Almost History

Last Saturday night… I had just put down a beer when the phone rings. “Hello, dad, can you come pick us up. Mike’s car ran off the road.”

“Are you OK? Is everyone alright?”

“Yeah. I might have a black eye but everyone’s alright.”

Off I go, figuring to find some kids next to a car stuck in the mud. As I get close to where they’re supposed to be, a line of idling cars is backed up. Sirens wail and it looks like a couple of fire engines and police cars are up ahead, strobes flashing. Shadowy figures are setting down flares.

I pull into a driveway, hop out of the car, and jog down to ask a patrolman directing traffic where the kids are. He points down an embankment. Three or four teens are shivering in the snow, next to a smashed, totaled sedan flipped on the passenger side. I ask where Kate, my daughter, is. They point to the ambulance.

She’s sitting inside, getting her “vitals” measured. “You sure you feel alright?” the EMT asks. Her face is pale. “If you get home and start feeling bad, call 911 or you can go to the hospital,” says the EMT, smiling. As Saturday night calls go, this one is a relief. Close, but amazingly, no injuries.

“Dad, I thought I was going to die,” said Kate. “Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. All I heard was breaking glass.

“I think Mike saved my life,” Kate said as we drove home. “He told me to put on my seat belt. I wasn’t going to because it was a short drive. But he made me.”

If I hadn’t seen the run-over mail box, the grazed telephone pole, the uprooted and hammered speed limit pole, and the severed wires that sent a transformer crashing to the ground, I don’t think I would’ve appreciated how close her escape was. The kids told the story one way to the police (“The car pulled out in front of me, sir”), for the parents (“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry”) and for each other (“It happened right by the high school. We knocked the lights out while the play was going on! I was never so scared in my life.”)

“Why did the police ask so many questions,” asked Kate.

“I’m going to get a five-hour lecture tomorrow,” said one of the boys in the car. “But you didn’t do anything wrong.” “That’s just the way my parents are.”
“Don’t think about,” a parent told me after hearing the story. “Those things happen. That’s why you wear seat belts. That’s about all you can say.”

Kate and her girlfriend said they’d never get in a car again unless their mom or dad was driving. That was right after the crash. A day later, spirits returning, she protested new rules about when and where she could drive with friends. Controls, more rules, this is what her close call got her. But I could have been driving her honesty with me into hiding.

What do we take from close calls? Everyone reacts with their own philosophy. All we can do is try to nurture the right response.

“What did you learn from it?” I asked Kate. “What do you mean?” “What would you do different the next time?” “Oh. I don’t know. I mean nobody did anything wrong.”

“What about wearing seat belts?” “Duh, well of course.”

Concessions and lessons come hard. We drove back to the crash scene the next day and I deliberately slowed to the speed limit — 35 mph. “Oh, we were definitely going faster than this. A lot faster,” she said.
Of course a line of cars was stacked up behind me. No one goes the speed limit on this stretch of road. When we got out to look at the damage from the night before, cars whizzed by going 50, 60 mph. “Look, everyone’s speeding,” Kate said.