The Epiphany
On many online sword and knife forums my signature on posts is: “Then one night as I was going backwards through a cornfield at 90mph I had an epiphany…” A lot of people have asked me about the origin of that quote, so the story follows:
Back in the eighties I had a hot rod ’78 Toyota Corolla with built TRD suspension, twin-cam motor with dual carbs and custom exhaust. It made 135hp at the rear wheels. Doesn’t sound like much, but in a 1900 pound car it gave me a better power-to-weight ratio than the contemporary V8 Mustang GT. No torque to speak of so it wasn’t as quick off the line, but quicker than you might imagine and fast as a thief once it got moving.
Anyway I fell in with bad company, by which I mean like minded idiots. Several of us had ‘hot’ small-bores: a supercharged VW Bug, a turbo’d 914, a hot ‘dime’ (Datsun B210) or two and we started chasing each other around in our cars. This evolved into the kind of thing that only bored twenty-somethings (that don’t realize they can die) come up with. We called it Rat Racing. Named for the idea of rats in a maze.
Here’s how it works: you start out side-by-side at a stoplight with your trip odometer set to 0. When the light changes you go. Whoever winds up in front decides what the course is. At the end of ten miles whoever is ahead is the winner. We eventually evolved some rules like “no freeways” and “No residential neighborhoods” and that your rear bumper had to be ahead of the other guy’s front bumper before you could take the lead and turn onto a different street. But that was pretty nearly it for rules.
This was endlessly more amusing than drag racing, and made for better stories besides. It was also completely insane. It was a form of outlaw racing where small-bores dominated for the most part. We had people try it in traditional muscle cars. They lost and generally didn’t have a good time. Muscle cars didn’t have the handling to keep up and once you got past them they could never overtake you again if you stuck to curvy roads. There were a couple of then-modern pony cars that stuck it out and sometimes even won, but these were the exception. I was chasing just such a car when The Incident occurred.
The car was a modified Camero IROC-Z (early ’80s- don’t really remember the exact year.) It was dark blue and it was driven by a guy that talked like a surfer dude and had a hair-style of the sort commonly associated with electric shocks. He got ahead of me off the line and headed out on a course that took us onto White-Knuckle Road (as we called it.) It runs along the western edge of the Snohomish Valley, and I could never quite get past him. Then he hooked a left onto Seattle Hill Road as it heads out across the flats.
There are two right-angle turns, a left and a right. I mean sharp, ninety degree turns marked ’15mph.’ I was caught up in the excitement and not paying enough attention. I didn’t know that he didn’t know where he was going; he’d panicked because he couldn’t believe my car was staying on his ass like it was. He hit the straight on Seattle Hill Rd., hammered it and pulled away under V8 torque and I went hell-for-leather after him. I had overcome the torque deficit and was coming up on him fast when he came on that 90 degree left unexpectedly. Suddenly I saw his brake-lights come on and there was a cloud of tire smoke as he frantically tried to slow enough to make the corner. Meanwhile I was storming up on his ass at about 115-120mph.
Miraculously he seemed like he might make the corner and I put the Corolla sideways. I figured that my only chance was to slide in sideways and power through the slide onto the next straight. It actually seemed like it might work for a second… then I put the power down and the back end went right out from under me. Suddenly I was going ass-first through the cornfield. I had released the brakes and stomped the clutch when I lost it, and was free-wheeling backwards at very high speed.
Ears of corn were exploding against the top of the car like machinegun bullets as I bounced along, mowing down the mature cornstalks. It was then that I had the epiphany: I couldn’t think of a single reason good enough to be sitting where I was at that precise moment.
I mean, here I was, out of control going about 90 miles per hour through a cornfield in the middle of the night. Backwards, no less. Any second now I would probably hit something and smash my car. Or flip. Or explode. It was going to be a real mess to explain this even if nothing catastrophic happened. And for what? To win the $100? For fun? I’d had fun before and I was pretty sure this wasn’t it.
Eventually I slowed down enough to brake and stop my backwards progress. I could see nothing ahead of me but savaged corn and darkness. Corn juice was actually dripping off the roof. The car had stalled so I reached down, twisted the key and miraculously the car started. I crept slowly forward through the murdered corn until I was near the edge of the road and could see the lights of the Camero.
Surfer Dude, bless his heart, had actually stopped and backed up to see where I’d disappeared to. I stopped at the edge of the corn, noticing for the first time the three-foot deep ditch between me and the road. I must have sailed over it to get into the field. So I crept along the edge of the field (more innocent corn senselessly slaughtered!) until I came to a culvert and could get back on the road. Surfer Dude pulled up and asked if I was OK with eyes the size of saucers. I said that I was, so he immediately asked if the car was OK.
“It seems to be,” I said rather bemusedly, then added, “By the way, you win!”
We returned to the Herfy’s Drive-In on Evergreen where we were meeting our cohorts in crime and I dutifully coughed up the $100. We told the story over milkshakes and assorted flavors of fried fat. I told them that I was done, and that was my last Rat Race.
A few years ago the subject came up at a dinner party and we talked about Rat Racing under the heading or “Criminally Stupid Things Done While Young.” Our hostess (who has known me almost since those days) asked “Why did you stop?” “Well,” I replied, “One night as my car was going backwards through a cornfield at 90 miles-per-hour I had an epiphany…”
Not sure what happened to the rest of the Rat Racers; nothing that ever made the news anyway. I guess it just faded away as common sense overcame the participants one by one.
