The truck hadn’t blown up like it always does in the movies when vehicle meets tree. For that I was grateful. But, I knew we couldn’t stay with the truck and hope someone would find us. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend in a state park with exactly three other campers. I mean, who doesn’t go camping on a Thanksgiving weekend? In California, I could take off any day at any hour and find a fun spot to camp. But this was Minnesota. All the other students who had signed up to go camping with us had backed out, one by one. Perhaps they had seen the weather forecast the zero-degree weather; more likely their parents had dissuaded them from going by providing a more fun alternative. So, it was just Donny and I. Me and Donny. We had a great time when we arrived to a largely deserted park on Friday. Our camp was set up in no time, leaving us to explore the roads and shoot off bottle rockets and throw rocks in the St. Croix River. Tromping around on make-your-own-trails in the snow left our feet wet and cold. It was warm while the sun shined, but quickly the temperatures dropped after sunset. Driving around with the heater on took the edge off the freeze. Finally, it was dinner time. We set up the backpacking stove on the edge of a firepit at an outdoor warming center, searched for firewood and built a fire worthy of the name inferno. Our faces and upper bodies benefitted from the blast, but the lower bits continued their slow descent into ice. I boiled up the instant ramen noodles, keeping my body moving all the time. Our luxurious meal took less than five minutes to consume, but it was satisfying. We ate with our feet up on the walls of concrete firepit. I took my scratchy wool socks off, laid them out hearthside and let my toes unfreeze and wiggle in the rays of heat. Ah, relaxation, warmth, food, finally! “Donny, your feet!” The steam I had seen rising from his feet had taken on a smoky bluish color; it was the scent of something unnatural burning that had opened my eyes. Donny yanked his feet back and howled, then laughed. His sock had started charring, right there on his foot. I took a look at my own socks drying by the fire. Oops. A crusty brown burn-hole had formed on my sock. At least my foot wasn’t in it. I laughed inside, remembering. But time was a-wasting. “Donny!!!” I yelled. There was a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me that we would die out here. Another nudge and Donny started moving. He got up, and we slowly trudged onward, boots crunching in the newly fallen snow, guided by the thin slit of dark sky between the darker dense trees. Upon impact with the tree, my face had planted on the metal dashboard of the Ford Courier, despite wearing a seatbelt, and left a crease in the metal where my nose had hit. We sat in silence, like waking up from a dream. My head ached. I put my hand to my mouth. My hand was wet. Drool? Blood? My feet still felt like chunks of ice. In the snow-lit darkness, everything was blurry to my eyes. I felt around on the floor for my glasses, and found the harmonica I had been blowing. I shook off the fog in my brain and looked over at Donny. “Are you alright?” I asked. My voice sounded like gibberish, and I realized it was painful to talk. “Yeah. My stomach hurts.” I could see the steering wheel jammed up high toward the windshield. “We gotta get out. This truck is gonna blow.” I became frantic with the notion that we would die in a vehicle fire. So we unbuckled our seat belts and pushed the reluctant doors open, and stumbled out onto the snow. Our vehicle was near the intersection where we had attempted a right turn at 25 mph. I know the speed because I had looked at the speedometer seconds before we got to the intersection. After some debate, we started walking toward the south, past the road we had turned off. It was against my judgment, against my internal map of our location, but Donny insisted that camp was back that way. After five minutes of slow trudging, we started going uphill, which was remarkable for flat Minnesota. “Do you remember a hill?” “No.” “Neither do I. Let’s go back to the car. It’s cold and this is the wrong way.” With no disagreement, we backtracked and sat in the slightly-warmer-than-ambient-air truck cab. The not-up-in-flames truck cab. In silence. The silence was lulling, calling, begging us to rest. And so we did. Half an hour? Ten minutes? Somehow we were roused, and we decided our only hope was to get help and that meant walking a long way on this road. The map in my head said to go the way we were headed. And so we did. A chance passerby probably would have laughed at the sight of us walking on the road. Donny, with pains in his stomach and chest area, was hunched forward, head down. With injuries to my head, and bleeding from my nose and mouth, I kept my head tilted back to help stop the flow. And so we walked, one head up, one head down. Our navigation was accomplished using the cut in the trees as a surrogate for the road. An occasional glance kept us on a confirmed path. Our first crisis after the first crisis of crashing came at an intersection. Which way, again? I had no idea. I knew the river was to our right. I felt that this road to the right was one of many spurs fishermen took to gain access to the river and to fish. My mind screamed “Straight.” But I didn’t know. We stood there, dumbstruck for a few minutes. A wrong choice would take us away from help, and we would freeze to death. A distant memory crept into my mind. An idea? Something I had seen yesterday? Yes! Minnesota had an odd practice of posting little sign posts at each intersection in its state parks. A framed map. Six by eight inches large on a post three feet tall. I scurried around to find it here. The stick-like snow-covered lump to the left. With no glasses, I could barely make out the markings. I’m not sure how we were able to read it in the darkness, but I suspect that light reflecting off the snow and clouds in the sky aided us. The sign confirmed that going straight on the road led to the park entrance and civilization and help. On and on, the road never seemed to end. We took turns laying down and resting, and cursing each other with foul insults to get each other up and on the road. To sleep was to die. One time, our first time, we both laid down on the snow in the middle of the road and slept. What woke us up, I don’t know. Fear can be highly motivating. I had time to think. I knew I was in trouble, but for what? For getting in a wreck? Foolishly