I was 17, and had mentioned to my father that I was thinking of buying
a rubber boat for use as a scuba platform.

My father  managed to get me one from the F.A.A. where he worked.
(Don't ask, I never did).
What he brought me was one of those Air Force survival rafts  that they
issue to bomber crews with up to 10 men. I couldn't wait to test it, so
I called Jason, and told him to come on over.

I took the back seat out  of my VW bug, and laid the seat back down.
This makes a VW bug kind of like  a hatch back without the hatch. Jason
got over to my place, just as our girlfriends showed up. They had come
over to see if we wanted  to go swimming. I crammed the raft, and both
girls in the back of the VW (it was really tight), and Jason in the
passenger seat up front, and took off.

I got onto IH35 in Oklahoma City to head for one of the area lakes. The
windows were down and the hot August wind was roaring through the car
like a minor hurricane. My girlfriend started complaining about the
wind, and a little red tag that kept getting tangled in her hair. I
told her not to mess with the tag, but she got mad and gave it a good
hard yank, intending to throw it out the window.

Can you guess what that little red tag was for? Yepp, that darned raft
started to inflate right there in the VW! It takes about 15 seconds for
one of those things to inflate, and for the first 5 seconds or so I was
frozen with something of a mixture fear, amazement, and a sense of
"this really can't be happening!'' In the 6th second the raft started
pushing my head down against the steering wheel hard enough that I
couldn't really see where I was going, and started pushing the windows
that weren't  down out of their frames, and onto the road. By the time
I got my wits back, the raft was fully inflated. I managed to push my
head up enough to see where I was going, and hopefully avoid creaming
anyone else on the road.

By this time the real chaos had started. The girls were screaming their
fool heads off, Jason was laughing like an idiot, and the Oklahoma
Highway Patrolman that had been following me when all this started  had
turned on his siren.

I finally got the car to the center median, and stopped. I got hold of
the door handle to open the door and pulled. The door shot open, and
the raft exploded out of the car pushing me ahead of it. When I got  to
my feet, the first thing I saw was the OHP cop laughing so hard he had
tears running down his cheeks, and having a hard time breathing.

I managed to get the deflate mechanism activated and the raft  started
to deflate. By this time the cop was breathing again and somewhat
coherent.

He came over and told me that was the funniest thing he had ever  seen.
I asked if I was going to get a ticket. He said no, he just  wanted to
make sure no one got hurt. We folded the raft as best we could and
went back to my place.

The real fun was trying to convince my insurance company that  all that
glass damage really was because a life raft had inflated inside the
car. They did payoff, but only after the insurance adjuster had  talked
to the OHP cop.