I’ve heard that a child’s teenage
years can age the parents. I always
thought this was in reference to the years after they turned 18; when they were
adults and could do whatever the hell they wanted. I have recently had an epiphany borne out of
some hair raising experiences. It seems
the aging process is accelerated during their teenage years whilst they are
learning to drive.
Most of you will remember my blog
about Miss Marvellous learning to drive from the Blog Titled: Shit Happens -
Learning to Drive posted on 22nd January 2015. Here it is almost a year to the day and I am posting
about it again. This time, I am not
posting about some elderly citizen who needs to be reamed with a cactus for
behaving like a jerk, this time I am sharing some experiences that have surely contributed
to the ever increasing lines etched onto my face.
Having recently endured an operation on both feet, it
had been a while since Miss Marvellous had sat behind the wheel sporting the
‘L’s. She was not allowed to drive until
her feet had healed enough to be able to stomp on the brakes. I’m kind of glad of those criteria given the
experiences of the last month or so. I
take my hat off to my daughter; she handled the mishaps (near death
experiences?) like a boss and took the lessons learned in her stride.
A brief
account of the first occasion actually appeared as a status update on my
Facebook account. We were once again
located in Bright, our usual Christmas holiday location. Miss Marvellous was eager to get back into
the car and after the first day, she and The Captain decided that she would do
a two hour drive most days to get some hours and some experience under her
belt. On this particular day, we had
decided to visit Yackandandah, approximately a 50 minute drive from
Bright. The drive there was fine. Miss Marvellous was driving, The Captain was in
the front seat riding gunshot and Boy Wonder and I were in the back seat. Yackandandah is a gorgeous country town that
actually housed a couple of really nice galleries. As we were sitting outside a small café
sipping a latte before heading back, we heard the distant rumble of
thunder. The sky was a boiling mass of
dark clouds that promised rain in the very near future. Captain Fantastic looked skyward and felt the
need to unnecessarily state that the clouds held rain. You don’t have to be a water diviner to work
that one out but I let it slide without comment (a miraculous moment in time
right there). We had no idea that the
rain would be as horrendously torrential as it turned out to be. Had we known, we’d have just stayed in town
until it passed.
As we
headed back to the car, the sky had darkened and it had started to spit but I
was hopeful that it would not get too heavy before we reached the safety of the
caravan park. About 15 minutes into the
trip home, it had started to rain with earnest.
The speed limit on those rural highways is 100km/hr and it was at this
speed that the heavens opened up and the torrential rain started. Not prone to panic, Miss Marvellous set the
windscreen wipers from fast to ‘hopped up on cocaine’ but still nothing could
be seen though the windscreen. She dropped
to about 80km/hour, still dangerously fast when you can’t see a Goddamned thing
out of the window.
The
Captain finally asked her if she’d like to pull over and to my horror, she said,
“No,
it’s okay, I can see the lines.”
What
the fuck? How can you see the
lines? You cannot see anything outside
of the window except the pelting rain – you couldn’t even see more than a meter
in front of the car. If someone had
stopped on that highway, we would have seen them seconds before we ploughed
into them and died. Boy Wonder and I
were holding hands in the backseat, united in our terror. The Captain was holding on to the Jesus bar
and although he would never admit it, he was absolutely shitting himself. Boy Wonder had started twisting my fingers
painfully in his panic. I seriously
thought we were going to die…so much so that I wanted to scream,
“I love
you all!”
but I
was paralysed with fear so I just squeezed Boy Wonder’s hand harder. Then Boy Wonder stepped over all sorts of boundaries,
swearing to himself then yelling,
"Holy
Shit!"
when
the rain got even harder. He looked at
me and said,
“How
can she be driving in this?”
Unable
to even form an answer in my mind, I was thinking that I didn’t want to see death
coming so I looked out of my side window and told him not to look out of the
front windscreen. I was planking in the
backseat and my eyes were bulging like a panicked cow; Boy Wonder continued to
stare out of the front windscreen. It
was at this point that I started emitting a high pitched squeal and squeezed my eyes shut. Miss Marvellous continued driving, not even a little worried,
even though NO ONE COULD SEE A FRIGGING THING OUT THE WINDOW! Finally the rain eased but I was so tense that
I could have cracked walnuts with my butt cheeks and was breathing like I'd
just escaped the clutches of death...which is literally what had just happened!
