What Can Happen in a Second
1,989 words. Approximately 9 minutes, 56 seconds.
When I was a junior in high school, my father’s company decided to cease operations in their Atlanta branch. Because my father was a valuable employee of the company, he was offered his choice of branches to relocate to. One of the choices would have sent us to Fort Worth, Texas; one of the choices would have sent us to a planned community in Maryland; and one of the choices would have sent us to Orlando, Florida. Because my sister was in college in north Georgia at the time, my father ended up choosing to relocate to Florida so as to remain within driving distance of my sister. The relocation was due to happen over the summer in between my junior and senior years of high school.
For a seventeen-year-old kid, the prospect of picking up and leaving the life I had managed to create for myself was not enticing in the slightest. Here I was, master of my domain, getting ready to enter my ultimate year of high school, in which I could really basically run the place (I was filled with hubris even as a teen). So I hatched a plan with a friend of mine to relocate myself to her house as my family relocated to another state, that way I could finish out high school in the same town in which I came into myself.
Things worked out well in the beginning. My friend’s mother was a nurse and worked the overnight shifts. This meant that she would be asleep all day and gone all night, so my friend and I were basically completely independent. I had a car, and free rein to do whatever I wanted to. I had very few required classes left in school, so most of my senior year was to be taken up as a library aide, where I would effectively do nothing for a quarter of the day and get class credit for it. It was, for all intents and purposes, the dream.
Unfortunately, the fates dictated that I not, in fact, live the dream, and when my friend’s mother announced that they were being kicked out of the house they were renting and were unable to afford a three-bedroom apartment, I found myself whisked away to a new town and a new school, where I didn’t know anyone, where the schedules were different, where I was missing classes Florida required that Georgia didn’t… I was apoplectic, with good reason if I do say so myself.
So it should come as no surprise that, in the spring of 2003, I made the decision to attend my senior prom at the school where I had spent three-and-a-quarter years (nearly a fifth of my entire life at that point) already. My parents gave me their blessing, and, knowing that my 1988 Ford Bronco that was a hand-me-down from my grandfather wouldn’t make the trip to Georgia and back, handed me the keys to my mother’s car to use for the trip.
Things went well, for the most part, with the drive. I’m no stranger to driving long distances, and I actually quite enjoy solo road trips. I listened to whatever music I wanted to, I had drinks and snacks provided to me by my mother in case I got a little peckish, and I had a plan laid out for how exactly I would get up to Georgia.
My mother, ever the worrier, told me to make sure that I took the interstate bypass around Macon. She said it was faster to go that way anyway, and safer, since I didn’t have to go through a city center. I, ever the not-worrier, told her that I would of course take the bypass.
But as I got closer and closer to Macon, I found myself checking the highway maps at the rest stops. It certainly seemed, to my untrained eye, that avoiding the bypass could save me some time. After all, the bypass completely looped around the city and then reconnected with the main highway just north of it, whereas the main highway was just a straight shot through the city.
Surely, I thought to myself, it would make more sense to just go through the city. So I adjusted the route in my mind, and when I came up to the exit for the bypass, I breezed right by it, satisfied by my smart thinking and time-saving abilities.
Just after I passed the exit and began to drive into the city, clouds gathered above me, and a light mist of rain came down to blanket my car and the highway around me. Had I been seventeen years older, I might have read that as a sign to turn around and just take the bypass. I might have understood that maybe listening to my mother’s advice wasn’t a bad thing.
But I was not seventeen years older. I was just an eighteen-year-old kid that thought I knew better than everyone around me. So I proceeded on my self-selected route, determined only to “make good time” getting to my grandparents’ house. I was about four hours away from my family in Orlando, and about four hours away from my family in Atlanta, when I realized my hubris had gotten the better of me.
Driving in the right-hand lane, I found myself behind someone that was moving incredibly slowly (by which I mean they were driving the speed limit in the rain), and I felt the need to pass them. I glanced into my rear-view mirrors to make sure that it was safe to do so, and saw a tractor-trailer in the left-hand lane coming up behind us. It seemed, to my untrained eye, that there was plenty of space in order to safely do this simple passing maneuver, so I conveniently ignored the message that “objects in this mirror are closer than they appear” and began to move over into the left-hand lane.
