It was December of 1975, and I was driving my parents’ Mercury Montego back to Louisville, Kentucky, from Boston. I was with a group of four young people who had attended a political conference there. As we approached Rochester, NY, on I-90, snow began to fall, and the roadway quickly became hazardous. After another hour or so of fighting the snow, I pulled over at a rest area and installed tire chains on the Montego's rear tires.
We started counting the number of cars we saw that had slid off the roadway into a ditch. After we counted fifteen cars, we decided it was time to get off the highway and started consulting our AAA maps to locate the next rest area. We had about 40 miles to go, so within an hour, we would have an opportunity to exit the highway.
I kept several blocks of distance between our vehicle and the nearest car ahead, and I had a clear view as a Ford Pinto lost control, made several loops, and came to rest. A Ford Galaxie 500 passed me soon thereafter, then lost control, spun, and slid into the rear of the Pinto. I slowed down to a crawl, put on my emergency flashers, and started to move to the left-hand lane when gasoline leaking from the crashed vehicles exploded in a huge fireball. The gas poured from the vehicles and quickly engulfed all lanes of the highway.
I thought about my choices: I could stop, drive down the median on the left, or drive through the fire burning on the highway. I quickly ruled out the idea of stopping. This section of the highway was so slick that another car was going to come along any minute and run into us. The median also looked like a bad idea. It was piled deep with snow, and we would probably get stuck right next to the burning gasoline. I decided to proceed through the fire on the roadway. When I announced to my front-seat passenger what I was going to do, he looked at me like I had lost my mind, but in a few seconds, we had passed through the fire with no harm done to our car or its occupants.
But it is too soon to end our story, because a few moments later, a Dodge pickup also went into a spin right before our eyes, came to a stop in the middle of the road, and was then struck by another, larger truck. Against all odds, one of these vehicles also caught on fire.
This time, there was only one choice, so I picked up speed and steered the Montego into the snowy median. I hoped to have enough speed to power into the snow and then back out onto the roadway. It soon became obvious that my plan had failed, as the Montego got bogged down in the snow. We sat there in the median, looking up at the fire on the highway, and wondered how long we would be stuck there.
I then realized that one of the trucks, still on fire, was starting to roll down the hill toward us. “Out, out, out!” I yelled, pointing at the burning truck. But I hadn’t really thought this through carefully because the Montego was a two-door vehicle, and the people in the back were frantically pushing the seat forward to get out while the front-seat passengers were trying to exit. This meant that we were all stuck in the car.
In a last-ditch effort, I put the Montego’s automatic transmission in “Low” and pressed on the gas pedal. At first, the chains on the rear tires just hurled snow and dug deeper, but eventually, they reached some gravel, and we popped up and out of the snow and back onto the highway.
I pulled over to the breakdown lane, and we prepared to walk back to the crashed vehicles to see if we could render any assistance, but before we could get out of the car, we saw fire trucks and state police vehicles arriving, so we drove on. We made it safely to the rest stop and hung out there for about 4 hours until the snow subsided, then we got back on the highway, bound for Louisville. We encountered no more burning vehicles on our way home.
