On December 29, a driver in Niagara County, New York ended up upside down in a water-filled ditch, pinned in place as police rushed to help. A local bystander reportedly tried breaking the window, but was unable to get the driver out. “Responding deputies arrived on scene and observed a 2009 Honda Fit overturned in the ditch, with the passenger compartment filling with water,” the local police’s statement reads. “The driver and sole occupant, [a] 40 year old… was pinned in the vehicle.”
The Niagara County Sheriff’s Office media release continues, saying “Deputy Virk and Deputy Kennedy entered the ditch and were able to use their department issued rescue tool to break the rear passenger side window, open the door, and pull [the driver] to safety.”
The report states that there were no life-threatening injuries, and that the driver — whom the police say was found to be under the influence of drugs — was then sent to the hospital. He was “charged with a traffic violation and Driving While Ability Impaired by Drugs…[and] released on appearance tickets and remains at the hospital for further treatment.”
Here’s the video of the incident in Wheatfield, NY — an incident that is, to me, total nightmare fuel:
This has been a recurring nightmare for me for years: ending up in an overturned car, underwater. There’s just a terror associated with water rushing in, not knowing how to get out or which way is up or down, and it doesn’t help that I’m a weak swimmer.
Starting today, I’ll be putting that ^hammer into my and my wife’s daily-drivers. I just need to figure out how to fasten it so that, in the event of such a situation, the hammer is easily accessible. I’m all ears if you have a strategy on that.
Anyway, today’s post isn’t about your biggest car fears (ok, it was initially until I found out we’ve already asked that). It’s about your own scariest automobile moment. One of mine is the crash you see above, in which an uninsured motorist in a Chevy Tahoe pulled out in front of me, totaling my beloved 1992 Jeep Cherokee — a vehicle that I later fixed with a fraction of the ~$1,600 payout.
Another one of my scariest moments happened when I was 17 and driving home from my high school girlfriend’s house in the dark. This was in a rural part of Kansas, where a raccoon ran right into the road. I, in my 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee (shown below) made what I thought was a slight swerve, but what was, in reality, a huge swerve in that top-heavy machine. I lost complete control at about 65 mph, drifting into the oncoming lane, then back to the far right of the road, then back to the far left shoulder; back and forth I hacked away at that steering wheel trying to keep that nose pointing straight, and luckily — thanks in part to lots of practice drifting in snow, mud, and in parking lots, I was able to recover. That would have been catastrophic, without question.
I often remind myself how lucky many of us Americans are to have made it out of our teens. So many of my friends have also had close calls between the age of 16 and 18 (this might make you wonder if we should raise the driving age, but that’s a topic for another day).
Topshot: everett225/depositphotos
While attending college in central Vermont I rolled an ’04 Subaru Forrester over an embankment in a snowstorm. The car came to rest on its side and the first thing that I noticed was I had spilled my coffee. When I managed to open the door, now above my head, a guy had stopped at the top of the bank. He asked if I was ok and said, “You should have seen that from where I was sitting.”
As a high school Junior, I took my Mom’s newish Z3 M roadster on a date. Traction control off and a clutch dump turning onto a major thoroughfare nearly turned into a Mustang leaving cars and coffee moment. Going sideways at 25mph inches from a telephone pole is my ultimate pucker moment. Thankfully the only damage was to my ego.
Driving along I-495 in MA on my way to a work gig in CT, sun is out after a heavy late morning thunderstorm, so the road is streaming wet, heavy, fast post-rush hour traffic doing 75 or so. I’m in my ”95 Saab 900SET. This is a six-lane divided highway with a wide, forested median. Suddenly there is a fountain of dirt and mud ahead to the left. – I am in the left lane. I start braking thinking WTF?!?. Fountain of mud resolves into a semi that is how heading across the median then highway perpendicular to traffic. It hits the pickup in front of me and absolutely annihilates it. At that point I have my full body weight on the brake pedal and come to a stop with the nose of the Saab inches from the side of the trailer that is now completely blocking the road – all three lanes. I dove across the center console FULLY expecting to get hit and shoved under the trailer, but by some miracle at least the first few rows of cars got stopped. There were a couple of collisions further behind us.