In my memory, everything that happened next is stretched out into an almost endless period of time, but it really happened over the course of probably a few seconds.
As I moved my car over to the left-hand lane, the tractor-trailer continued to gain on me. The roads were slick, and there was no time for the driver to slow down. I moved my car to the left, and the front of the enormous truck clipped the back-left corner of my mother’s small Altima. I watched in shock from the driver’s seat as the world outside my windshield shifted and turned.
Every muscle in my body tightened as the driver’s side window exploded inward, sending bits of glass scattering all over the car. The bag of chips that I had been munching on similarly exploded, leaving the inside of the car looking like the aftermath of a birthday party featuring a pinata filled by a person that hates children.
And I was greeted by the grill of this truck, spewing hot air into the car, leaving the left side of my face feeling kissed by the non-existent sun.
This was not the first car accident I had been in, and it (surprisingly) wouldn’t be the last. I am lucky enough to have the ability to quickly assess a situation and calm myself down if I feel that remaining calm is warranted. So, as the truck dragged my car down the road, I turned my gaze to the passenger window, and I thought to myself, “Well, fuck; I guess this is happening.”
I relaxed my body, content in the knowledge that being all tensed up wouldn’t really make this situation go away, and watched through the passenger window, idly wondering whether or not the truck driver had even noticed me, and whether or not I should be worried about the fact that we were approaching a small overpass. My wonderings were answered by another blast of hot air, followed closely by the airbag deploying in my face. I did, as it turns out, need to be worried about the small overpass, as the front end of my car was in just the right position to hit the guard rail and be completely ripped off. I don’t really know that the airbag deployment helped, per se, but it did at least alert me to the fact that something else had gone very wrong.
A few hundred feet after the overpass, the truck slowly came to a stop on the side of the road. Shaken, but apparently not injured in any way, I climbed over to the passenger side of the car, pushed open the door, and stepped out of the car. I had only a moment to survey the damage and feel the light misty rain on my face before the truck driver jumped from his truck and screamed at me about what an idiot I was and how much money I had cost him.
So there I was, a four-hour drive from anyone that I knew, standing next to my mother’s twisted shell of a car, being berated by a fat, greasy man in his mid-40s. I don’t really remember much about that. I think I just sort of tuned him out after a while. I don’t know what he thought screaming at me would really accomplish, but I knew that there wasn’t anything I personally could do at that point, and I didn’t need that extra stress. So I just stood by the side of the road and pretty much gave up on life.
When the ambulance arrived (I don’t remember calling one, and I doubt that truck driver would have given enough of a shit about me to call one, which… fine, whatever, I was walking around unharmed), I felt that I had no choice but to take a ride to the emergency room. I mean, I guess I could have stood there on the side of the highway for another several hours waiting for someone in my family to come get me, but that seemed unwise, so into the ambulance I went.
I sat in the emergency room waiting room for over an hour. There were no other people waiting. When the doctor finally took me back to examine me, there were no other patients in any of the beds. I thought maybe they were busy initially, but, the more I think about it, the more I’m remembering that I only recall seeing one other person (the doctor) during the entire four-hour period that I was waiting for my grandparents to come pick me up.
So it is now apparent to me, as an older and wiser man, that I had been transported to some episode of The Twilight Zone and was in very real danger of having some ironic twist happen to me, like my entire family coming to get me and somehow also ending up in wrecks with tractor-trailers and maybe we were all actually in that waiting room the whole time but we couldn’t see each other because it turns out it was purgatory.
But in reality, I just sat around and stared at the wall for a few hours until my grandparents popped in and carted me back up to Atlanta.
I did manage to make my senior prom still, although one of my other friends had to drive, for obvious reasons. And my parents saw the car before me (reminder: it was a twisted, crumpled shell from which I shouldn’t have escaped completely unscathed), so they were just so happy that I was alive that I didn’t even really get into too much trouble. All in all, I’d say things worked out about as best as they could in that situation.
And I’d like to say that I came out of it with a newfound wisdom and cautiousness while driving, but it would take a few more incidents (par for the course for me; the six accidents before that could have just been crazy flukes and had nothing to do with my driving abilities, or lack thereof, as the case may be) before I really learned my lesson.