That time I was in a high speed car chase

I had just broken up with my college boyfriend and was devastated. My high school friend Amanda came down to Stevens Point to cheer me up. We decided that we'd get away and take a road trip from Stevens Point to Madison. The thing is that we had to take a high school kids car. You know how high school kids' cars are. They are usually not very reliable. For some reason the parents of the kids I hung out with (mine included) gave junkers to their kids to drive. They're practical that way. Why give your kid a good car if they are just going to crash it anyway?

Well, the car didn't make it back to Stevens Point. It was super dark out, in the middle of nowhere and we were stranded on the side of a highway outside of Portage. This was in the days before everyone carried a cell phone, so we tried to flag people down to help us out. I figured that we could get someone to drive to a gas station and call the cops or a tow truck, but Amanda had other ideas. A car of fishermen pulled over and told us to hop in. I refused because my mother told me of all the serial murderers out there that will prey on young women stranded on the side of the highway. "Never ever get into a car with strangers," she would say.

Well, Amanda didn't think twice about that old adage and just hopped in. I was in a bit of a predicament. I couldn't sit there on the side of the highway alone. What if a serial murderer, rapists, or Freddie Krueger came out of the cornfield and found me alone in the dark. It's harder to dispose of two bodies than one, so I reluctantly got into the car.

I was terrified. I saw once on a crime drama how the victim had written the suspect’s license plate on her body and the cops were able to catch the crook, but I didn't have a pen. So, I started etching their license plate number into my black nail polish, so they wouldn't get away with killing me and dumping my body. Then, I started to note the fishermen's every feature just in case I survived. My mom did a good job scaring the pants off of me to get me to behave. hehe. I also had a very vivid and morbid imagination.

Well, the fishermen didn't turn out to be rapists or murderers. They were just nice guys who went out of their way to make sure these two young girls got back safely to campus. Once we got to campus, we called a tow truck place to see if they would give us a tow back to Stevens Point. We guessed that the car was somewhere on the outskirts of Portage. The guy who answered the phone wasn't too friendly and told us that he'd open the tow truck place especially for us, but that we'd have to pay. He was crotchety all the way out there, especially when he found out that we misjudged how far out of Portage the car was. It was A LOT further than we had guessed. He was pissed and very open about how angry he was with us stupid college kids.

Just as he was about to grumble again, he got a call on his CB radio from his buddy back at the garage. His buddy was pulling into the garage when he spotted another car parked next to the auto yard next door. He saw some guys climbing over the fence with some items they had stolen, so he called the cops and started to tail them in his truck.

Our tow truck driver gets really excited at the prospect of catching these guys. He calls over the radio that he's driving in the opposite direction as the crooks and how we could corner them. Him and his buddy were communicating their locations every couple of seconds over the CB. The tow truck driver was going about 80 mph at this point with Amanda's little red escort strapped to the line. His buddy calls that the crooks just turned off the highway and our driver found a back road that he could take that would corner the crooks.

Suddenly, we are surrounded by at least 7 squad cars. They are in the same chase that we are in. The tow truck guy somehow gets away with driving top speeds along side the cops instead of pulling over. I'm shaking in my boots, and Amanda is just laughing hysterically. I vaguely recall the driver yelling, "Hang on Girls!" as he almost spins out in this cul-de-sac where the cops and his buddy had cornered the crooks.

The crooks realized they were stuck and made a run for it into the woods. The driver gets out to see if he could help and told us to stay behind. All of a sudden, the cops draw their weapons and start approaching the woods. There's a bunch of commotion and then a few cops come out with the suspects.

Amanda and I are left in the cab of the tow truck yelling "HOLY SHIT!" and singing the Cops theme song. Bad boys, Bad boys, whatcha gonna do, Whatcha gonna do when they come for you. That was a pretty crazy night.