoir stretching in front of us.
Darrel let out a whoop and, in his best Okie drawl, yelled, “We gonna do some ice skatin’!” Then he plowed through a 4-foot-high mound of snow left by a plow and proceeded to swerve and slide down the narrow road — heading straight for the lake.
The temperature was hovering in the low teens and this cold snap had been around for a week. Not one of us gave a serious thought as to whether the reservoir ice was thick enough to hold a full-sized car with four people in it — weighing somewhere around 4,000 pounds. Darrel just crashed through the snow berm at the edge of the lake, and suddenly we were on the ice. He cranked the wheel while revving the engine and started laughing as we slid in a graceful circle. He straightened it out, floored the gas pedal and we were ripping out across the lake — doing 30 mph or so — cranking the wheel into a series of doughnuts that must have lasted a quarter of a mile.
We repeated that maneuver at least a dozen times, covering a large portion of the lake. Darrel finally got bored, found our entrance spot and somehow got us back on the road without getting stuck.
It’s a testimonial to the teen mind that not once did we think we could hit a patch of thin ice that might crack and send that heavy car, and us, into the freezing water and to the bottom of that 200-foot-deep reservoir. It never occurred to us that since no one knew where we had gone, no one would ever think to look for us at the bottom of a lake.
Unless someone saw our tire tracks across the ice before the next snowfall, it’s likely we never would have been found. Our parents might never have known what happened to us.
The illusion of immortality let us assume the ice was thick enough to hold us, but it could have killed us just as surely as a head-on collision.
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