Near-Life Experiences

I usu­ally get up for work some­time between five and six in the morn­ing, or enough time to work up a sweat, take a shower, read news and eat some toaster fod­der before head­ing out. This morn­ing I fid­dled with the alarm after get­ting up (yeah, always a bad idea), and ended up sleep­ing until 6:30. After an abbre­vi­ated shower, food, and news ses­sion, I ended up leav­ing a lit­tle late for work.

Along the way, there are two stretches where one can drive some­what fast. Long flat stretches with no police. Coming off of one of those stretches, I did a rolling stop at an inter­sec­tion and turned ahead of a large pickup truck (it’s farm coun­try, so every other vehi­cle is a large pickup truck). It would be a close call, but my car can accel­er­ate with the quick­ness, so I just gunned it.

I had it up to 55mph (90kph) when he swerved a lit­tle to the left; I was already deep on the gas, so it was up to about 65 by the time he was actu­ally pass­ing. Look up ahead, and there’s a black SUV com­ing the other way.

Break, swerve right, into the ditch at around 60. Slowing down fast in the soft earth, the back end starts to come out a lit­tle, get that spin under con­trol. Telephone poll on the right, still slow­ing down. Corner-glance off the poll at around 20, there’s a dirt entrance filled into the ditch just ahead of that. Slam into that, prob­a­bly catch a lit­tle air and come back down, notice I’m still in the mud and slow­ing down fast, turn back towards the road and hit the gas again.

Bounce back onto the road, and slowly get­ting things back under con­trol. Start laugh­ing as I salute a shocked guy in what looked like a Navy cap who was walk­ing his dog in the ditch about 30 yards ahead of where I finally got it back on the road. Seemed like the thing to do.

Pull up to the next inter­sec­tion, behind the truck in ques­tion, still laugh­ing. He’s stopped and got­ten out of his truck. I think, briefly, that it was nice of him to stop and see if I was alright, hav­ing quite lit­er­ally run me off the road.

It’s a com­fort­ing thought while it lasts, at least.

He starts yelling at me as he approaches the car — and I’m not going to be stu­pid enough to get out or turn the car off.

(At some point in there, I men­tioned that I didn’t “have time for that crap; I have to get to work,” so it’s not a tran­script or anything.)

Anyways, it’s pretty evi­dent that he was scared that I was going to die over our col­lec­tive dumb asses, and needed to rant that out of his sys­tem. And he wasn’t wrong: it was my gam­ble that started it, and even though he didn’t take the oppor­tu­nity to stop it, when it didn’t pay off it’s my fault. I’m OK with that.

Of course, I had just ended up in a ditch, taken air, hit a tele­phone pole, nearly hit some guy walk­ing his dog, and was wor­ried about my car mak­ing it to work. There isn’t a man on this earth who will sub­mit to a lec­ture after some crazy shit like that. That’s what the whole alpha-establishment thing was about. I don’t think I hon­estly could’ve died. It’s pos­si­ble, of course, but I was wear­ing my seat-belt, have airbags, and the only real dan­ger was hit­ting the tele­phone poles head-on at slower speeds. It would’ve sucked, but not to a game-over level.

So, lessons learned? Well, come to a com­plete stop and don’t try to make it when you don’t have enough time to ade­quately judge the win­dow. Also, there’s a thresh­old of stress, and on the way back down after cross­ing it, peo­ple (or at least I) just laugh — and those who don’t expe­ri­ence the same level (or type — e.g. “direct” instead of “con­cern”) stress may get pissed at you for doing so. A minor vic­tory against Grim? I’ll cel­e­brate it, thanks.

Of course, I will also drive care­fully all the way home