Devil-Worshippers in Winter

This is tangentially a Dad Story.

Way back, senior year in high school, a couple of friends and I decided we really needed to see a movie in a town 30 miles away (life in the boondocks, you know—and I have absolutely no recollection what the movie was). January in Minnesota and the temp was below zero (no clue what the wind-chill factor was, as we didn’t take note of it then).

Mom was away at a meeting, having ridden with someone else, and I asked Dad if I could take her car. (See previous post about Dad and winter.) Of course he said yes.

Back story: for months, rumors (rural legends?) had swirled about devil-worshippers who would place pieces of furniture on lesser-traveled roads, forcing drivers to stop, whereupon unlucky travelers would be seized and used in unseemly rituals. Never mind that no missing-person reports had been filed; much less had bodies been found. Desecrated or not.

We set off, traveling a state highway that was pretty much deserted at the time but for a car far ahead that suddenly displayed red brake lights. Okay, the driver slowed for something, but what?

When we neared the spot where the previous driver had braked, my car headlights revealed a sofa in the road. No oncoming traffic, so I swerved around the sofa, only to shortly encounter a wooden kitchen chair. I couldn’t avoid it, and I wasn’t about to slow down, so I ran over it.

Big crunch, but the car kept moving, so I didn’t stop for a couple of miles before checking for damage. None that I could detect, and we continued on.

When I got home, Mom was quite ticked with Dad for having let me go—he couldn’t understand why she was upset—temperature? Nothing stopped him, so why should it stop me?. Needless to say, I never told either of them about the furniture.