MCF recently mentioned the B13's bad car accident in '92. I'd seen the pictures before and they always make me cringe.


I'm something of a paranoid passenger, as Wendy can attest, due to my own history of car accidents. I'm one of those guys who sits in the passenger seat maniacally clutching the dashboard, eyes wide, mouth agape, screaming "SLOW DOWN!! And that's before the driver even puts the key in the ignition.

My first car accident occurred shortly after I got my driver's license. I was a junior in high school. As MCF says, "kids are crazy," and I was one of many who had to learn lessons the hard way. One lesson I learned the hard way is that you should pay attention to the road, the road signs and the traffic signals when you're driving ... instead of haphazardly bopping down the road over the speed limit, eating a McDonalds cheeseburger and blasting Metallica's Disposable Heroes, paying no attention to traffic lights. I ran a traffic light at a busy intersection and crashed my mother's Ford Escort into a Chevy Blazer. I totaled the Blazer I hit and did something like $3,000 worth of damage to the Escort; shockingly it wasn't the other way around. Upon impact I flew forward (nope, not wearing a seatbelt) and spider-webbed the windshield of the Escort with my head, then flew to the left and embedded the window crank into the door with my left arm. Pretty scary. And to make matters worse, I knew that it was my fault. Thankfully, nobody was hurt beyond my few bumps and bruises, but I was terrified to tell my mom what had happened. Long story short, I got a year's driving probation and a good scare.


A few years later I was driving home from work one afternoon, once again blasting Metallica but this time paying attention to the road, when an old man ran a stop sign and I hit his station wagon with my car; that same Ford Escort which I'd since bought from my mom. This time the accident wasn't my fault, and I was fortunate in that a police officer witnessed the whole thing and testified on my behalf when the case went to court. Nonetheless, in this second instance there was more damage done to me and the car. This time the Escort was totaled, and I had to be cut from the car with the jaws of life and taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I was strapped to a flat surface of some sort by paramedics and x-rayed and cat-scanned before I was allowed to get up because I'd had a neck injury. Thank God the injury turned out to be just a bad strain/sprain and not something more severe.

When that case went to court the old man who'd ran the stoplight told the judge that it wasn't his fault, but the police officer who'd seen the accident testified differently. The cop suggested that the old man have his license revoked since he had a history, but the judge didn't take that suggestion. Sadly, a few years later, the old guy got on the interstate near here going in the wrong direction and hit a big truck head-on. The truck driver wasn't injured, but the old guy was killed.

Then, a few years after that, I was on my way to visit a girlfriend who was going to college at James Madison University, about 90 minutes away. It was a winter night and an icestorm blew up from out of nowhere. I didn't realize how quickly the weather had gotten bad and I didn't adjust my driving in time… so I hit an ice patch on an interstate bridge going at least sixty. My car spun three times at that speed, and it seemed to take about a half an hour. You know how people say that time slows down during those kinds of things? It really does. I can vividly remember having time to pray that God would just make the car stop spinning. And I can vividly remember the headlights of other cars all around me. They seemed to be coming from all directions. Finally, my car came to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate, facing in the wrong direction. I wasn't hurt and the car itself was unscathed. I sat staring at the cars passing me as I faced them pointed in the wrong direction, wondering how in the world I could possibly be perfectly fine. It was the most uneventful of my car accidents but it was easily the most terrifying.

So, yes, I'm a bad passenger. I always assume that the "other guy" is going to run a stop sign, that there's some unseen hazard on the road, or that safes and pianos are going to just start falling out of the sky.

Unless I'm driving. Then, I find that I often feel secure enough to drive and play air guitar at the same time.

Labels: Blogs, Metallica, Personal