Grand Cherokee Rollover

 

For years I had to listen to a college buddy spout off about how his Grand Cherokee on 35 inch tires could take on any full sized Bronco. He told me, several times, that his Cherokee could handle jumps at 30 mph on the trail, land, and continue driving, in one motion. He never meant to jump of course, but recklessly speeding through the New Mexico desert sometimes produces undesired results.

 

It was years after listening to this young man’s ranting and raving about the reliability of Jeep Cherokees that I witnessed this somewhat remarkable occurrence firsthand. My cousin, around 17 years old at the time, was following me in his Grand Cherokee to the beach. He had the back of the car loaded up with gear, coolers, fishing rods, guitars, etc.  He had so much stuff back there that he couldn’t even see through the rear window.

 

Several hours in, he and his father took a wrong turn onto a rural back road. They slowed down, stopping in the middle of the empty lanes. My cousin, a fairly young driver, planned to reverse into a small gravel driveway with a large ditch on either side.

 

Suddenly, halfway through the turnabout, while the car was sitting broadside in the middle of the road, things went horribly wrong. An ambulance sped down the road at about 60mph, rounding the corner and heading straight for them, forcing my cousin to reverse very quickly off of the road.

 

Since there was no way to see out the rear window with all of that beach gear back there, he took a guess at where the driveway would be and punched the gas. The ambulance shot past and my cousin sat in silence, gasping over such a narrow escape. In the heat of the moment, neither he nor his father had noticed that the Jeep hadn’t made it into the driveway.

 

“Pull forward,” his father said, sensing that the car was at an awkward angle. The rear wheels spun and the car, very slowly, drifted down the embankment. I watched in my rear view mirror as the Jeep settled in the ditch and began to capsize.

 

They screamed wildly, my cousin still pressing the gas in hopes that the two remaining wheels would gain traction and correct the vehicle. “Put the windows up!” he yelled, frantically pressing the buttons for the passenger side windows, which were slowly rolling into the mud. His father covered his face, expecting the window to burst with the pressure of the roll. The car groaned and creaked and my cousin shut off the engine.

 

I arrived back there and helped them climb out of the vehicle. The Jeep had turned over onto its roof and my cousin’s seatbelt was jammed and had suspended him in the driver seat. His father was holding him up with his feet, relieving the pressure from his son’s weight so that the seatbelt would come off. The very same ambulance returned to help and we quickly persuaded them to continue with their previous call.

 

“I’ve never seen a car roll over so slow,” said the ambulance driver. “I’d never known it could happen like that.”

An hour later, a tow truck arrived and they were able to flip the vehicle over by pulling on the front chassis. My cousin let it sit upright for ten minutes, searching for fuel leaks or damage. Unbelievably, there was nothing wrong with the vehicle. The tow truck backed up, preparing to haul it away to the mechanic. My cousin asked him to wait.

 

“I think it’s alright,” he said. The mechanic scoffed. My cousin started his Jeep and left it idling for ten minutes while a crowd of onlookers gaped in amazement. Everyone had been sure that the engine was flooded, that he’d broken electrical connections, that a hose was torn, that some internal system had been damaged by the wreck. My cousin drove the car all the way to the beach, arriving just two hours behind schedule.

 

Lumina Blow Out

My 75 year old grandmother put her Chevy Lumina up for sale in 2006. She tried for weeks, months, but no one would buy it, not even for under $1,000. My brother, being the kind of guy he is, decided to take it off of her hands for $900 as a way to help her out. He had wanted to sell his Silverado anyway, so figured why not take the Lumina for a few years until it died and then he would just buy another truck.

 

It hadn’t been one full month since my grandmother sold him the car when the front left tire blew out going around a curve. My brother, not a fast driver, and a pretty laid back kind of guy, recalls that the car washed off of the road so fast that he didn’t even notice it was happening. The wheel gave way and the car jerked sideways, hurling him into a ditch. The ditch was just the right height that it caused the car to flip over, sending car spiraling like a meteor into a telephone pole.

 

 

 

 

The Chevy, after striking and snapping the pole in half, continued its forward trajectory and tumbled into a field. My brother described his situation post-accident as “sitting in the back seat as if someone else had been driving!”

