About a mile east of where I took this photo—a little beyond where the farthest set of headlights is—there is a dented guardrail with a half-foot streak of blue paint on it. Honda calls that shade Aegean Blue, for reasons probably more related to market research than geography, but I didn’t care about the fancy name; I just liked the color itself.
Decades from now, the paint—and maybe that particular section of guardrail—will be gone. No matter; I’ll always know where that place is. I will think of it every time I drive by.
I took this photo three minutes after skidding out on an icy stretch of US-44: flying into the oncoming lane and spinning 180°, before slamming into the guardrail and coming to a stop facing oncoming traffic. Except there was no other traffic, in either direction, and that likely mattered a lot.
This is what I was seeing minutes later, when I was sitting in my mostly intact car in a safer place, feeling stuff that’s hard to define, muttering incoherent gratitude to whatever had intervened and might still be listening—generally trying to come to grips with the increasingly clear realization that if a few minor things had been different, a lot of major things would be very different.
——
I have a lot of things I want to do. I live each day with a dim, unacknowledged expectation that I’ll be here for years to come, getting those things done. We all, of course, have a general recognition that we could die every day in some freakishly unlikely way—drunk driver, falling air conditioner, asteroid—but you deal with that by remembering how incredibly unlikely these things are, and reminding yourself that as long as you keep your wits about you and don’t do anything irresponsible, you’ll be fine. Trouble only happen to people who lose control, and responsible people don’t lose control. Don’t text, don’t drink, etc.
And then there is the occasional reminder that you—you personally—can be snapped out of existence at a moment’s notice.
That is what haunts me the most about this business…I never even saw it coming. It was above freezing. There was snow coming down—slushy, indecisive stuff that I have handled before without issue. I wasn’t speeding or distracted. My faith in myself centers on being firmly in control of everything I do, and I was comfortably In Control, until—in the space of three seconds—I wasn’t. I didn’t die last Sunday because of sheer, stupid, lottery-winning luck. I don’t like relying on luck.
The odd part is how much I actually didn’t feel.
Seeing the guardrail coming at me, the only thing in my mind was a sensation that I was in over my head—that the situation had shifted into extreme territory and nothing could be done except ride it out and hope for the best. I don’t remember fear—there wasn’t time, and the situation didn’t seem real enough.
Sitting in the car after the collision, staring down the road, I didn’t feel panic or any surge of relief—just a muted sense of, well, still here. Inspecting the car after I’d pulled into a muddy parking area minutes later, I saw with amazement that the front—which I’d assumed had been totaled—was, except for a scratched-up bumper, mostly undamaged. It occurred to me that the airbags hadn’t even gone off. Evidently I hadn’t been going fast enough to trigger them.
I got back in the car at that point, expecting to feel some flood of emotions, and there was still nothing: more of a dull, chaotic sense of something vast having been narrowly avoided. I was back on the road within five minutes.
But I remember thinking, over and over again: Do not let me get past this. Don’t let me go back to the state of complacence I was in minutes earlier, when I was cruising along, looking at the sleet coming down, deciding I’d seen worse, and not even considering the possibility that I couldn’t handle whatever came next.
And on some unspoken level, I haven’t gotten past it. Driving upstate for Thanksgiving a few days later, it was a rainy night, well above freezing—conditions I’ve never worried about before—but I realized I was looking at the shiny road and seeing ice: and I could feel, with gut-level vividness, the car abruptly twisting to the side, whipping over the lanes like a hockey puck. Passing tractor trailers—again, something I’ve never been shy about—felt like creeping past a bomb that might go off with no warning.
It keeps coming back, late at night: the realization that there was a lot of room for a scenario where I’m not here typing this right now. Someday, maybe…but not today.
Something to be thankful for.