Miss
Marvellous looked in the rear view mirror and smiled wickedly, saying,
"Are
you all calm in the back there?"
My lips
had been squeezed together for so long with such pressure that I couldn’t open
them enough to form words, let alone scream,
“No I
am not fucking calm...you nearly killed me you Satanic Sorceress!”
All
hail the queen of calm and evil.
So, it turns
out that I can hold my breath for five minutes.
My right thigh was quivering from braking in the back seat and all of my
senses were on high alert for a very long time.
I spent the rest of the afternoon curled up in the foetal position
trying to restore my heart rate to something akin the ’normal’, not an easy
feat when Satan’s lovechild kept taunting me for the remainder of the afternoon.
As a
side note, that annoying rain ended up staying for about five days. Weather doesn’t usually bother me but
considering we were staying in a cabin in a caravan park, there is not a lot one
can do when it rains like that for so many days straight. I wrote some chapters for my new novel and I
went for a walk (and by the time I got home it had started to rain so heavily
that I was saturated though and my clothes were rendered transparent). One night, just as I’d put all of the kebabs
on the barbeque, it started raining so heavily that the food was swimming all
over the hotplate within minutes and it was mixed up leaves and gumnuts that
were falling with the rain out of the trees and onto the barbeque; sizzling with
beetles and frying spiders. I tried to
hold an umbrella over the whole mess but the umbrella broke and the rain
continued to pour down and all I managed to do was to steam my face and frizz
my hair so I looked like a crazy Italian woman boiling food on a barbeque. In the end I had to scoop that shit up and
take it inside the cabin to finish cooking it, minus the added bonuses provided
by nature. That relentless rain,
uncommon for the area at that time of year, had me questioning my state of
mental health a number of times as I became surly and short tempered in
annoyance. Then, we woke one morning to
the song (or throbbing cacophony, if you prefer) of cicadas in searing heat and
it was all over.
Back to the driving experiences; whilst we were in Bright, Miss Marvellous clocked up 40 hours in total in her learner’s book so we vowed to keep it up when we got back, if only on weekends. This past weekend, instead of just ticking a box, we decided to go visit The Captain’s parents in Mount Martha for Miss Marvellous to clock up a few driving hours. Apart from some complete knob travelling at 75km/hr in a 100km/hr zone; holding up traffic and having The Captain declaring,
“People who sit on 80 in the centre
lane need to be shot,”
the trip was cool. As we were nearing the neighbourhood of our
destination, The Captain missed the turn off so we decided to go down to take
the scenic route along the esplanade beside the beach. That was a complete fail.
Word has recently spread on Social
Media about a ‘The Pillars’ in Mount Martha with headlines like Victoria’s Biggest Secret Named Among The
World’s 20 Best Trips, so now thousands of beachgoers have started flocking
to the beach to jump off these cliffs.
This new phenomenon equates to cars parked on both sides of the esplanade,
hundreds of people walking beside those cars with prams, towels and beach bags
and two single lanes trying to pass without accidentally flattening these
beachgoers.
Miss Marvellous crawled along with
the other cars past these careless individuals meandering all over the place
like Brown’s cows, with complete disregard to the congestion they were
causing. As we passed, we could see that
the beaches were a simmering mass of scantily clad people and the waters were
populated with jet skis and small boats.
The situation worsened as we approached the winding roads where cars had
parked haphazardly on nature strips that were not wide enough to leave room for
passing cars and clusters of beachgoers were rambling across the road in front
of us. We were looking forward to
entering the street leading up to The Captain’s parents’ house to escape the
mess. This was false hope and as when we
turned into the street, we noted that it happened to be opposite the entrance
to The Pillars. This road was narrow and had cars parked on both sides of the street so it was actually quite
dangerous and nigh on impossible for Miss Marvellous to negotiate her way
through the quagmire of randomly parked vehicles where the concept of ‘near
enough is good enough’ was employed with too much regularity. The flashing lights of a police car up ahead
validated our opinions of how dangerous the clogged street had become. Miss Marvellous was navigating her way
through this complex assembly of negligently parked cars when we spied another
car coming in the opposite direction.
