Etude: Accident, Truck vs. Truck

Building on Wednesday’s episode of 10 Things, a ramble about an accident.

In tenth grade I had my first and only car accident. I had been a licensed driver for less than a year. I was driving a fourteen-year-old, faded green, 1977 Chevy pickup truck with an on-the-column shift. At five feet tall (if I’m generous) and with the bench seat slid all the way forward, and if I scooted right up against the steering wheel, I could just about mash to the floor the giant pedals of the brake, clutch, and accelerator. With both a license and a vehicle, I had the righteous privilege of offering people rides home from school sometimes. In later years, I might view this as a curse. On that day, I was dropping off two friends before heading home myself.

Our high school had a population just under two-thousand students. Only a small fraction of those rode the bus, and I’d bet almost none of them walked or rode bikes because the school was nowhere near anything at the time. Everyone else got picked up, drove themselves, or bummed rides from people like me. At the end of the school day, two parking lots full of teenage drivers and a pickup lane of buses and parents spilled out onto a winding, descending, narrow, two-lane road that terminated at a busy T-intersection at the bottom of the hill below the school. In the thick of the exodus, getting out of a parking lot onto that road was usually an adventure.

My friends and I were giddy, practically punch drunk from who knows what, likely singing at the top of our lungs as we left school. We survived the merge onto the road and were sitting through a second round at the red light when another truck slammed into us from behind.

I was six or eight cars back from the intersection, and the light had turned from red to green. I had taken my right foot from the brake and pulled the gear shift back and up into first. The tires were loose, but we hadn’t started to roll. My foot hadn’t made it to the accelerator. We hadn’t yet fastened our seat belts.

The singing stopped. The impact threw us forward. All of our books and purses flew into the dashboard and spilled onto the floor. The chassis of the truck was knocked forward so that it didn’t sit right on the axles afterwards.

The guy driving the new red pick-up wasn’t a teenager as you might expect. He was delivering parts for a local auto shop, driving his shiny, manual-transmission truck with one arm in a cast. He had smashed into us going at least thirty-fives miles per hour and had never once applied the brakes.

We lied about the seat belts, puzzling everyone who expected us to have bruises from the shoulder straps. We were ok. Sore necks. Sore backs. A few days of headache. That green pick-up I was driving was a beast, and I credit it with protecting us from more serious harm.