The pickup truck driver died – given what it looked like at that point they possibly had to suck him out of the cab with a wet-vac. The engine block went bouncing down the road a hundred yards. Found out on the news a car had hydroplaned into the semi and broke the steer axle, sending it out of control. The semi driver had minor injuries but what a thing to have to live with.
I was able to get off the highway by driving the wrong way up an on-ramp that was right there at the accident scene, but I had to pull over for a good while until the shakes went away. “There but for the grace of God go I”.
Fell asleep at the wheel of an ’82 Subaru GL wagon, which I later found out had an exhaust leak and was filling the cabin with carbon monoxide. I was somewhere on 81N between Binghamton and Geneva, NY, and woke up about 40 feet down an embankment headed straight for a concrete pillar. I’ll never know what woke me up in time. I slammed on the brakes and got control of the car. I was shaking from the gallon of adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream. When I had collected myself, I put it in 4WD (this was December, and it was snowing) and made it back to the top of the hill. I drove the rest of the way blasting Back in Black with the windows open and a titanic headache.
In ~1999, my car (a 1986 Saab 900) spun three times and flipped on Highway 17 outside Santa Cruz. If you know that road, you know. Ended up upside down, facing oncoming traffic. Managed to get out of that with minor cuts and bruises.
Late in ’88 I was driving home after an AC/DC concert in my ’76 Bronco. Needless to say, my hearing was somewhat compromised in that moment, but I was bone sober. I pulled to a 4-way stop sign that was at the crest of a small hill at the end of a long 2-lane suburban road. I was going to make a left at that stop sign, but had the recongintion to come to a full and complete stop and pause before turning. Just before I released the brakes, I caught a flash of light in my side view mirror and a car flew past me in the left lane, completely blowing through the stop sign. I’d estimate the speed at something like 70 MPH. If I had simply turned left as I normally would have done, there’s little chance I would be typing this right now. That car would have slammed into me full broadside, and I would have probably been killed instantaneously.
Mine was not really an on-road accident but getting trapped by fully self-inflicted stupidity.
At the ripe age of 19 I was working as an international delivery driver.
The job involved lots of long overnight interstate drives and one day on the way back home I got super tired somewhere in Austria.
In the Opel Corsa D van I was driving, there was a cargo fence behind the front seats so I couldn’t lay the seat flat to take a nap.
I had the bright idea to climb in the small empty cargo area of the Corsa and try sleeping a few hours in a curled-up fetal position.
During the night it got a bit breezy so I shut the trunk door from the inside without a second thought.
I woke up a few hours later, the sun came out and it got very warm inside.
I realized the Corsa D has an electric trunk lock. I also left my keys are on the front seat, behind the cargo fence. The external door handle is also just an electrical switch.
In the EU it is not mandatory to have a trunk escape mechanism like in the US, so I was completely locked in the car in a fetal position.
All windows were up.
All I could do is yell my lungs out for help and try to rock the car as much as I could, hoping the alarm would go off. Which it did not. But boy, it was getting very warm in there from the summer sun.
Eventually, after what seemed like several hours of yelling and rocking the car, someone opened the trunk.
They were very surprised to find me there, and thought there was a dog left inside.
I tried to thank them as best I could with my 10-word-long German vocabulary, in hindsight they saved my life.
I am not sure how much longer would I have remained conscious in the heat.
By far my scariest moment was on the traffic circle of my hometown.
Not a roundabout, a traffic circle. Where the cars looping around in a single have a yield sign to enter the two main double lane routes through the circle.
So anyways, I was approaching the circle at extra legal speeds, as everyone in the area does, in my 1988 XJ, which had a failing master cylinder.
