The Time We Blew Up a Car

So I’m going to tell you about the time I blew up a car.

This is a hundred percent true, by the way.

I’m on vacation, hanging out with my family, and my girlfriend. Italy. Tuscany, to be precise. When you’re driving along a narrow road on a woody Italian hillside in the late afternoon, with the sun just starting to go down behind the mountains and the promise of salami and stupidly large amounts of parmesan and truffles back at the villa, you can’t help but feel satisfied with life. Of course, that’s a dangerous state of mind to be in, because something, inevitably, catches fire.

My mom, dad, sister, her boyfriend and I, plus my then-girlfriend-now-wife, were in a rental car. A Fiat Ulysses. It’s big, it’s ugly, and they stopped making them a while ago. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the story I’m about to tell, but it definitely didn’t help.

So my dad’s driving, and little curls of smoke start to come wisping out the hood. This was smoke which had ambition, which had big plans. It swiftly grew from a wisp into a billow, obscuring the road ahead of us, and we started making polite suggestions that perhaps we ought to, you know, pull over and get the fuck out of there.

My dad said he would stop as soon as he could find a clearing off the narrow, rocky road. We pulled into one a few minutes later – God knows how he saw through the pall of smoke now leaking out the hood – and we were out the car and seriously contemplating legging it before we all noticed that we’d parked next to another car. As in, right next to it. As in, less than a metre away.

Now, my dad is one of the smartest men in the world. This isn’t just his son boasting. He’s a professor of surgery, a man with three decades experience of running the Johannesburg General hospital’s trauma department. He is someone who has spent his entire life making exactly the right decisions in the middle of a thousand fucked-up situations – except this one.

See, at this point, there are flames licking out of the edges of the hood, and there’s this big black patch spreading over the metal. And my dad, bless his cotton socks, darts forward and tries to open the hood. Fortunately, we managed to persuade him that opening what amounted to a casket full of fuel and flames was perhaps not the sharpest course of action.

It was then that I realised that my girlfriend was still in the car.

You had to fold down the seats in the Ulysses for the people in the back to get out, and I’d abandoned ship without doing so. You think you’ve pissed off your significant other? Try leaving her stuck in a burning car.

My sister’s boyfriend rescued her before I could. Another man literally saved my girlfriend’s life, while I stood around looking confused.

At this point I should highlight a few things.

One: when a car catches on fire, it doesn’t explode immediately. It explodes in stages; first the windows, blowing out in a shattering, gasping explosion. Then the tires, with an almighty bang. Then the fuel tank – whooooooosh.

Two: it happens quickly, and it is almost unbearably hot. From first wisps of smoke to blazing, gutted shell took barely five minutes. We couldn’t get near the damn thing – especially considering the blazing trail of petrol which started to leak downhill towards the nearest village.

Three: a fire in a forest will send every living thing in the undergrowth scurrying for safety. That includes a massive nest of scorpions that suddenly poured out onto the road, trying to outrun the rivulets of burning fuel. You know that scene in the original Mummy movie where they open the tomb and let loose a cascade of flesh eating beetles? This was like that, only everything was on fire.

Four: if you park a car that is on fire next to one that isn’t, the results are somewhat predictable

The fuel tank of the second car exploded with such force that it was pushed uphill. This happened shortly before the car’s owners, a family who had gone out picking mushrooms with their elderly mother, came back to find things not quite as they left them.

By this time, we had gathered a crowd from the surrounding villages, including one very confused and alarmed family of mushroom pickers. A massive, honking traffic jam had formed. My dad was on the phone to Hertz car rental, who insisted on sending a tow truck and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually, the phone was handed to a sympathetic Italian policeman, who explained that the car was “Totale destrutto”.

To this day, we have no idea what started the fire. Our suspicion is that it was a broken fuel line, but for all I know, someone else really wanted to date my girlfriend, and was really bad at assassination attempts.

Here’s the kicker. And again, I swear, I’m not making this up. You know where we were going? We were on our way to visit a local landmark, located in the village at the top of the hill. A monument to Dante’s Inferno.

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