My daily commute out to campus, on the days I lecture, is about an hour along Texas highway 67, as straight and flat as only Texas can make such a highway. The speed limit is 65 or 70 the whole way, but it's criss-crossed with all kinds of little farm-to-market roads, and sometimes just the occasional long lonely driveway from someone's ranch or a budding construction site.
A week ago, a big Dodge work truck, hauling a trailer, blew through a stop sign and pulled out right in front of me, while I was driving Mrs. Crit's little Ford Fiesta. It's a narrow little two-lane road, there was nowhere I could go to miss him (I tried), and while I missed the TRUCK, I couldn't quite miss the trailer, too. I smashed headlong into him, braking as hard as I could but still moving damned fast.
My car didn't make it. By kind of a lot, my car didn't make it. In these first few pics, I can't get over how the metal is shredded (where one headlight is hanging out like Johnny Five's robot-eye or something). Not crumbled, but physically torn.
If it weren't for these airbags, Bull or Jason or someone would probably have made an [RIP] thread for me by now. I like to think I'd rate a respectful forward in the
Shadowrun Returns Anthology or maybe
SR5's core book, as my last published work, but...well...I'm glad that's not the case.
I hit so hard, and the car crumpled like it's supposed to, that the
back of my car got torn up. Panels were falling off, the rear windshield was destroyed, and in some strange quirk of physics a book that had been sitting in the back seat flew out (while the car was spinning), and managed to land
exactly under the rear wheels by the time the car stopped spinning and sliding, off to one side of the road.
This pic shows how far pieces of the car went flying from the collision. Like, full-on, major, body-panel parts that were just torn off and flying around. The road next to the car at like 12:00-6:00 is the road the truck was pulling across, the road going sort of diagonally across is the road I was driving on (going left to right, despite the car now facing mostly right to left).
So, anyways. I'm mostly in one piece. My hands got all beat up and some friction/chemical burns from the airbags deploying. I've got a bunch of abrasions and contusions especially on my left hand, and maybe a hairline fracture in my thumb. Typing full speed right now kind of sucks (which is a big deal to me).
I could have, and maybe should have, been a whole lot worse off. The state trooper that inspected the sight asked who pulled me out of the car, because he couldn't believe I'd just opened the door and got out (I commenced to cussing out the driver of the truck that did this to me, but the trooper totally understood that part) on my own. The wrecker that came to scrape my car up onto his flatbed had trouble finding solid pieces of frame to hook up his chains to, because the engine was falling out the bottom in pieces, and because so much was broken down there. I'm...really lucky. The Ford Motor Company is getting a letter and some pics from me, thanking them for making a car that will break so that my body doesn't.
I'm having a few issues with my daily drive (in an insurance-paid-for rental car right now), mostly because that exact sort of big white work pick-up is like 10% of the cars I see on the road, and because there's
so many little side roads with stop signs and stuff. So in addition to driving right past this very spot, I've got all kinds of very similar spots for my whole commute, and I kind of tense up at each of them. It's rough. I'm not in the best head-space at the moment where that's concerned, and the current suspicion with a few trained professionals is that I've managed to get full-on PTSD from it. So, yeah. That's not great news.
But anyways! I just figured I'd post this, to try and remind people that unlicensed drivers are out there. Cars bigger than yours are out there. Terrible, awful, unsafe drivers are out there. Be careful everyone, and be safe everyone. Make sure you've got decent insurance, everyone. Hug your wives and kiddos and stuff, everyone. You never know what your daily commute might turn into, so tell folks you love 'em and appreciate 'em, everyone.
If I happen to be a little snippy or impatient in my posts, or if I just post less than usual for a little while, I hope everyone understands and doesn't hold it against me too much. We're not dealing with the fallout of all this (with adjunct faculty and freelance writer pay), and I'm not sleeping too great and...anyways...mostly, just be careful on the road, folks.
I'm having a rough week, but it's good to still be here. Never let anyone tell you a high Edge score isn't a good investment.