(this thing was held together with bubblegum and whatever my weekly pay of $100 could afford to fix after I’d paid for gas)
I can vividly remember the next moments. There was a Chrysler 300m waiting at the yield, to enter the circle. No biggie.
So, as I begin my entry to the circle, the 300m decides it’s GO TIME. I’m approaching at about 70km/h, heading into a curve of a traffic circle, in a (at the time) nearly 20 year old rust bucket with the front swaybar endlinks long busted.
I stand on the WHOA pedal and get all the feedback of a rotten cantaloupe on a hardwood floor, cause the master cylinder was failing. The front end barely dips. But while the front calipers missed the memo, the rear drums understood the assignment and LOCKED UP as I was beginning to turn.
The ass end began rapid rotation in it’s quest to overtake the front end. As I’m beginning my Elvis Stojko routine, I can see a green mid 90s Suburban that was nearly immediately on my ass, now nearly immediately on my front.
Like a teenage house party, there was far less thinking and far more reacting in the next few moments. I slammed the shifter forward to “R” for “Race” and floored it, cranking the wheel hard to the left in an effort to realign the ship with the flow of traffic.
Racking the poor shifter back down into “D” for “dicked if I don’t get moving” I regained forward momentum with a bark that I’m sure took years off of every component south of the flexplate.
In hindsight, once again like a teenage house party, I’m sure all the action was finished inside of 10 seconds.
The Maneuver saw me move from the inside lane, to the outer one, getting me out of the path of the Suburban.
Once I pulled off into a nearby parking lot, I called my dad to tell him what happened. He asked “what the hell is that noise?”. Turns out, I was coursing enough adrenaline through my system that I couldn’t hold the phone steady, and the sound was the phone rubbing on my hair.
Eventually I managed to calm the fuck down and meet my dad for lunch. The tire marks of my outrageous stunt were there for months afterwards.
I’m both proud of 19 year old me for reacting, and ashamed of 19 year old me for getting into a situation like that in the first place.
I still hate the 300m on principle, and it permanently coloured my perception of the people who drive them.
In your defense, traffic circles are the worst. They manage to combine the most problematic elements of normal roads with the confusion of something completely alien to most people.
Unfortunately, it was the most efficient way to funnel traffic off the bridge that led directly to the US border and the native land between.
The high level bridge is now gone, but the traffic circle remains. Although they’ve redesigned it to lower speeds and have added more signage. so it’s better now.
I went off the Kink at speed and somehow managed to not hit the wall.
Somehow that wasn’t as terrifying as being stuck on the Million Dollar Highway in the snow as an incredibly naive, stupid and lucky 22-year-old in a Firebird.
Don’t have a story, but just wanted to say that I think something like a resqme is better than those hammer cutters.
It’s small, relatively cheap, and has a spring loaded spike so you don’t need to provide any force to break the glass. Since it IS small, you can stow it on your keyring or anywhere else in the car without difficulty.
It was a stocking stuffer this year for some loved ones.
Cresting a modest rise at maybe 20 or 25 on refrozen snow, I saw that the road took a hard right in 10 yards—and the surface disappeared behind that. No abs in an 80s Subaru, so I started pumping brakes and coaxing it: just sliding. Yanked it into 2nd (in 4Lo), then jerked the wheel & gave ‘er some…
Gf is screaming, and we could now see the steep hill we were going to roll over&over down into distant trees. My loyal wagon somehow bit right at the edge, pulled us through the turn, and we came to a slightly hysterical stop a few yards further. Breathing heavily, we clambered, slipping & falling, back up to the turn to find our tracks went right to the downhill edge of that icy, crumbling pavement.
If I hadn’t played as much on low-traction surfaces—and hadn’t had pretty new WinterForce tires,—it would have ended very badly
Summer of 1990 (more or less). My wife and I were driving home from Denver in her ’69 Baja Bug on I-70. We’d just gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel and were coming down the west side of the hill…fairly curvy, pretty steep…at about 60mph, nothing unreasonable. Traffic was moderate for a weekday afternoon. It’d been raining, but nothing to really worry about.