 

He always wore his seatbelt, and it was still fastened even after the wreck. The force of the roll had caused him to slip out of it, hit the ceiling, and land in the back seat. He was a little bruised, but not in horrible shape.

 

My grandmother, having owned the car since the early ‘90’s, thought what may have happened had she been driving when the tire blew out. It seems my brother had purchased the car just in time.

 

Jeep Rollover

Having just rolled his Jeep two days prior, my cousin Jerry was feeling a bit shaky on the road. Nevertheless, I asked if he would mind driving to the pier so that I could get some live bait for fishing that afternoon.

 

“I need to wash all the mud off of the car anyway,” he said, starting the vehicle. Since the rollover, he had been calling the Jeep “Old Reliable”. Little did he know, he had yet to see the extent of his Jeep’s capabilities.

 

We pulled in at the gas station and power washed the mud off of the passenger side and roof of the vehicle. We laughed about it, citing how unlucky he’d been but how amazing it was that no one had gotten hurt. Everyone was still very impressed that the car was in fine condition after a ¾ rollover on the side of the highway.

 

After the wash we drove down to the pier. “Speed up,” I said, noticing that he was doing 30 in a 45. “I don’t know where the pier entrance is,” he said. “I’ll tell you when it’s coming up. It’s easy to see.”

 

He increased speed to 45 along the winding roads of Topsail Island and I waited for the sign for the turn to the pier. We made casual conversation, talked about where we wanted to fish, what rods we wanted to use, what sorts of bait we were going to use. He was just beginning to loosen up from the last accident. After you roll a car, especially at a young age, it’s hard to be calm on the road. It takes a few days, perhaps even weeks, before the adrenaline stops pumping in your mind at every corner.

 

“There!” I shouted, pointing at a sand driveway. The entrance was too sharp of an angle. The driveway was sand. We were doing 45 and the Jeep had no chance of making the turn. My cousin Jerry braked as hard as he could. The front tires turned to the right but had little traction in the deep sand. The Jeep continued straight at about 30 mph, careening into a telephone pole that had been landscaped as an entrance barrier.

 

What happened next was incredible. At 30 mph, full brakes applied, front wheels wrenched at a 70 degree angle to the right, the Jeep smashed into a 1 ½ foot tall wooden barrier. The bottom plate protecting the engine made a horrific smashing noise and the wheels bounced the front of the Jeep high into the air. When I say high, I mean very high, as though we were almost perpendicular to the ground, like a rocket ship read to blast off. My head flew forward, whipping with the force of the impact.

 

The rear wheels made contact with the wood, snapping the front back down and launching us into the air as if we’d taken the Jeep off of a ramp. The weight of the engine forced the front of the car and lowered it right into the rear of a parked car. The other guy’s car, a Kia sedan, was brushed out of the way by the sheer speed and size of our Jeep. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I didn’t even feel anything when we hit that car.”

 

Our Jeep spun across the sandy lot, resting a mere few feet from another parked vehicle. “That’s one way to get to the parking lot,” I said. My face was frozen in shock, transfixed by what had just happened. I looked down at the instrument panel and sighed with disbelief.

 

“What is it?” I asked. He took his foot off of the brake and the car lurched forward. “It’s still drivable,” he said. He looked around the parking lot. No one had seen the accident except for two boys on the back of a pickup truck.

 

“We didn’t see anything,” they said. We nodded and they drove away. My cousin and I wiped up the tracks in the parking lot in hopes that no one would realize that we had come careening off the road at 45 mph and smashed over the barrier before striking the Kia.

 

Instead, we went onto the pier, found the man who owned the car, and my cousin said, “Sir, I was turning around in the parking lot and, well, I accidentally tapped your Kia.”

 

My cousin paid for the repairs, of course, but since it happened on private property no one ever had to call the police. Aside from having the front end aligned and a new headlight and fender installed, the Jeep was alright. He drove it for the rest of the trip without needing any immediate repairs. His ’97 Jeep is still running well.

By Jesse Stretch

Jesse has completed his first published novel, "Desperate Highway, The True Story of a Criminal" available on Amazon.com.

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