The Domino Effect

New Jersey weather is something you never get used to, no matter how long you’ve lived there. It’s always up in the air what the day will be like with the exception of one constant: the winters are absolutely brutal. It wouldn’t surprise me to go to school on a day with six inches of snow. It would annoy me, absolutely, but not take me by surprise.

So I woke up one morning in January of my senior year to an especially frigid day, making sure to turn my car on twenty minutes before I left because I really wasn’t a big fan of the current 9 degrees that I was facing. There’d been notifications of black ice warnings but everyone believed that the roads had already been salted like they always would be on these kinds of days.

I took my time, I maintained 25 miles per hour and picked up my friend from his house and we set on our way to the Dunkin Donuts that we always stopped at before school. It didn’t matter how cold it was, I had to have an iced mocha. But traffic was unusually insane. There was never any backup on other days but that day, I couldn’t go more than five miles an hour at a time because of the traffic. Apparently, students had gotten into accidents further down the road on their way to school due to the black ice.

Now, am I an absolutely phenomenal driver? No. I’m alright at driving, sometimes I break the speed limit and I’ve jumped my fair share of curbs. But I passed my test on the first try and never had an accident, and today was no exception. I made my usual left turn at an intersection onto a slight downhill slope, and I noticed that my speedometer read three miles an hour due to the severe traffic in front of me. And like any other day, any other time, I start to break as I approach the car in front of me. But, as you can probably assume, the break fought back. I kept trying, pushing it pedal to go from three miles to zero, but the slope and black ice were not cooperating. The front of my car tapped the Mazda in front of me and on any other day, in any other circumstances, it would’ve been a simple rear ending with no further damage. But, as was fate that day, that wasn’t all. The Mazda crawled forward and spun out, rear ending the Tesla in front of it. The Mazda went off the street and crashed into a tree as the Tesla rotated 270 degrees before hitting the Nissan in front of it, causing the Nissan to spin out and hit a telephone pole. One patch of black ice resulted in four cars in a pile-up, two of which were totaled. A total domino effect. The ice was so bad that my friend instantly slipped and fell the moment he stepped out of the car, and people started to exit the other cars. My heart dropped as the driver of the Mazda revealed herself to be a former friend of mine, broken down into tears out of fear and panic. The other two drivers revealed themselves to be people I vaguely knew from classes years ago. All four of us had been new drivers, all seniors in high school. The cop who came to help us could barely stand still on the sidewalk. Drivers behind me, also kids my age on their way to school, started climbing out of their cars and holding onto doors and each other to avoid a fall.

I don’t know about the other students, but personally, I’d been told the exact dos and don’ts of everything when I took Drivers Ed. Don’t cross the yellow line, the specific angles for parallel parking, how to check mirrors when switching lanes on the highway, I’d been taught all of it. But seeing my old friend sobbing out of fear that that might have been her last moments, I thought of the one thing that Drivers Ed didn’t teach me; what happens when it’s not your fault. A car is a behemoth, a separate entity that can take over control at any given moment depending on something as fateful as an icy morning. I found out later that morning that many of my classmates had spun out and either got into accidents or narrowly avoided it by sheer luck that one morning. At this point, many came to the conclusion that it was due to the fact that the roads hadn’t been salted. In a perfect world, there’d be proactive decisions as to how to deal with icy conditions on major roads. But if it doesn’t happen for the whole world, at least hopefully it’ll be taken into consideration in the future of my small town to keep the roads dry and teach the future generation of drivers what to do if the unexpected happens.