Trip to Old Forge, January 2017

My brother has this uncanny ability to make terrible ideas sound completely reasonable.

Back in January 2017, he'd just started his grand adventure around the country in a tiny trailer he'd spent months building. His first stop was an old friend in Old Forge, New York.

Now, if you're not familiar with Old Forge, imagine looking at a map of New York, finding the part that says "absolutely fucking freezing," and then voluntarily driving there in the middle of January.

For reasons that still escape me, that's exactly what he did.

Naturally, when he called and said,

"Come spend the weekend."

...my response was,

"Why the fuck not?"

At the time, I owned a white Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X.

Jesus Christ.

I still get goosebumps just writing the name.

That car was ridiculous.

I once ended up racing a motorcycle somewhere in Tennessee and actually kept up with the bastard.

That's another story.

The important part is this:

The Evo was not a car.

It was four-wheel-drive poor decision making with a turbocharger.

So I head north.

The first hour is uneventful. Interstate 87. Sun's out. Armin van Buuren blasting through the speakers. Life is good. I'm doing a completely respectable...mid-eighties.

Eventually I leave the highway and turn toward Old Forge.

That's when the road changes.

Single lane.

Mountain road.

Long sweeping corners.

Elevation changes.

One of those roads engineers accidentally design specifically for people with impulse control issues.

The speed limit is 55.

I'm doing 90.

The Evo doesn't care.

Honestly, the car is probably offended I'm going that slowly.

It just plants itself through every corner like physics had personally apologized to Mitsubishi.

Then I arrive at the first corner that politely informs me I am, in fact, not a rally driver.

I throw the car in way too fast.

Halfway through, the rear starts moving around.

Not enough to lose it.

Just enough for my brain to wake up from whatever chemical vacation it had been on.

It screams,

"OH SHIT. YOU'RE ABOUT TO BUY SOME LAND."

That's one thing your brain does remarkably well.

It doesn't tell you you're going to die.

It immediately starts estimating real estate.

I remember thinking,

"Shut the fuck up. This isn't about thinking."

Which, in hindsight, is exactly the sort of sentence you should never hear yourself think while entering a corner at ninety miles an hour.

Then something even more absurd happened.

Instead of lifting...

...I gave it more throttle.

Not because I understood weight transfer.

Not because I had rally training.

Not because I had some deep understanding of vehicle dynamics.

No.

Because every survival instinct I apparently possess was replaced by,

"Fuck it."

Somehow...

it worked.

The car hooked up.

Straightened out.

Shot out of the corner.

And naturally, having learned absolutely nothing...

...I repeated the experiment.

Several times.

Each corner became the same conversation.

Brain:

"We're going to die."

Instinct:

"Counterpoint..."

Accelerator.

To this day, I have no idea how I arrived in Old Forge without becoming part of the local geography.

By the time I got there I wasn't driving anymore.

I was basically just a bag of adrenaline wearing a hoodie.

My brother was hanging out with his buddy at the mill, doing random jobs.

We spent the evening drinking in his tiny trailer.

At some point he made weed butter.

Which sounded harmless.

It was not harmless.

I've never been that hungry before or since.

We demolished every edible object in the trailer.

I'm fairly certain we would have eaten the instruction manual if we'd found it.

Then reality returned.

Specifically, winter.

That trailer was fantastic.

If by fantastic you mean "perfectly engineered to remind you heat is a privilege."

There was a tiny wood stove.

It worked beautifully.

Within approximately eighteen inches.

Outside that magical circle...

...you entered another climate zone.

Around three or four in the morning we gave up pretending we'd ever be warm.

We climbed into the same bed like a pair of hobos who'd somehow misplaced their bridge.

The blanket had all the insulating properties of folded newspaper.

I have no scientific evidence for this.

Just memories.

We somehow survived the night.

Barely.

I woke up sore, frozen, and questioning several life choices.

Oddly enough...

not the driving.

I don't remember much about the rest of the weekend.

The drive home was fast, but not stupid.

Or at least, less creatively stupid.

Looking back almost a decade later, that's the part I remember.

Not the speed.

Not the trailer.

Not even nearly becoming a permanent resident of the Adirondacks.

What I remember is that strange moment where instinct completely overpowered fear.

I've spent years wondering what life would look like if I could summon that same instinct outside a driver's seat.

Not the stupidity.

Just the commitment.

If I could slam the metaphorical accelerator every time fear showed up...

I'd probably be unstoppable.

Or dead.

History suggests the odds are disappointingly close to fifty-fifty.