camping in the snow? For being ill-equipped for such a trip? Or for letting Donny drive? Yeah, that’s it. The stupidity of that choice gnawed on me. Donny had been begging to drive the whole day. But he was only 14, and I resisted his wishes. All day. All day, driving around the park trying to keep warm. Friday night had been incredibly cold, perhaps down to zero degrees, or at least it felt that way when we had to get up and fix our tent that had blown over in the north wind. But the day warmed up with sunrise. Still, it had been below freezing, as witnessed by the pools of ice that never melted, not even in the sunshine. So we alternated between hours of adventure outside and hours of driving around. The truck heater was of California capabilities, built for the slight inconvenience of a chilly night. Our breath in the truck cab formed ice on the windows, so the defrost was on most of the time. As night had fallen, we left our campsite and drove. My feet were numb. Donny said his feet were fine. A comparison of the two sides of the stick shift led to a conclusion that the passenger side got more heat than the driver side. Aha! A reason to let Donny drive! Or so I told myself when searching for a reason as to why I let him drive, when questioned by the insurance company later. The heat pouring out from under the dashboard was luxurious. My wet feet finally had a shot at drying out. And Donny was driving like a pro. “See? I told you I could drive!” “Yeah, not bad.” But it was mostly a straight road leading back from the river’s edge to the main camp road. No matter, his unusual attentativeness put my mind at ease. I took out my harmonica and blew out a few tunes at 20 mph and when he edged up to 25 mph, I gave him a few words of advice. He slowed down a bit and proceeded to execute a right turn onto the main camp road. The tires did not bite the icy snow, and instead slid past the road and straight into a tree. Many who have been in an auto accident will describe the slow-motion nature of the event. Ours was no exception. And there we were. Alone, cold, scared, fueled by adrenaline and fear. Walking towards God-knows-what. Who would help us? Finally, off in the distance, we could see a light. A light! People! Help! We rallied and walked faster down the road. The light appeared to be off to the right. We didn’t care. Both Donny and I re-set a course for the light and thrashed through the snow drift and across the brush towards the light. Just then, a car drove by on the road we were headed for, and pulled into a driveway. “Help! Help!” And of course, with my injuries, the ranger only heard gibberish. Noise. Like what a wounded animal off in the outback would make. He turned to look toward us as we crashed through the snowdrift back onto the street near his residence. He didn’t draw a gun, but I’m sure he wondered if he should. Finally, we reached him and told him our story in little pieces. He took us inside and asked us a bunch of questions, and called an ambulance, and the sheriff. He gave us some water and a hot drink, and we waited. I saw my face in a mirror. It was a mess. Donny was still complaining about pain in his abdomen, and finally threw up all over the black-and-white checkered linoleum of the dining room floor. Our journey was over. Or so we thought. My pregnant wife Jane caught a ride with someone to the hospital in St. Paul where I was transported after a night in one of the four beds at Hinkley hospital. Surgery for my broken jaw and nose would take place after the swelling subsided. Jane gave the surgeon a picture of a monkey from National Geographic when he asked her for a ‘before’ picture he could use to reconstruct my face and wire it back together. He was known for working on hockey players in the area, so I felt a great amount of confidence in his experience and abilities. I was off school for six weeks. The substitute was a horrible witch. That is the secret to a successful teaching career. Make sure the substitute is annoying. She had done what I could not. Students were more cooperative, more attentive, more interested in school. I still remember feeling the love at the Christmas program that year. My teeth were flattened and my nose broken, and teaching after winter break was challenging with my teeth wired shut. Many days were interrupted with appointments to get a mouth that looked reasonable and was functional. Donny was treated at the Hinkley hospital and released to his parents. It was quite a shocker when they got the news that Donny and I were in an accident. Facing the parents, knowing what I knew, was stressful. Luckily, I had a lot of medications to take the edge off. The father sat there in my hospital room, just he and I. “Well, there is more to the story.” The look on his face was classic quizzical, like a puppy with turned head and puppy dog eyes. “I was not driving,” I said. “Donny was driving. That’s why his injuries were internal, from the steering wheel, and my injuries were to my head, on the dashboard.” It felt like a confession, like something wrong. He sat there stunned. I could see the wheels turning. At the time, I felt like he was wondering how this could have happened. Looking back now, I see him worrying about the financial costs of all this, and would I sue him. We agreed not to tell anyone except ‘need to know’ people like cops and insurance to protect the boy’s fragilic marginal reputation. The legal and insurance ramifications never really hit me like I had worried about. I spilled it all to the insurance man who came round the house a few weeks after I got out of the hospital. Forty-five years later, I think I have convinced myself that letting Donny drive was the right thing to do. But I don’t know. The cost to him was just another burden added to his bag of burdens: A mother that died several years ago, his uncaring step-mother / aunt, a brother that would later kill himself, an addiction to anything that provided an escape from his life. The family and the boy and I have remained friends for almost fifty years. Donny and I had several interactions throughout the years, Idaho, and later when he went to college to not study and not learn. I became reacquainted with him when I took him in off the streets 25 years later and fed/housed him. He was one messed up SOB. Did I do that to him? Probably not. I still have back and neck pain to this day; some of it was started then. My nose is still crooked as a reminder. I’m much more cautious now. But only a little.