Free A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me by Jason Schmidt Page A

had my own reasons for wanting to go.
    Like most five-year-old boys, I was crazy for dinosaurs. At some point my dad had read me a book about dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals that included a few paragraphs about tar pits, and how tar pits sucked dinosaurs down into them and dissolved the flesh off their bones over a period of centuries. The book said that the skeletons left over from this process were some of the best-preserved specimens in the world. The book said there were tar pits that had been around for millions of years, like the La Brea Tar Pits, in Los Angeles, which were surrounded by chain-link fences to keep people from getting sucked into them.
    The book had pictures of lots of dinosaurs in it, but no pictures of the tar pits. So my five-year-old brain conjured a picture of a kind of prehistoric monster called a tarpit that basically just sat there on the ground like a giant Venus flytrap and waited for something to step on it. Then it would pull its victim down into its gaping maw and spend a few centuries digesting it before pooping the cleaned skeleton out into the desert where humans would later stumble across it and put it in a museum. I was fascinated by the idea that there were living specimens of these things in Los Angeles—and that I’d missed my chance to see one while I was living in Torrance.
    When Dad told me that Grandpa’s heart attack meant we had to go to L.A., I knew the universe was conspiring to give me another chance to see the tarpits.
    *   *   *
    Dad’s cousin Dave met us at the airport in L.A. Dave was related to Dad on his mom’s side, and he didn’t look anything like us—he had wavy blond hair and fair skin that tanned a kind of ruddy brown. He was a hippie, but Dad had warned me that Dave was one of those clean-living hippies like I saw on TV and I shouldn’t say anything about our family business around him.
    We threw our stuff in Dave’s van and he drove us straight out to the hospital. I was glad we were going to get this part out of the way, but we ended up in a traffic jam. I’d never seen one before, and I couldn’t believe how many cars there were all around us, or how wide the freeways were. I couldn’t understand why the cars were all stopped or why the ones up front didn’t just go. But every time I asked about it, Dad told me to be quiet. Eventually I gave up and lay down on the floor in the dark back compartment of the van—until Dad and Dave both jumped in their seats.
    â€œHoly shit!” Dave said.
    I sat up and looked to see what they were staring at and at first I didn’t see anything. Then I spotted something a few hundred yards ahead. Some kind of bird or …
    â€œWhat is that?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s a tire,” Dad said.
    That didn’t make any sense, but he was right. It was a tire, bouncing down the shoulder of the freeway toward us. On each bounce, it seemed to go fifty or sixty feet into the air. I wondered where it could possibly have been dropped from to make it go that high.
    â€œWhy’s it bouncing like that?” I asked, as we watched it lope down the freeway toward us.
    â€œIt’s a spare,” Dad said. “It’s still got a rim and a tube in it. Jason, come here.”
    He reached behind him and pulled me onto his lap, then opened the passenger side door a crack. Dave did the same on his side. Neither one of them took their eyes off the tire.
    I realized the tire was moving down the freeway toward us much faster than I’d first thought. I leaned forward and watched it sail into the air, hesitate for a second, and start to come back down.
    â€œIt’ll land in front of us,” Dad said.
    â€œYeah,” Dave agreed.
    Watching it come down, I started to get scared. When it hit the concrete shoulder of the freeway I felt the impact as much as I heard it, and then the tire flashed back up into the sky again, so fast I could