30-Day Drawing Challenge: Day 16

The challenge is a wreck!

See the blog Expatriatism for a list of the other worthy participants, including my artist niece, and links to their daily drawings.

Day 16: Our assignment was to draw our Worst Accident.

I was going to draw myself the time I was “helping” the plumber install a new water heater (yep, there’s that scary plumbing thing, again). I was probably about 6 or 7 years old. I quickly leaned over to pick up a brass fitting he dropped… before he could yell to stop me. Trouble was, he’d been soldering it with a torch and it was so hot my hand was seriously burned (no TMI details here.) But hands are hard to draw so…

Instead, I drew a picture of a car accident we had years ago. Our Toyota broke down just before dawn on a long stretch of icy highway a few miles south of Winnemucca, Nevada. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of that town. And don’t worry. You haven’t missed much.

Anyway, I was looking under the hood (as linguists will do) pretending to know how to fix it, when a guy rear-ended us going about 55 mph. So a new career was launched for me. No, wait… I was launched, as an involuntary Crash Test Dummy. I rolled down the ice and landed in a snow bank.

Scary. But I survived, basically intact. Although I wonder if some of my middle-aged aches and pains trace back to that crisp winter morning in Winnemucca.

I’ll save the rest of the story (the hospital, the casino, the Shriners’ convention… all before lunch) for another blog post. Maybe it would make a good Travel Tuesday.