The Accident

You may have heard that I was in an accident. If not, well, now you know. Here's how it went down.

Casey and Paul decided to have a co-birthday party in Indy last Friday, February 5. Nevermind that their birthdays are, in fact, weeks apart. Both Shelby and Casey had to sub that day, so when they were done we all gathered at the Brown house and made our departure. Shelby drove us in the trusty ol' Buick. We headed south on 421.

A winter storm had been hammering central Indiana all day, but the most Michigan City had gotten was a smattering of flurries. The further south we went, the more white we saw, and the more ominous it became. I had recently pulled The Hobbit out of my bag and began reading. After getting through not more than a page or two, I heard Shelby exclaim a loud, mono-syllabic utterance. I looked up from the backseat and saw that we were approaching a wide curve to the left in the road. I gathered from Shelby's reaction that something was not right.

We were sliding. The car suddenly lurched to the left as Shelby attempted to keep it on the road. Good thing, too, as we would have been headed full-speed straight into an electrical pole along our current route. As the car continued to swerve, we found ourselves mostly perpendicular to the road and edging into the other lane. A black pickup truck was headed right for us. I encouraged Shelby to just try to maneuver the car off the road. Because we were sliding at an angle into the turn, the far edge of the road, which we now faced, seemed elusively out of reach.

The truck loomed closer. Casey, in the front passenger seat, and I, in the back passenger seat, looked on. With a slam and a crunch, the vehicles collided.

We were completely at rest. I could see the truck out the opposite window some twenty yards away. Nobody was hurt. Shelby made an attempt to drive the car forward a few feet to get it off the road, and with a grinding of metal he was actually successful. We got out to assess the situation, although Casey's door wouldn't open and he had to crawl across the front seat. The front bumper was missing entirely, along with the passenger-side fender, and the door was crumpled in. We found the bumper on other side of the street, behind the car, about 30 feet away; this we found somewhat comical as we were at a loss to even contemplate the physics of its trajectory. The front left tire had come completely off the rim. Everything under the hood looked remarkably intact. The driver of the truck was completely unharmed. His vehicle was damaged but not nearly as badly as Shelby's.

We had no idea where we were. All of those little towns along 421 kind of look the same. We waited in the car for the police to arrive, which took a bit longer than expected, no doubt due to increased numbers of calls that day. After assessing the scene, he said he had to move on to an accident that involved a child. He told us we were a few miles south of Francesville, gave us the phone number of a towing company in town, and told us a county officer would arrive shortly. That also took way longer than expected. Eventually he showed up and took the report, followed shortly by the tow truck.

As the tow truck headed back in the direction of Francesville, we meandered aimlessly behind along the side of the road. Shelby said that the driver of the pickup truck had mentioned that he could help us arrange to get a ride to town if we needed. We didn't know what to do except awkwardly ask. As we walked in the direction of the truck, we passed the police car that had yet to leave the scene. The officer rolled down his window and asked if we needed a ride into town. We all got in.

He dropped us off at a gas station in Francesville that was conveniently right across the street from where Shelby's car had been towed. Gotta love small towns. We walked in and were greeted by an elderly couple that were sitting at a table inside, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and just generally passing the evening. They invited us to sit, and we were soon joined by a friend of theirs, who looked to be about 30. They talked with us for a while and we told them what had happened while we waited for a ride back to Michigan City in the form of Rachel.

Shelby and I decided to go over to the car to get a few things out of the trunk. When we got there, the trunk latch inside wouldn't work, and we didn't have the keys. We walked back over and sat and talked some more. We heard a lot of stories from these people who knew each other quite well and, in fact, it was pretty entertaining. The 30-year-old fellow was quite fond of 75-person motorcycle racing on a frozen lake just outside of town. Fancy that.

Not too much later, the guys who had towed the car walked in. Gotta love small towns. They went over to the car with us and opened the trunk so we could get our stuff out. We walked back to the gas station and sat and waited some more. Eventually Rachel showed up, and our little gas station party was at an end, as they all went home and we piled into Rachel's car and headed back north.

The next day, Shelby and his dad drove down to Francesville to see what could be done about the car. I wondered if it might still be drivable, since everything under the hood looked completely fine, as long as a tire was put on the front left wheel. They discovered that the front axle was too mangled for that to be possible. So it goes.

The heroes of our story—Shelby, Casey, and myself—have quite a bit to be thankful for with regard to this accident. There are many different ways it could have played out. Casey told me later that he was certain that we (or at least, from his vantage point, he) would surely die. Automobile tragedy is no strange thing to me. My uncle and his wife were killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver before I was even born. My cousin, with whom I was extremely close growing up, was killed only seven years ago, along with two friends of his, when the driver of their car fell asleep at the wheel.

Any number of factors could have been infinitesimally altered, and the outcome of this accident could have been very different. The only thing we can do now is be thankful that it wasn't.