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she's okay
My sixteen year old daughter who has been driving for a month had a car accident this morning.
She's okay.
She called at 7:20, breathless. Her exact words: Mama, I crashed the car. It's really bad.
But really, she's okay. On the other hand, I'm having some trouble thinking straight.
Here's what happened. She got in the car to head out to school. This is the car we bought her a month ago, okay? Every possible safety feature, six airbags, antilock brakes, etc etc. We live on a beautiful but windy road that follows the coast. At one point it goes through a series of very sharp curves. When she was learning to drive, my heart rate always doubled when she drove those curves. But she handled it well. Except today she didn't.
So 7:20. My husband and I both jump into our cars and screech out of here. She was about seven minutes away. By the time we got there, there was a line of cars backed up. Two men were pushing her car off to the almost non-existant shoulder. I had a good look at her and what I saw was this:
a healthy sixteen year old, shaken up, with abrasions to her arms where the airbag hit her, and what looked like a sprained finger. She could move it, so it wasn't broken.
You can imagine what the next hour was like. Phone calls to police, AAA, insurance, school, etc etc. People, neighbors, stopping to see if everybody was okay. A guy pulled over and said: there's debris in the road. I'll pick it up for you. I was on the phone with 911 at that point and just nodded. The guy comes off the road with a large hubcap and some other bits and pieces. He sez, not even from her car. Maybe this is what caused the accident? I nod, still on the phone. Fast forward to the arrival of the traffic cop.
Let me pause here to say that in this town the traffic cops are well known entities. The two most famous are Rusty and Rick. Big men in their fifties, somber if they've got you at the business ends of their radar guns, but good guys in general. This was Rick. We relocated to a half mile down the road to a parking lot used by hikers, and he took the report. He asked her to tell what happened, and this is pretty much what she said:
I was coming around the corner and the car started to skid to the right and so I corrected and then it slid to the left and I ran into the guardrail.
He was very calm and kind. Spoke to her about driving too fast for conditions (there's a sprinkling of rain, and leaves on the road) and issued a ticket to that effect.
So we're driving her to school and I remember the debris. I said to her, did you swerve to avoid the hubcap and stuff in the road? And she says:
Well, there was a car parked on the other side of the curve and I was trying not to run into him.
Wait.
There was a car parked in the blind spot of a sharp curve on a narrow two lane, no shoulder road?
Yes.
And you lost control trying to go around that car?
Yes.
So, why didn't you mention this to the police? (or us?!)
Um, well. I didn't hit the car.
But the car was part of the reason you had the accident. What happened to the guy from the car?
He came over and asked me if I was okay. Then he left.
I'm thinking now about the guy picking up the debris from the road, where he left it (answer: no longer there), who he was. I am thinking about another man, maybe the same man, sitting there in that blind spot while my daughter's car went head first into a guardrail. Beyond that guardrail is a very long drop, so I'm glad it was there, but I'm wondering about this guy, why he was sitting there in the first place, and why he took off. She remembers nothing about him. Not the first thing. Not his hair color or his age or the car he was driving. Just that he came up and said: are you okay?
We're looking at a minimum of five thousand dollars of car damage, but you know what? It's far more upsetting to me to think about somebody contributing to an accident and then taking off.
So I called Rick the Traffic Cop and left a message on his machine saying we wanted to amend the accident report. It won't make any difference to the insurance company and there's nothing he can do about it, given the lack of information, but it's the one thing I can do. The only thing I can do. Not enough, but the only thing.
All the things in life that go wrong, that irritate or aggravate, all of them are insignificant compared to the fury I feel when I know that somebody did something that caused harm to my daughter and didn't have the guts to stick around and deal with it.
September 30, 2005 12:31 PM
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Comments
Whoa. Is it Runs From Bears who says something about not getting in between a mother bear and her young? Glad your daughter's alright, and if you ever find the "sit-and-run" guy, I hope you blog about your encounter.
Posted by: sarandipity at September 30, 2005 01:22 PM
2 daughters, 1 with 4 wrecks, the other with 1. Even now, a dozen years later, when the phone rings at a wrong time, the blood pressure goes up, and I dash for the phone. My blood pressure is up now, and it was your daughter! Wasn't it wonderful that SHE CALLED, not someone else. You knew instantly that she was fairly ok. Everything else becomes far, far less important. My greatest sympathies over the whole thing. But SHE'S SAFE, SHE THOUGHT QUICKLY AND WELL, AND SHE'S SAFESAFESAFE. Oh, and she knows you both love her! But ultimately, SHE'S SAFE.
Posted by: asdfg at September 30, 2005 06:27 PM
very true, absolutely true. A car is just a piece of machinery. The girl is okay. She's safe.
Posted by: sara at September 30, 2005 08:10 PM
Good to hear she is ok. Maybe his description will come back to her in time. I still remember the cat's-eye glasses of the little old lady who hit my car when I was 16, who came to my driver side window after the impact. Mind you, I wouldn't be able to pick her out in a line-up now. Thank goodness for cell phones eh? When my crash happened, my parents were on a rare holiday, and I had to wait 2 days before they heard the news on their scheduled call home. Talk about tension (car totalled, but humans all ok).
Posted by: Pam at October 1, 2005 03:54 PM
Phew, the bella bambina is safe. Hope she isn't too shaken up still.
Can you put an ad in your local paper - just in case there are any witnesses or even someone else who drove by a little earlier than your daughter and saw the idiot parked where he shouldn't have been and who remembers more about it?
Good luck
Posted by: Alison at October 2, 2005 04:54 PM