The Story That Didn't Get a Telling

So we arrived in Selma at around 4:00 in the afternoon and soon located a nice Mexican restaurant downtown and settled in for some great food and a couple fear-quelling beers. By the time we got to the tale telling we missed the open mike portion of the evening, so I was spared the tremor-inducing horror of getting up in front of a crowd of strangers and trying to communicate. So here's the story that didn't get a telling:

Clay's Snowmobile Story
I grew up in the northeastern corner of Washington state 10 miles south of the Canadian border, and back when I was a kid before global warming the winters were long and cold with lots of snow. Snow so deep that we only knew where the barbed-wire fences were by the little pyramids of snow that piled up on the fence posts. Our main transportation in the winter was the snowmobile. For all you native southerners who may not know what a snowmobile is, it's a kind of sled with skis in front, a treaded rubber drive belt in the back powered by a loud, smoking gas engine that pollutes the countryside and scares any nearby animal and is just a blast to ride. We rode those things every chance we could, and gas was under a dollar per gallon back then so it was affordable fun.
I was six years old when I first tried to drive a snowmobile. The machine belonged to a young man who was interested in my 17 year old sister, and he thought a good way to impress her and score points with our dad was to teach me how to handle his brand new SkiDoo 295cc sled. So I climbed on the machine at the top of our driveway with him behind me and he began the lesson. In hindsight, he shouldn't have started with the trottle, or where the gas was. He said "squeeze this to make it go," and I did. I began to speed down the driveway and I waited for his next instruction, which didn't come because he was sitting on the ground where he fell when I rocketed out from under him. I noticed this when I turned around to see where he was, and I also noted the look of concern he had that he had not informed me of the location or purpose of a mechanism called the brake. My speed was increasing and I was running out of driveway. In fact, luckily, I was on a collision course with a large pile of snow that had been plowed out of the driveway earlier that week. I say luckily because beyond the snow pile awaited a shed full of farm equipment.
So when I came to, I was under the snowmobile still squeezing the trottle. The engine was screaming and smoking, about to burn up, and the fiberglass engine cover had cracked in two. Dad pried my fingers off the gas and he and the young man rolled the snowmobile off of me. This event left the young man with a SkiDoo in need of much repair and no girlfriend, me with a banged up knee and a fear of snowmobiles, and my dad with another story that he used to embarrass me at family gatherings for the next 10 years.
If there is a moral to this story, I guess it would be that in life and snowmobiles, ride fast but know where the brake is.