Started noticing there was a bit of hail on the road, but again, nothing dire…yet. Came around a corner, and found ourselves skating through about 2″ of accumulated hail on the roadway. As we did a slow 360 at speed, there were 5 or 6 other cars in the same situation…sliding sideways, colliding with each other, etc. Somehow, I managed to get straightened out and threaded our way through the mess. I’ve no doubt that if we’d collided with anyone, we’d be dead.
I should’ve stopped to see if I could help, but I’d already seen one parked car get smacked in the rear by another sliding vehicle, so I got us away from the whole situation, and called the state patrol when we got down to Silverthorne (before the ubiquity of cell phones). We spent an hour in McDonald’s, shakily drinking our coffee as we tried to calm down.
Why there was so much hail in that one spot is anyone’s guess. I’m certain that people must’ve gotten hurt. How we got so lucky, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was my experience with VW oversteer that allowed me to regain control.
Been there, done that.
That portion of I-70 is deadly and well known, (both directions) as a killer.
Have been sideways on that thing more times than I can count.
Glad you made it ok…
Both in a 1972 AMC AMX, 2 separate incidents:
1) While driving to school on the SE Expressway in Braintree MA in the left lane, I see a moving slowly towards me, the passenger side inches off of the Jersey barriers, driving about 10 MPH, a little old lady (I swear) looking thru the steering wheel. I go around her, look backwards, cause I cannot believe what I am seeing, Turn back around, and nearly cream the state cop car backing up to catch her. there were no left hand exit ramps nearby, which meant she got on the highway going the wrong direction and crossed 3 lanes of traffic to get where she was driving.
2) After doing the front brakes in a flat spot in front of my house, I took the car for a drive, backing into the uphill driveway to turn around. Going to the end of my street, I hit the brakes and they go to floor, as I had not pumped the Calipers full after retracting them. Going 30mph to a T intersection, I had to use some hedges to slow the car down.
1981 in my early twenties driving my 1980 RX-7. Came over a hill in Burlington MA on 95. A black lab is in the middle of the road and I slam on my brakes. It was winter and I had no snows. The RX-7 was a pretty light car. I did a full 360, avoided the dog and my car stalled. MIraculously, nobody hit me on this usually very busy road.
I’ve put snows on all of my cars since that day. Also, I miss that car!
I had an ’81 RX7, and I missed my turn once in the rain. Turns out the tires were severely dry rotted, and when I stepped on the brakes it simply locked up and slid past my turn, barely scrubbing speed.
On the bright side, those same tires made burnouts possible with that little revvy 12a.
First year Boxster. Black on Black on Black. Driving down hill to light, T intersection. Concrete road surface with a light rain. Going slow, 10 mph? Make the left. And immediately learn about polar inertia. Worse than a Bronco II. PSM or what ever they call on the next one made the daily driving better.
Oh boy – I got a lesson in how a limited-slip diff can bite you in the ass in my first of two ’91 BMW 318is. Taking off from a light across a wide and steeply cambered intersection to take a left in a light drizzle, the thing did a snap spin so fast I could not even believe it. Perfect 270 degree rotation and ended up facing the wrong way. Just gave it THAT much too much gas and both rear wheels spun as I went over the top of the camber.
Modern stability control is a GOOD thing.
First was showing my brother how to properly test drive a used Dakota. LF wheel bearing gave out at about 60mph. Wheel locked up and turned all the way left. I was surprised by how much control I still had to get it of the road.
Next both involved the biggest mistake of my entire life, buying a 2004 Grand Cherokee. Gas tank dropped and was dragging on the expressway. You could argue this was partly my fault as I knew the metal cover under the tank was rotting away, but I foolishly thought there were straps holding the tank under that.
