One summer day when I was seventeen, my friend, Brent, and I went to the beach. It was one of those rare days at the Oregon coast when the sun was actually shining! We hadn’t planned anything special, just a day of relaxing and lying in the sun. As was often the case, the water was too cold for swimming. No problem -- it was fun just watching the ocean.
We lay on the sand about 30-40 yards away from the water. Between us and the water was a large depression in the sand, about 15 feet long—parallel with the water line—about 4 feet across and a foot or two feet deep. It had a little water in it and just looked like a huge puddle.
We were south of the town of Cannon Beach, and in this particular area it was legal to drive vehicles on the sand. While we were dozing in the sun, we heard a car approaching from the direction of town. It was a two-door, cream-colored, 1961 Chevrolet. The windows were down, and inside we saw two young couples, teenagers, laughing and enjoying the ride along the water’s edge. As they neared that big depression, the driver saw it and steered to avoid it. The depression was easy to see because the tide was out. They continued down the beach until the car was out of sight.
After awhile we noticed that the tide was coming in, and as the water got closer, the rising tide filled that large depression until it was hidden from sight. If you didn't know better you wouldn't even know it was there. At about this same time we heard a car coming—the same Chevrolet we'd seen earlier. Because of the rising tide, the driver was having to drive closer to the water than before, and this time there was no way he could have seen that depression because it was hidden under water. As he reached it, his right wheels slipped into the depression, and the car became stuck. The driver gunned the engine, but the wheels only dug deeper -- and the tide kept rising.
All he could do was keep gunning the engine, to no avail. When the water was a couple feet deep, the two couples got out of the car, desperate to devise a way to get the car unstuck. But there was no way. I’m sure they were hoping the water had risen about as high as it would go, but they were mistaken—the tide continued to rise.
First the water completely covered the wheels, then it climbed up the doors and finally spilled inside through the open windows, totally filling the car’s interior. Anything that was loose inside the car came floating out—mostly beer cans, bobbing in the water—and the tide kept rising.
The young man who’d been driving was frantic. He had one last hope: He decided to run up the beach towards town, hoping to find a tow truck with a winch that could pull his car free. While he was gone, a small crowd had gathered, and we all watched as the car totally disappeared beneath the water, all except a few inches of the car’s radio antenna.
Pretty soon we noticed a vehicle racing toward us along the sand. It was a tow truck, and on its front bumper was a winch. In the passenger seat was the driver of the car, and he was shocked to see that his car was now totally underwater. When the tow truck came to a stop, the frantic young man jumped out, grabbed the winch’s cable that had a large hook on the end, and started swimming toward the radio antenna that marked the location of his car. When he reached the car he dove underwater, trying to find a place where he could attach the hook.
After a couple of dives he finally signaled to the tow truck operator to activate the winch. At first, all we could see was that little antenna slowly moving towards us through the water like the periscope of a miniature submarine. Then the car’s roof appeared – and the upper part of the windows – and finally the whole car was out of the water, unstuck and resting on the sand
The young man opened the car doors, and seawater gushed out. Opening the hood, he gazed hopelessly at the engine, slowly shaking his head.
Then, taking his girlfriend by the hand, the two of them, with heads hanging down, slowly walked over to some rocks and sat down. The last thing I heard him say was, “My Dad’s gonna kill me.”
I’ll let you come up with your own moral to this story . . . perhaps beginning with these words from the Book of Mormon: “And thus we see . . .”
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