On November 22, 2024, Cole Harnar and I were driving up to McNary High School for the football playoff game against Mountain View High School. Cole was at the wheel, offering to drive since I normally drove to most of the away games. Cole drives a 2007 Toyota Matrix, which is a manual transmission. We had decided to take the back roads, due to a wreck on I-5, which would have caused us to miss the first half of the game. 

     As we were driving through the winding backroads, heading north to Salem, Siri provided us with an alternative route that would  help us get to the game faster. Obviously we chose to take this new faster alternative route. Little did we know that it would be taking us up a substantially steep gravel road for nearly three miles. As we began to climb the hill in pitch black darkness, Cole’s clutch began to give out. He switched into first gear slamming the clutch, trying to get the little Twinkie of a car to start accelerating uphill. We started to smell a rank smell that smelled like burning rubber. There was no room to pull off on this hill and we were rolling down the hill with increasing speed. Naturally we both started to panic, having no idea how to resolve this crisis, as neither one of us had cell service or knew how to fix a car. As we began rolling down this hill of death, Cole began to drift into the one driveway on the hill, giving us a chance to calm down. He began to rev his engine and try to regain control of his clutch, but it wouldn’t budge. After two minutes of battling the clutch, we had felt that we had won the battle with the hill, but as we were pulling out of the random red neck’s driveway, the smell of burning rubber started to increase. It became so unbearable we had to roll down all of the windows, which really didn’t help, but the smell kept coming through the AC vents in the car

     With our heads out the windows we continued on our trek up this winding gravel road for
what felt like an eternity. Eventually, we reached a real, paved road and felt more relief than ever. That trip up the hill truly felt like it was going to be the death of me.