They were underneath the four-wheeler.
My cousin, a friend of hers, and I got together to ride four-wheelers one sunny Spring afternoon. It was a beautiful day. The flowers were blooming, the bunnies were hopping, and the bees were buzzing as we made our way out to the country.
We broke out the four-wheelers, loaded up, and headed out. They were on the red four-wheeler. I was on the yellow four-wheeler. The red was a bigger ATV and could fit two people more comfortably. We’d been driving for some time with my cousin and her friend leading when I zoomed around them.
After 2-3 minutes, I looked behind me, and they weren’t there. I thought they had slowed down and were trying to make me think they had gone another way or turned around. My cousin is notorious for playing pranks on unsuspecting, innocent, kind-hearted souls.
So I turned around and sped back as fast as the ATV would go, which was a good thing.
I topped a hill and saw the four-wheeler overturned in the ditch beside the road.
I thought, “Wow, they are relentless in playing pranks. This is a little extreme.”
It wasn’t a prank. I cut the motor off and heard screaming.
Then I saw a foot peeking out from under the ATV.
I jumped off and ran over to where they were pinned underneath the beast of a machine.
“Caleb, help us!”
Yeah, no kidding, Captain Obvious. Okay, that was not what I thought at the time. I just now thought that. And I laughed. My first thought was, “God help us!”
I picked up the back end of the four-wheeler a few inches. They tried to move out from under it. Not fast enough. It got heavy, and I had to set it back down…right on top of my cousin’s friend’s head.
Oops. I had hoped I would set it down on one of their legs or a torso, maybe a shoulder.
She screamed, “IT’S ON MY HEAD!”. I think the words, “you blooming idiot!” and “you hind leg of a bumpy toad!” were in there somewhere.
Thankfully, I hadn’t let it down all the way. I got a sudden burst of adrenaline, probably from those uncouth words cast in my direction. I lifted the ATV a couple of feet into the air and held it until they both got out from under it.
They were shaken up a bit from the wreck, and I was shaken up from having just lifted 550 pounds of dead weight.
What happened was this: when I went around them, dust was kicked up from the tires and got in my cousin’s eyes, then she couldn’t see. Or see as well. She reached up to rub her eyes and meandered off the dirt road into the ditch beside it.
It was steep and about four feet down from the road. The front right tire went off the road, and when she tried to steer back onto the road, she overcorrected, and the ATV overturned.
She tried to holler for help, but the revving engine of that powerful yellow four-wheeler drowned out her desperate cries.
It’s a good thing I looked back, and that I broke the sound barrier going back.
Things could have turned out a lot worse that day.
to those who might need to take a look around,
– Caleb
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