Second one on that jeep was when I was able to identify the clunking in the front end. Had my son turn the wheel while I was underneath and saw the (I guess you would call it a pitman arm) almost falling out. I literally was stunned watching it sloppy around in the socket. Couldn’t believe I was driving my kids around in that death trap. While it was cool doing an alignment in my garage (only had to adjust steer ahead/ straighten the wheel) I actually got tired of always working on it.
Don’t ever buy anything from Chrysler/Dodge/jeep.
Rolled a Land Rover Defender 130 at 90 km/h due to driver error on a dirt road. The first roll was ‘exciting’. Which broke the entire vehicle. The second roll was depressing in all the wrong ways. Without windows, A pillars, B pillars and side windows…I went over on my head. Which wasn’t comfortable. When I landed back on the wheels, it was like rising out of a pint of Guinness. Then I realised I had a rock the size of my head sitting in my lap….
Well done
Winner
Did you keep the rock as a monument to your stupidity (I would have)? Could be your tombstone.
I did manage to roll my Diesel Rabbit. Downed power line, slick road, overcorrection into the hill, hilarity ensued.
Haven’t many crashes luckily, but the scariest must have been riding my Aprilia RS125 in Barcelona – had a love/hate relationship with that bike.
It was summer and I was heading to the movies with my girlfriend (now wife). We were driving quite slow, and, as we crossed one of the main streets, a senseless bike jumped his red sign and t-boned us from the right. We fell and she had a small drag burn on her back where the t-shirt ripped (yeah I know, t-shirts aren’t riding gear…). I was livid, punched the fat 30-sth year old rider guy with my weak 16-year-old arms, and he barely nooticed even if I was wearing my riding gloves. I was so scared for Maria that I told him I wished I had been driving a bus and turned him to mush.
Not a great story from an even worse racounteur, – I guess the takeaway is that there is nothing scarier than getting into an accident with your loved ones aboard!
PS: David, I have a window-breaking thingy and an Element fire extinguisher attached to the molle cover of my sunvisor on my. Just an idea!
Bill.
I have to ask this.
Did you ever live in Colorado as a kid?
Not a joke.
Happy new Year.
No, why?
Grew up in Barcelona and moved to the states a bit over a decade ago.
Happy New Year!
Thanks. A best friend from over 50 yrs back has same name.
Actually thinking I may have already asked you that before…
Appreciate your patience.
My scariest moment was just a few weeks ago. An inversion rolled in, snowy fog everywhere but seemingly icing things at random. I was in my Miata about to merge onto the highway, and the on-ramp was not icy. It HAD been icy a week or two before, so I got a bit of false confidence that the highway wouldn’t be icy if the on-ramp wasn’t…
As it turned out, the place where the highway met the on-ramp was completely iced over, so as I’d already accelerated to 60 mph or so and started merging, I suddenly lost control of the car and started fishtailing wildly on the highway, while huge pickup trucks whizz by me honking in the next lane over – which, I mean, do I LOOK like I have control in this situation??? I’m trying my best to recover here, I’m not sliding around on purpose, honking at me isn’t going to help me regain traction or avoid sliding into your lane… But whatever…
I managed to just barely keep the car in 1.5 lanes, but had to slow down to like 10 mph and start accelerating back up from 1st gear again to get the car under some semblance of control until I reached a part of the highway that wasn’t icy. THANKFULLY, after that the roads were clear and I got to my destination on time. But my heart was definitely racing for the rest of the day, genuinely didn’t know if I’d be able to stop the car from hitting the guardrail or get creamed by an oncoming truck.
Normally I’d say Miatas are pretty good in inclement weather because they’re so responsive and intuitive that you can get out of trouble as easily as you can get into it. At least, that’s how I feel about rain… But ice? Ice is just terrifying no matter what you drive, and a tiny, short RWD chassis doesn’t help. Thankfully such conditions are pretty infrequent around here, so that’s only something I have to deal with a couple times a year, but those are a scary couple times.
Ice is a nightmare. I’ve had far too many close calls myself, but never in a tiny car like a Miata!
