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I wrote this last year, about my first (and only) serious, um, vehicular incident.
"Eastbound to Omaha"
On road trips, my father has always been edgy when he wasn’t behind the wheel. In July 1987, our destination was southwestern Iowa, the birthplace of my youngest sister Sarah and the first home I can remember. It was an important trip, a first return visit to see good friends at our old home and the farthest we had traveled in years. We had borrowed the Chevy Impala, the company car, having long since outgrown the tiny Dodge Omni, our only vehicle. Traveling three days, we passed through Arizona, Colorado, and most of Nebraska before Dad offered me a turn in the driver’s seat.
It was the first time I had driven my entire family anywhere, but I had been licensed for over a year, had driven to Phoenix and back more than once, and therefore had no reason to be nervous heading east towards Omaha in the comfortable traffic of I-80. For over an hour, I maintained the speed limit, slowly passing car after car, while Mom and my two younger sisters wandered in their thoughts and while Dad drowsily slipped in and out of consciousness in the backseat.
As we approached Omaha, the freeway diverged unexpectedly. I steered toward the left fork, calling back, “Which way do I go? Which way?”
Dad jerked his head up, shouting, “The other way!”
Unfortunately, I obeyed his delayed command, suddenly veering right, too late to be successful at it. Panicking in the swerve, I slammed the brakes and then fishtailed for several interminable seconds across two lanes. My youngest sister screamed as we were abruptly stopped by the steel guard rail designed to keep us from even greater distress at the bottom of the hill.
Oh, no. What’s Dad gonna to do to me? That must be the first thought in the mind of every teenage girl the moment after her first accident, the second thought being, Thank God, no one’s head made contact with the windshield. Sarah’s still screaming, she must be OK.
Dad forcefully roused us from the car, jutting dangerously across half a lane of 60 MPH traffic. I unfastened my faithful seatbelt and wandered onto the grassy shoulder, bracing myself for more tire squeals and clashing metal sounds, although somehow none came. Good Samaritan #1 stopped to help push the car’s broken body out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, car after car merged over and back gently, safely.
As the adrenaline faded, I began to survey the damage. Several feet of metal were crunched like a sheet of rigid paper around the left front wheel. It would be impossible to steer the car, assuming it would move at all. Radiator fluid was forming an ugly pool, and our cartop carrier cables had snapped upon impact, although fortunately, the container had held shut when it was launched onto the freeway’s shoulder. Inside the car, the baby saguaro I had brought as a gift for a friend, had been flung headlong across the back seat and was lying in a puddle of its own dirt. Why is Dad so calm? It wasn’t an eerie calm, but a true calm, a Mr. Rogers-impossible sort of calm. When is he going to lose it? Is our vacation over already? How on earth are we going to get to Iowa?
It was in the days before cell phones, but a trucker had stopped and radioed for the police. What’s the cop going to do to me? I was too overcome by remorse to feel fear, but it was comforting when an elderly man in uniform arrived. I had never even seen a Grandfather Cop before. He escorted me into his cruiser so that we could have a private conversation, removed from my sister’s continuing hysteria. “Tell me how it happened.”
Holding back tears, I told the truth, revealing my responsibility and total incompetence. The officer gently reminded me of the importance of pumping the brakes. His ballpoint skimmed the surface of the ticket form until he found a box to settle on, the box next to the lowest dollar amount, seventy-five dollars: “Improper Lane Change.”
“The truth is, I could call it Reckless Driving, but that’s a $250 fine,” he sighed. “You know what not to do now, and it won’t happen again.” He spoke with the gentleness of a prophet offering blessing, not punishment, as he handed me the ticket.
When I rejoined my family outside the car, I noticed Good Samaritan #2, a young man who had pulled his RV to the shoulder. His family was just returning from a weekend camping trip, and he explained that he was a trained welder with equipment in the garage at his house, only a mile off the next freeway exit. Minutes later, the man returned with ropes and chains for towing, and not long afterward, his wife was serving us cool lemonade in their living room. We drank it gratefully, watching her small daughters play happily with their toys while outside, my father observed the kind stranger’s first aid to the Impala.
As two hours passed, it became evident that the surgery on the radiator would be successful, and the men also decided that the front section of the car, badly disfigured, was nevertheless road-worthy: nothing that a few passes of the welder and a solid, well-tied rope couldn’t handle. Dad’s years as a Boy Scout were coming in handy, and it dawned on me that my father was never going to scold. When he finally said we would be leaving soon for Iowa, he surprised me by saying, “It was partly my fault.”
In the middle of the afternoon, we climbed back into the car. I had rescued the fallen baby saguaro, scooping the soil gently back around the roots, praying that even the cactus would survive the ordeal, restoring it to the sunny spot on the back dash. Our two-week vacation began again as my father took his favorite seat in the car and paid no heed to the disparaging looks other drivers gave us as we passed them, broken but not broken-down on I-80, eastbound from Omaha. |
