Running on Empty
Coasting to a Gas Station
By Daniel Muniz

I often use Saturday mornings as my time to run my errands. One particular Saturday was no different than other previous weekends. I had a host of things to do like getting my hair cut, the oil changed in my truck, etc. But I also had one other errand that I had failed to do during the week.

Climbing into my truck, I wondered where I would gas it up at. The suburb I recently moved to happened to be the farthest out I had ever lived. It wasn’t the exurbs although they were a short drive from my neighborhood to them. As a result, my options for gas stations were fewer because of where I lived.

As I turned the ignition and drove out of my garage, I noticed something a bit strange.

Towards the end of the work week, I had been meaning to fill up my gas tank but the only time I really had was during my lunch breaks. I always make an attempt not to stop anywhere on my way home from work unless I really have to because I have a nine hour work day instead of a traditional eight hour day (which allows for alternate Fridays to be off which means I have a three day weekend every other week). Any delay limits the already short amount of free time that I have to spend with my kids after work so I avoid it when I can.
 

Story Continues Below ê

Today's Top Stories

● Text Messaging - Teachers Bantering With Students ● Truth or Dare - Naked Woman Ends Up in Jail ● It’s For the Children - Well No, It’s Not! ● Wasted Adulthood - Does Prison Deter Crime at 18? ● Secular Triumphs - Liberals are AWOL on Secularism ● Self-Deportation - Illegal Aliens Voluntarily Leaving

Yesterday's Top Stories

● Sanctuary Cities - A Haven for Violent Criminals ● Truancy Schools - Fight the Wrong Battles ● Country Club Republicans - The Party’s Bad Snob Image ● Massages - Therapy That Sometimes Goes Overboard ● Leaving the Big City - Millions Flee Metropolitan Areas ● Creative Sentencing - A New Way to Punish Shoplifters

I was low on gas at the end of the week so I thought that the following Saturday morning would mean that filling up the tank would be my first stop. As I was driving away, I thought that it was a bit odd that my gas gauge didn’t dip any closer to the empty mark (I have a no-frills vehicle with few indicators). Perhaps under false pretenses, I “assumed” that I could probably visit the gas station as my last errand on the way back home.

Well, you know what happens to people who assume.

Shortly after I had driven on to the freeway, I noticed that I started losing power. I pressed the gas pedal but instead of accelerating, my truck seemed to choke. My initial impression was that one of my rear tires had an air leak so now I had a flat. A couple of days ago I hit a nasty pothole and as my tire bounced out of it, my truck ran over a bit of debris. But I was slowly losing speed instead of abruptly losing it so I felt that my tires were fine.

I looked again at my gas gauge. Although it was low, it was nowhere near the empty mark so I assumed that I had plenty of gasoline. Now I was perturbed. My truck had served me well but now it was getting old. My hope was that I could hit 200,000 miles before having to do any serious and expensive repair work. Even the years after I paid it off, I only had to do routine maintenance and I felt fortunate although I knew it was wishful thinking to believe that I could go so many years without having to shell out a lot of money to fix it.

The freeway had a busy Saturday morning traffic and there were now plenty of cars whizzing by me. I pressed the gas pedal again but I was still losing power. All of a sudden it hit me. This is how a car behaves right before it runs out of gas. There was an off-ramp right before the next major intersection. I quickly swerved into it to get off the freeway and hit the emergency flashers. I next turned off my air-conditioning and rolled down the windows. The frontage road was just as busy with traffic since the intersection was also a major retail area.

I knew that there were not any gas stations nearby but I didn’t want to be stranded on the freeway.

My first thought was that I could coast into a parking lot however I was still moving along at a fairly good speed. I also knew that I was on top of an incline and I remembered that there was a gas station downhill if I took a right and passed another intersection. The major intersection I was at was actually another freeway with a frontage road so I coasted on to it but I was now doing under 20 miles per hour. However, as I correctly guessed, I was now going down an incline and was picking up momentum which was good because by then, I was now down to 10 miles per hour.

But as luck would have it, as I approached the next intersection, the light was red and the road had leveled off. Stopping would mean that my car would stall and that it would then be really hard to get it moving again to where the road sloped off again. I still couldn’t see the gas station but I knew that it was somewhere down the road. The only thing I had in my favor was that I would be the first car in my lane to reach the light and I was on the outside lane.

Out of necessity, I didn’t stop. I did apply the brakes a bit and fortunately there was light traffic so it was actually kind of easy to run the red light. I had hoped that my ridiculously slow speed and my flashing blinkers would announce to everyone that my car had trouble.

After running the light, I thought that this would be the perfect time for a cop to see me even though I had a perfectly good reason to do what I did. And by then I had reached the next part of the downward slope so my car gained speed. The engine was still running but it was wheezing and choking.

As I coasted downhill, I managed to easily park into the gas station. I quickly filled up the tank and then turned the ignition. To my relief, the truck properly started and it drove fine afterwards (meaning no major repair work). I was also relieved that I averted a major embarrassment for me.

It had been years since I had actually run out of gas so that I couldn’t even remember the last time it happened to me. Now I was married with screaming kids at home. And I was also a grown man with responsibilities in which stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.

I chuckled.

That incident flooded me with memories of my adolescence and of my early and mid twenties where mishaps like that were not commonplace but they did happen from time to time. I remember an old clunker that I used to drive in which the gas gauge had completely failed so I always had the tank full.

However, as I laughed, I realized that this experience taught me to be more vigilant about my responsibilities because I don’t ever want to get stuck on the side of the road with an empty gas tank.

We want your opinion! Tell us what you thought about this article. Click the Your Feedback menu item to send us your comments.