When I moved to Ann Arbor from CA to go to college, every native Michigander I met had a black ice story. Most of them involved doing an unexpected 180 on some part of the 94. Nothing else about driving in winter terrified me more than black ice.
Not only a Miata, but a 1990 model! As small, unprotected, and old as a Miata gets, with it being old enough for the airbag’s functionality to be questionable, and no traction control, limited-slip diff, or ABS, and on all-season tires because icy roads are so rare here that winter tires are financially difficult to justify buying. Normally I’m confident enough in my driving instincts to get me out of these situations that I’m not worried about the lack of driver aids, but ice really is the one thing you can’t fully predict or react your way out of. You can learn everything there is to know about safe winter driving and it’ll still surprise you.
It’s tricky to shift right for the rest of your drive when your hands are shaking from the near-death adrenaline rush…
To me, places that only “occasionally” get real winter are the places you need winter tires the most, because they are so completely and utterly unprepared for when it does happen. I’d run winter tires year-round if I had to in that situation. Actually what I do on my Land Rover Disco in Maine. I only really drive it on the rare occasions I am in Maine in the winter at this point, so I don’t even bother to swap wheels anymore. The 2-300 miles a summer I drive the thing aren’t doing any harm, those tires are going to rot off before they wear out.
Unexpected ice is the absolute worst. In my hometown in Maine, I-95 goes down into a long valley that has the Royal River at the bottom of it just before my exit. One night many years ago I am driving home from work down that at a good 70mph in seemingly light rain. But then I got a lesson in “bridges freeze first”. Hit that long bridge and immediately knew I was on glare ice – you can feel it in the wheel and the seat of your pants. Thankfully, the good old ’84 Jetta GLI stayed straight all the way across, but I saw spinning lights in the mirror as some people behind me were not as lucky.
Mine’s pretty straightforward. Got caught on a highway in a middle of a blizzard, in nearly white out conditions, to the point where I couldn’t see beyond 40’ in front or at all from behind. I was driving my old Jeep at the time, and the 4×4 shifter turned into a dead fish. Didn’t know if I snapped the cable, or if it got jammed in ice and snow. Regardless, the road wasn’t getting plowed quick enough, and decided to find a hotel to wait it out, call around for a shop.
How did I get in this mess? I’m a Marylander who grew up around Boston. The Patriots were in the Super Bowl (2014), and I had the genius idea to drive up to watch the game with some old buddies. Take a few days off, drive up, watch the game, drive down, no problem, did that trip countless times.
Well, I should have known I was in for a rough day. Snow was already starting to fall hard by the time I got to Worcester. Genius me, what’s a little snow? 2014-2015 snow season was a very active one. By the time I got near Hartford, I decided to slow down, plop it into 4 high, and… what was that noise? Why is the shifter loose? Where’s the road?
Pulled off into the next town. Called my boss, told him what happened. He laughed, ask if I was drunk, and told me to be safe and take my time.
Well, long story short, showed up to the office two days later – one to wait out the storm, another to schedule a service repair nearby, before finally completing the drive. Everyone in the office assumed I was just drunk – it was a damn good Super Bowl.
Well. At least they were right about one thing. It was a damn good Super Bowl.
But that was the last time I drove up during winter. Been flying up ever since.
What’s the Jeep? Great story!
2010 JKU. Ironically most reliable vehicle I’ve ever owned. In ten years of ownership, only major malfunctions were the cable snap described above, and a bad transmission oil sensor replaced under warranty (HOT OIL error).
Traded that thing in like an idiot for a since lemoned 4xe. Stellantis is running Jeep into the ground.
That time I woke up in a convertible in mid air towing a U-haul trailer in the middle of the night after driving off of I-80. Actually it was all over before I had a chance to be scared. I do remember thinking “This is not good” then I hit the ground, and not much happened.
