“Hey, Cletus, Watch This”

SEATTLE - Two charter buses packed with passengers collided while sliding down a slippery hill in Seattle, and one is now hanging precariously over a 30-foot wall beside Interstate 5.

About 60 passengers were aboard the two buses, which crashed through a metal railing and screeched to a stop seconds before toppling onto the freeway below.

The bizarre accident happened at about 12:30 p.m. as the buses nosed down a hill on East Thomas Street approaching Melrose Avenue East in central Seattle.

Witnesses said the rear bus was heading down the hill too fast for the slippery conditions, and slammed into the back of the front bus.

Both buses slid across Melrose Avenue, which borders a wall above northbound I-5, and kept going through a metal barrier at the top of the wall.

By the time the first bus stopped, its front end and front wheels were dangling suspended about 30 feet above the freeway.


I'm from the South, and, in the South, after a winter storm, a new arrival is likely to share this piece of wisdom with the natives, “You guys don't know how to drive in the snow.” Although I generally ignore all the trite observations made about us—that we don't own a lot of teeth or shoes, that we take forever to say the simplest things, that we'd rather stick our penises into our relatives and farm animals than into the crab and wart wonderlands of venereal plague and low self-esteem your women call vaginas, etc.—today, I want to comment on this old snow-driving saw.

No, we don't know how to drive on snow. We don't know much about how to do anything that regularly happens north of the Mason-Dixon line, or west of the Mississippi, or south of whatever the fuck is south of Georgia. Yet, even though we let our bibles occasionally cloud our minds to things like the theory of evolution, we do know science (it's in all the schools now)—gravity, friction, the laws of motions, all that jazz. More to the point, we know how to apply it, in engineering and our daily lives. Because we do, we know better than to drive on snow and ice. 

And since snow and ice storms are rare, there is no reason for anyone to develop a bank of experience driving on those substances. All anyone has to do is wait for it to thaw, and then go about his business, which, as you know, involves telling stories, marveling at footwear, and not fucking things that would rot our privates faster than molasses and Co-Cola rot our teeth.

If only these boys had been from the South.

* And, yes, I-5, over which that bus is hanging, is a major—and heavily trafficked—piece of the NW interstate system.