The lost drive shaft

These days so many cars and trucks are front wheel drive that I'm not sure everyone knows what a drive shaft is. It was of course (all of us old timers know this) a steel shaft perhaps four or five feet long which connected the motor and transmission to the rear wheels of a vehicle, spinning them so it could move. Make sense?

So anyway, one day years ago an old friends of me Pops, whom I'll call Cloyce just to give him a name, told him the tale of the lost drive shaft.

While happily driving his pickup on the freeway one fine afternoon Cloyce suddenly realized that the vehicle had stopped pulling. It was slowing down rapidly, and extra gas applied via clomping down on the gas pedal merely raced the engine. At that point a glance in the rear view mirror showed Cloyce the reason for the trouble: his drive shaft had come off and was going end over end backwards on the road behind him.

Imagine that. A long steel rod larger in diameter than a balled fist was, I suppose you could say rolling, making its way south on the freeway and having a good old time about it. It was traipsing along end over end, changing from laying flat on the pavement to standing its whole five foot tall and back to laying down again at will. And a car was approaching it as the drive shaft bore down on the car.

Cloyce was quickly praying that nothing bad would come of it. But as he told me Pops excitedly, "You wouldn't have believed it Bill, but right as that car was to meet it, that drive shaft laid down flat, the car drove over it, and it picked itself up right after. It didn't touch that car at all. It was a miracle."

A miracle which had the diver of that car's heart in his throat I'm sure.

The drive shaft came to rest and rolled to the shoulder without any other incident. Cloyce steered the pickup to the shoulder, walked back and grabbed his errant drive shaft, admonished it for being so playful, threw it into the bed of the truck, and went off to find a phone to get a tow. all the while thanking his lucky starts it wasn't worse.