Tie rod falling off a truck in traffic on the Long Island expressway, not as scary. A couple of cars that fought fire while I was driving, not as scary. Wheels falling off, kind of scary, the one where a CV joint failure tore the driver-side front suspension off the car with the MacPherson strut lying in the road and sending me into the guardrail was kinda exciting. But none of that was quite up to waking up driving a flying car.
You were towing with a convertible?
He buried the lede…
Living in New York, had a 69 Chevy Malibu convertible, and moved to California to go CalArts. The fact that the convertible was assembled from a 69 with a 68 front clip out of a junkyard and the top frame of a Buick and a truck engine just two months before didn’t seem like a problem at the time. Turned out to be an epically bad idea. That car was an adventure every time I drove it. Really ought to write it all down sometime.
Driving back to college from Minnesota to Montana in my ‘62 Beetle which was coming off a fresh engine replacement. Motor was a relatively warm 1835 (041 heads, port/polish, headers, and a Weber progressive).
About 120 miles in, the engine died and smoke started pouring out from everywhere. Turns out that the shop that did the reinstall of the engine didn’t space or insulate the carb from the fan shroud, and the hot line from the choke shorted out the entire electrical system and melted the 32 year old insulation throughout the car.
The smoke pouring out from the dash combined with the 10 gallons of premium unleaded sitting only inches away (and directly above my knees) had me sprinting out the door and into the middle of I-94 with zero consideration of oncoming traffic.
At the end of the day, I had to dump the car with the shop that did the engine…I loved it, but as a broke college student I just didn’t have the means to sink any more cash into it.
Damn! I hope it wasn’t wintertime.
When I was 18 I had gotten into a huge fight with my girlfriend right before driving back to college. I was totally in my own head and it was dark outside. I was in a rural area and approached a stop sign. I had been this route hundreds of times before but being preoccupied I just assumed that I was at a 4 way stop. So I leisurely took off from the stop sign and failed to notice a vehicle approaching me at around 70 mph. Luckily they were paying attention and I was snapped out of my head by the sound of tires being lit up and a Chrysler minivan barreling towards me. At the last minute I punched the throttle and turned the wheel which provided just enough oversteer to BARELY miss the van. I immediately woke up and had an adrenaline rush that made me forget all about the fight from earlier. The driver of the van immediately pulled a U turn and started following me with high beams on. I threw my hand out to wave sorry and just kept moving. Eventually they got tired of following me and turned around. I learned that day that alcohol and drugs are not the only thing that should avoid before driving. You have to have your mind right on all fronts. It’s important to be fully alert, and for that reason people looking at their phones while driving infuriates me.
I’m sure that would have been a friendly conversation lol!
My scariest was perhaps getting rear ended by a box truck in Guatemala.
Already in a foreign environment with a language foreign-to-me as well, my coworker and I were riding in the jumpseats of a Land Rover variant (Not sure. Whatever. Rear jumpseats. Blindingly yellow one). Stopped at a red light ahead- with traffic-which put us almost at the last intersection, though not at all IN the intersection.
I’m a big boy and so one shoulder was snugged up tight against the rear door, other against the back of the rear seat.
After a while of not moving, I boredly look down my right shoulder and see the signal’s red lights and in freezeframe a midsize box truck running the light in the middle of the intersection barreling toward us, obviously with some speed behind it.
Long story short: I yelled “shit!”, we got hit, it caved the rear in (including rear-mounted spare), but both my coworker and I were fine.
No idea what happened with glass shards or anything, but everything went everywhere. We eventually drove off, much fuss was made later. Don’t think the truck driver was hurt either, but that was a HIT if I’ve ever received one. I hope they were okay. Their passenger cabin and my own were pretty intimate for a moment.
I don’t remember the box truck driving off under power, but of what I remembered: here it is.
I rolled a car off of an overpass and down onto a highway below where it landed on its roof. The scariest moment of the accident was the near silent flight from the bridge to the highway fourteen feet down as the car turned turtle, tumbling me over and over like wet jeans in dryer. The landing was almost anticlimactic. Almost. Stuck it, by the way.