The other vehicle didn’t appear to be slowing and as Miss Marvellous
attempted to move over to the side of the road, she came dangerously close to
hitting a car that was parked precariously angled with its corner poking out
and as I am want to do, I panicked out loud and said,
“Look out you’re going to hit,”
at the same time that an alarmed Captain
yelled something similar. She stopped
and said,
“What am I going to hit?”
but we had already safely moved past
the car so I was breathing heavily with my heart thudding
painfully in my chest and blood roaring in my ears. By the time we exited the vehicle and walked
into the house my breathing had returned to normal but I had a film of sweat
all over my face and I seriously felt the need for a little lie down.
We decided to take a different route
home to avoid stupid people doing stupid things and the threat of a heart
attack for Mother in the back seat. During
the trip I decided to call my Aunt to pass the time. She answered on the second ring but with the air
conditioner blowing and the radio on in the front seat, albeit at a sensible
decibel, she couldn’t hear me property.
She was yelling down the phone like I had a hearing problem until the
radio was turned down and then she started talking to me. After establishing that I was in fact me and
not my cousin, a normal conversation ensued until Miss Marvellous took the
Freeway exit like a rocket sled on rails.
The Captain told her to slow down as
she exited but she hadn’t slowed down enough and we were propelled to the right
side of car as the g-force of the exit speed on a sharp bend had us feeling
like we were on a rollercoaster at Dream World.
The Captain’s left bicep, the same one he constantly thrusts in our
faces, asking if we want to have a feel of its magnificence, was bulging
impressively, whilst clinging to the Jesus bar, and straining from the effort not
to succumb to those g-forces and slide to the right like the rest of us. His right hand was on the dashboard and he
looked to all intents and purposes like he was about to scream like a thirteen
year old girl at the One Direction concert.
I had found Boy Wonder’s hand and I was wringing the bejesus out of it
like it was a life support and babbling nonsense down to the phone to my poor
confused Aunt. The tires were squealing
and I was just waiting to either go up onto two wheels or hydroplane into a
ditch, either way, I felt like I was in a Dukes of Hazard episode and all that
was missing was,
“Yeeeeehaaaaaaw!”.
My Aunt was yelling down the phone at
me,
“What the hell are you doing? I can’t
understand what you’re saying.”
I wanted to whisper,
“She’s trying to kill us,”
but that would have her fretting. Finally as she completed the exit, the car
rocked back onto all four wheels evenly and we all unclenched. By this stage I was sweating profusely and
had the sudden urge to giggle, as I tend to do when panicked. The Captain’s breathing was laboured and he
appeared edgy. I was waiting for my hair
to fall out; Boy Wonder was glaring at me and shaking his head as I silently
giggled in my corner. I quickly ended
the call to my poor puzzled Aunt and sat silent in the back seat.
Normalcy resumed in the Pathfinder
until a car up ahead jammed on its breaks which had a knock on affect with all
the cars behind it and we were suddenly thrust into another perilous
situation. Captain Fantastic yelled,
“Brake!”
Miss Marvellous had to suddenly stamp
hard on the brakes to avoid colliding with the rear of the car in front. We all pitched forward, our faces alarmed and
our seatbelts snapped taught; mine digging painfully into my boobs. I half expected all four of us to be sitting
in the front seat by the time we came to a complete halt.
We were all stress sweating; The
Captain was barking orders like a drill sergeant, Boy Wonder was looking
everywhere but at me and valiantly defending his sister, poor Miss Marvellous
was learning a valuable lesson in velocity and all the while I was breathing
hard in the backseat, feeling my heart palpitating and my toes tingling with
the after effects of the adrenaline rush.
No matter how many times I tapped my heels together in the backseat muttering,
“There’s no place like home”
I still had to wait for the fucking Pathfinder
to take me there.
Doona
