How To Snap Roll A Chevrolet

Clevis O. Laverty

HOW TO SNAP ROLL A CHEVROLET

Do you think that there ought to be an investigation of a man who could get up in the middle of the night in order to go for a horseback ride in the rain? You do? There is no record of any such investigation of Paul Revere. Of course, the absurdity here is in the arrangement of the question. But I was once accused of flying eleven thousand miles in order to get into an automobile accident.

The preceding paragraph is absurd; the incident I’m going to relate was absurd. Always a source of amazement and amusement to me is the frequency of the occasions whereby a series of absurd little incidents evolves into the center of tragic potentialities and finally resolves itself into absurdities.

It was true; we had flown eleven thousand miles from Miami to Karachi. We were suppose to have been a most efficient crew of a most up-to-date airplane making a survey flight of Near East landing fields to find out whether or not the C-54 could be accommodated. Efficient? We had had more troubles than Carter has pills. That modern aircraft had developed trouble with everything but the passengers; there weren’t any. We had been due back in Miami by Christmas; we spent Christmas in Gura. And now with the New Year almost in sight, we were at the apex of our trip at a hotel in Karachi. The name of that hotel: The Killarney, and all the tea in China wouldn’t have purchased an Irish stew there.

Needless to say, we were all anxious to see an end to this farce from which we felt no good could come. Word came on our second night that we would leave for Habbaniya the next morning. We overslept, then made a mad dash for the dining room. The Killarney dining room! As you stepped into it, you half expected to see Gunga Din scurrying around filling the water glasses from an old goat intestine. We filed into the dining room just in time to see the captain finishing his breakfast; he admonished us to “get on the ball.” He left. We sat down. We felt we had plenty of time, and so we leisurely ordered, waited, and prepared to eat.

Lo, that series of absurdities hadn’t ended: the table broke down and spread itself in all directions as though it too were in on some diabolical conspiracy. By the time another table had been prepared and another breakfast brought in, we finished in time to observe the captain disappear down the road in the staff car.

I dashed back into the hotel and called the airport for another staff car. I should have been a little suspicious when it arrived so soon, but we were in a hurry and merely congratulated ourselves on its early arrival. Then we had the temerity to tell the driver to step on it. How that car ever got through the streets of the city of Karachi without solving their overpopulation problem, I’ll never know.

Almost instantly, we were shrieking down a long, narrow ribbon of concrete flanked by steel telegraph poles. Up to this point, our driver’s good luck, rather than skill, kept us on this side of eternity.

Then they happened. The events piled up. There was the RAF truck lumbering along or appeared to be. We later discovered it was traveling sixty miles an hour. Our driver was a real Barney Oldfield; he zoomed up behind the truck swerved to the right to pass. The absurdity of absurdities was right there in front of us: A great big unconcerned camel pulling one of those ridiculously small carts.

We made a ninety degree left turn between the front of the truck and the camel, taking the truck’s right front fender with us. I don’t know how many of those ninety degree turns we made; I have a fleeting recollection of steel telegraph poles approaching us first on one side and then on the other. Then they all got mixed up as we rolled over and finally came to rest right side up.

Shaken but unhurt, we emerged from the remains. My memory of the ride ends with this final absurd scene and my own crazy thoughts. There was the flight engineer dancing around in the middle of the road, unable to remove a pith helmet that had been jammed down over his ears; the camel standing there with his nose turned up as though the whole thing stank; and the driver standing there wringing his hands and telling us that it just didn’t handle like his old man’s tractor in Kansas.

My own thoughts: What a crazy bunch of people to go out and snap roll a Chevrolet so early in the morning.