By Bill Matson

As a news reporter for the Rebellion, I am supposed to go out and find the news and report on it so my fellow classmates can hear about it firsthand from a reliable source. But for now, I’d like to talk about an issue that has always been in the back of my mind: The parking situation at Old Mountain Field.
Back in November, I wrote an editorial about the junior “parking lot” at OMF. I wrote about how it’s not worth parking a half a mile away from school, just to say you drive to get to school. It’s not worth trekking through the bitter cold during the winter months. Also you are risking your life just trying to get out of the car over there.
But for the last few days, I’ve encountered a new reason why you should not park, what may be your most prized possession at OMF. The fact is your car can get completely destroyed just because you parked on the side of a main road.
I, as a junior, have had first hand experience with the parking situation at Old Mountain. It’s cramped, the parking spaces on the side of the road don’t leave enough space to get out of your car without making the oncoming traffic swerve into the other lane. Sometimes, you’ll encounter a situation such as the one I and five others went through rather suddenly. I saw my car get hauled away to a junk yard just to be turned into scrap metal.
Now, I understand that there isn’t much choice as to where we park. You can try to park in the senior lot, but I wouldn’t recommend that because your car might end up getting towed anyways. There’s the actual parking lot at Old Mountain Field behind the tennis courts, but I really don’t know if it’s legal to park there for six plus hours during the day. There is the church, but you’re supposed to have a pass to park there too.
Anyways, back to my point. These tragedies can happen rather quickly. One minute I was sitting in my first period class trying not to fall asleep and the next minute I found myself sprinting down to Old Mountain Field to find out if my car was being mercilessly beaten with a baseball bat, or if it had gotten hit by a car.
This leads me to the second thing I learned that fateful day; rumors spread like wild fire in high school. Before I even got to my vehicle to check the damage, I had heard that there was a drunk down at OMF beating my car with a baseball bat. I heard that a drunk driver had hit my car and sped off. And I also heard that my car had been stolen.
Naturally, when you hear news such as this, you panic. It’s human nature. And that’s exactly what I did.
“Ms. Fox, someone apparently has something against me or my car, because at this very moment, someone is beating my van mercilessly with a baseball bat at OMF. I’m gonna go check it out regardless if I have a pass or not.”
Being the great secretary that she is, she immediately wrote me a pass to go down there and check out what was happening.
So I sprint down there, and on the way got yelled at by a bunch of kids at the custy corner and then some old guy told me to get back to school, but I just kept going. And what a sight I had before my very eyes, fire trucks, police cars, and tow trucks, oh my!
Oh how I started to panic. An officer told me my car wasn’t badly damaged, and I came back with the fact that my car was halfway up on the side walk with no left back tire. He just let me go and check it out after that. And after that, my stomach just sank.
This, my classmates, is the feeling I don’t want you to ever have to feel the feeling of having one of your biggest assets taken from you in the blink of an eye, or maybe even a best friend. That all depends on how sad of a person you are, that you actually decide to befriend your vehicle.
Regardless of what kind of relationship you and your car shared, you will be angry, sad and hopeful all at the same time. Mad because some idiot destroyed your car, sad because some idiot destroyed your car and maybe a slight glimmer of hope (possibly) if your car is totaled. If your car is totaled you might be able to get a new one with the insurance money.
So to the up and coming drivers in our school, think about alternative places to park. Old Mountain is definitely the easiest place to park at, but it is also by far the most dangerous. Find a friend that lives nearby that you can store your car with for the day, maybe a grandparent, or a close family friend. This kind of thing will probably happen again and I don’t want you, the reader, to have to deal with it. Ever.