Catching Air and Almost Dying

Would you look at this! Two days in a row with a new post. I haven't done that since I posted twice in one day last September (2015). Well, this piece is based on something I've never told my mother, a topic I have taken from Jack Prelutsky’s “A Day at the Zoo” found in Guys Write for Guys Read on many occasions. I’ve been using this prompt so long now that it’s getting harder and harder to come up with ideas that Mom doesn’t know about. I’m sure if I could spend a few minutes with my brothers, though, something will spark a memory.
                  My students had been asking about near-death experiences lately, so here's another one...that I don't think Mom knows about unless she's reading this right now.

                  The first time I ever actually thought I was going to die in a car was late one Friday night when I lived on Scott AFB in Illinois. Jon, Steve, and I were driving away from the base, probably headed back to The Coop via Rally’s or Taco Bell or somewhere else for a midnight snack run. I think we had dropped off Josh at his house, or maybe he was with us. I don’t remember. It’s possible Rob or someone else might have been in the back seat, too, but that doesn’t really matter. For some reason, though, we decided to take the back road that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, a route we normally didn’t take that late at night because there were very few lights, or more importantly, no girls cruising up and down like there would have been on the main roads.

                  About a third of the way down that stretch of lonely road, there was a small rise, a short hill or a bump if you will, not quite as steep as a speed bump like you find in a parking lot or highfalutin gated community, but steep nevertheless. Some of you might see where this is going by now.

                  Jon was driving his little Plymouth Sundance, I was riding shotgun, and Steve was spread out in the back seat. Naturally, the tunes were cranked, back left speaker already fuzzing.

                  I’m not sure if Jon meant to hit the bump that fast, or if he just forgot it was there, but at sixty-five miles per hour, there’s not much you can do after impact.

                  We hit. The Sundance launched. Snowboarders would have been awed at the air we caught. And that’s when time slowed down and eyes bulged in their sockets.

                  Sparks flew upon landing, the underside scraping the hard pot hole riddled asphalt. We jolted twice. Then spun. Counter-clockwise. Once, twice, three, four times. We jerked to a stop in a ditch. The seatbelts had held fast.

                  Tightness in my chest. Breathing suspended. I looked out the window to my right. A cement power pole stood a literal inch on the other side of the glass.

                  The CD must have ended because I only remember silence. The only noise came from my heart trying to thump through my rib cage. Breathing resumed. The three of us looked at each other. Jon put the car in reverse and backed out. We stopped again on the road and jumped out. We circled the car wordlessly, inspecting for crumpled metal or jacked-up fenders. No damage—a miracle—just a little mud and grass clumped into the tire treads.

                  Still without speaking, we climbed back in, I turned back on the music, and we drove silently on. I don’t even think we stopped for food. It wasn’t until later that night that any of us dared speak about what had just almost happened. And being the intelligent teenage morons we were, we later went looking for safer places to jump the car.

P.S. If anyone reading this has a picture of this car, I'd like to have a copy. I can't find any in my stash despite how much we lived in it (and a few choice others).