Flashing Red Lights, Frustration, and Freakishly Close Encounters of the Cervidae Kind

Disclaimer: This is a post from Scott. I (Jocelyn) have done all the other posts. So, now this blog can officially be the Scott and Jocelyn blog!

Two weeks ago, we had a very interesting experience on our way home from school and work. It was a dark and stormy Wednesday night (really, it was dark and stormy…and it was a Wednesday for that matter.) It is important to know that it was stormy…not so much that it was dark, but that it was stormy…and it was Wednesday. Jocelyn and I were on our way home from work and school and just pulled onto I-75 to go home. The entrance we got on the freeway at is no more than 1 mile from the exit where we get off. Just as we get onto the entrance ramp we round a corner and see the entire freeway before us full of frozen red lights. I-75 had turned into an utterly static parking lot as far as our eyes could see. This was bad news because it was a Wednesday (see, I told you it was important to know it was a Wednesday).

It just so happens that Wednesday evenings at 7:00, Jocelyn and I teach a personal finance class at church. I am a firm believer in starting meetings on time and told the class that we would begin our classes promptly at 7:00 every Wednesday night. After 10 consecutive weeks of beginning at 7:00, I was not about to break the streak. I glanced at the clock to see how much time we had. 6:20. We sat on the entrance ramp waiting for any signs of movement. The clock kept ticking…6:25…6:30. The rain drummed down on the roof of our car as we sat overlooking the sea of red. My fingers drummed the steering wheel impatiently watching the minutes tick by with no sign of reprieve from the gridlock. After sitting in the same place for over 15 minutes, I turned off the car hoping to invoke the eternal Law of Traffic that states once you have sat idling for any significant length of time, traffic will begin moving the moment you turn off your car. No such luck tonight.

The digital numbers on our clock ticked closer and closer to 7:00. When it became apparent that no matter how quickly traffic cleared, we would still not make it to the church on time, I called the one member of the class whose number I had in my phone and asked him to let the rest of the class know that we would have to push our start time back to 7:30. In an effort to find out why in the world we hadn’t moved in over 25 minutes, we turned on the radio and listened for a traffic report. (This is where the stormy part comes in.) Right at the very exit we needed to take, a semi had slipped on the wet roads and was jackknifed blocking all lanes of traffic. To make matters worse, there was also a diesel spill on the road making it impossible for any traffic to pass.

Around 6:50, traffic finally began moving. When we got home, Jocelyn scrambled to make us salads for dinner as I got the materials for class together. As we were rushing out the door with our dinners, my bowl of salad slid from its perch on top of my binder and launched a beautiful salad, complete with salad dressing, all over our front room. Perturbed at another set back and having lost my dinner, I ran to grab towels to clean the mess. We tidied up as best we could and ran out the door with the few pieces of lettuce we could salvage from the carpet.

It was now 7:10 and we still had to get the room set up for the class. We were not, however, too worried because the church was close and we never had traffic on the roads we took to church…except tonight. We pulled onto the street and again saw the ominous, steady glow of brake lights. Letting out an audible groan, we pulled into traffic and sat, waiting. After another ten minutes, the cars began moving past a three-car pile-up that had been moved to the side of the road. (You have to understand that in Cincinnati, the “side of the road” means the right lane of a two lane road.) It was now getting dangerously close to 7:30 and we were still not at the church. As we pulled off of that road, I said aloud, “There had better not be a wreck on this road!” Had I only known then how close we would come to making that statement true.

I take back an earlier statement I made…it is important to know that it was a dark night. As we were being passed by a car in the left lane, we noticed movement in the car’s headlights. Jocelyn immediately began screaming, “Deer! Deer! Deer!” I slammed on the brakes as a deer came bounding across the road not more than 10 feet in front of us. After it scampered off the road, I accelerated to get back up to speed when out of thin air, another deer appeared directly in front of the car. I slammed even harder on the brakes causing the car to go into a slide on the wet road. Everything seemed to slow down and I could see the deer’s eyes get wider and wider. It was almost as if I could see a little thought bubble come out of its head that read something like, “Not gonna make it…not gonna make it!!!” It was only half right. Just as the deer made its final Herculean leap to get out of the trajectory of our careening car, we felt its back leg knick the front corner of our car. I regained control of the car as the deer bounded off to safety. Jocelyn and I immediately erupted into that terrified, relieved laughter that comes after a night of frustration and near death experiences. We at last pulled into the safety of the church parking lot and found that someone had already unlocked the building. (It was a good thing too because the family we normally borrow a church key from was not answering their phone that night.) Needless to say, it was an interesting night fraught with flashing red lights, frustration, and freakishly close encounters of the Cervidae kind.

For those of you wondering, Cervidae is the genus of deer (at least according to the all-knowing Wikipedia).