Fishtails

No, I don't mean food. I mean the kind where a car's tires are no longer in static friction with the road's surface. This is what I experienced this morning on my way to school.

I was heading to Takae in a little bit of a hurry. I'd slept a bit late, waking at 7:12, and was making my way north around the usual speeds, 60kph or so. It looked like it had rained last night, so the roads were wet, but it was nothing I hadn't seen before. So I drove like normal, quite a bit faster than the speed limit, slowing at the points I knew might be a little rough in conditions like this.

Seems I didn't judge one turn right. I was following a right turn bend in the road when the wheels lost their grip. The car started fishtailing left, with the front of the car drifting into the right lane. There were no other cars around. My biggest fear was ending up in the typhoon gutters on the side of the road, protruding into lanes of traffic at a bend.

As the car slipped left, I threw the wheel in that direction, apparently without applying the brake. The momentum of the front wheels, I'm guessing, helped to bring the car into a more reasonable velocity, though there was a slight rebound to the right, which required a quick correction of the wheel. Once my speed had fallen low enough, the tires gripped the road again and I was able to straighten out in my lane. Heart pounding appropriately, I finished the short drive that remained to my school.

I got out of the car shaking from the shock of what *might* have just happened. I also remembered my predecessor, Ben, telling me of his spin out on the same route to the same school during a late morning dash to get there. His incident resulted in a flat tire, though I assume the feeling was quite the same. Losing control at any point of the day is not fun; when it's behind the wheel of a fast-moving and heavy automobile, it's even less so.

The drive back home was a bit more tame, with careful attention paid to each of the bends in the road. One of the thoughts I kept having had to do with the relative lack of population in Higashi. I try not to think about what would have happened if a car was coming the other way at the same speed. It would have turned out to be a very very bad day. Waisu desu.