A Costly Cure
I used to have road rage, but I don't anymore.
Actually, I started my vehicular career as quite the granny driver. Speed limits were followed; courtesy was exercised.
Then I went to law school. I can't explain what it was about law school that made me so ANGRY (well, okay, maybe I can think of one or two things), but next thing I knew I was ripping down the roads leaving a trail of terrified travelers in my wake.
But a few weeks ago I saw something so horrible, it changed everything. I was close to being part of that something horrible, in fact, and I'm so grateful that somehow I wasn't.
It was kind of a normal morning...I was much later than usual, so the roads were clearer, enough that I and others were tooling along at top speeds and weaving around slower cars.
Then suddenly everything came to a screeching halt. The accident a few cars ahead of me was as awful as an accident can be when cars are going too fast and following too close and someone isn't wearing a seatbelt.
Suffice it to say that it was upsetting, the most shocking thing I've seen in real life (and funny, isn't it, that you can see so many horrible things on TV, and they say that it desensitizes you, but I found nothing even slightly comparable between faked tragedy and the real pain of a real person before my eyes).
Fortunately, incredibly, from all I have been able to gather, that person escaped serious injury.
And as for me? Well, it's like a red haze has been lifted from my eyes. I just don't feel that sense of frustration and competitiveness that I used to, and I'm happy going a slower speed – I'm actually grateful when a not-so-fast car gets in front of me because it gives me an excuse not to drive so fast myself. (Since I would never be the slowest car in the left lane, knowing so well as I do what that does to the angry drivers behind me.)
I wish I could have figured all this out without having seen what I saw, though.
1 comment:
When I lived in Colorado, I was driving through the Rocky Mountain National Park one day, just for fun, and I was the third car to stop at a wreck that happened on the meadows part of the park - where the road was flat.
It was a bike wreck, a girl and a guy, they had been drafting and their tires had bumped. The girl had been thrown over her handle bars into the asphalt and the guy had fallen very hard as well.
Obviously we were in the middle of nowhere, and it took close to an hour for the ambulance to get there. The entire hour the girl writhed on the ground crying and screaming in pain. I honestly thought she was dying, that she had ruptured some internal organs. And her helmet - looked like it had been run over by a tractor trailer truck.
Eventually she was taken away, and we later learned that she had broken her collar bone, a rib and a wrist, but that she was okay.
But it frightened me. To think that her helmet could have been her head, and that so many every day activities that we think of being fun and exciting are actually seriously dangerous. Like driving a car or biking.
And how it can all change in the blink of an eye.
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