So there I am riding back on the weekend from my neice’s house and I’ve got the window cracked a bit to let the heat out. I’ve got my hand out the window feeling the cool breeze on my hand, when, zing! I feel pelted by something right where the pointer and ring fingers meet the palm. I think I see something fling through the window but it could have been the glare on the glass.
I hate that sensation. I usually get it driving down Rt. 7 heading home — I have my hand out the window and let it glide gently on an air current. This joyful sensation is abruptly ended the moment when the car in front of me flings a small bit of debris into the air. Rocks sting the worse.
Tamara’s driving and looks over at me rubbing my hand. “Are you okay?” I look, it’s a little red, “yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” as I continue to rub. That sure was a big rock.
“Seriously, why are you rubbing your hand?”
I’m sitting there now explaining that something smacked me and go off onto a little rant about pesky gravel placement.
Sure enough, I look down and there at my feet is a small pebble. I pick it up, eye it, and throw it back out to the comos from which it came.
Still, my hand is sore and I ponder how fast that thing was moving. There was no car in front of us. Our tires couldn’t have slung it that hard, and it seemed impossible to have shot up from the wheel well besides. And that pebble was way to small.
My mind starts rolling through other logical possibilities. I hit something that was high up. A plant? A bug? Could it have been a bug? I’ve smacked other ones out of the sky before, but not like this. This thing would have to have been a good inch long. That’d suck if it was a bee, I could have gotten stung.
At that moment, I glanced down and crawling up my crotch is a very, very, very pissed off yellow bee. It was doing one of that zig-zag dances on my pants leg, violently stinging at every direction change.
Let’s set the record straight. I’m allergic to bee stings. So this is *not good*.
When I bent over to pick up the pebble, I spread my legs to bend over, and the taughtness on the jeans kept enough space between me and the bee. However, it was working it’s way quickly to my leg.
Panic, and I’d be stung. If I sit still, I’d be stung. If I swatted it, it’d take off and I’d be stung.
“STOP THE CAR.”
Nothing.
There was no good time for discussion. Tamara was willing to pull over the car when we got to a good spot. Screw that.
“STOP THE CAR. I WANT OUT. NOW!!!”
She whipped the car to the shoulder, helping to make a point that she didn’t know what this was about and that she thought it totally unsave, and I opened the door, stepped out, flicked the bee (who was REALLY not happy about all this) to the ground, got back in the car and said “DRIVE”. Why I thought the bee might engage in hot persuit, I dunno.
Apparently Tamara had missed the bee on all accounts. From her perspective I wanted to claw my way out of a moving vehicle and grab myself.
I just couldn’t think of a way to say, “Hi, I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s a pissed off insect trying to kill me over here because I just hit it with a 35 MPH slap. There’s a BIC pen in the side door, you may want to reflect back on that episode of M*A*S*H where they had to jam it into the guy’s neck so he could keep breathing. By the way, do you think we might pull off at the next rest stop and let this poor creature free?”