Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

I sat comfortably in the back middle seat of a white Ford 500, belonging to my best friend. She was sitting behind the steering wheel with her hands at two and ten, driving too fast for the gravel road that, unbenounced to us, was disguising itself under a blanket of stealthy black ice.

My daydreams were immediately brought to a halt when I spotted a sturdy telephone pole coming alarmingly fast towards me. In the next short few moments, the world seemed to simultaneously lag and fast forward around me. The focus of my eyes the entire time was the wood pole growing increasingly larger, but in my peripheral vision, I saw four frantic hands flailing in front of me in an attempt to correct the steering wheel that had been possessed by the power of the ice beneath us. The deafening sound of the window on my right shattering and a 3,000 pound car coming to an abrupt, crashing stop, as well as the seatbelt over my lap digging forcefully into my hips, brought me back to reality.

Forced by the pungent fumes filling the air around us, I climbed out the window, dodging the jagged shards of glass around me as if I was climbing out the mouth of a shark. Speaking of sharks, a common phobia, I wonder if those who are so afraid of them realize that the chances of them being killed by a shark are far less than the chances that they are in a fatal car accident. In fact, sharks are only responsible for ten deaths a year in the entire world, but texting and driving kills nearly eight people a day in the United States alone (PADI, 2021).

Although my friend was not using her phone at the time of the accident, there are still many valuable lessons to be learned. One being we shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place. It was a snow-day, so we spent the night together and decided we wanted sonic the next morning, despite the school’s decision to call off classes due to the weather. Secondly, we should have been driving a lot slower. We weren’t exceeding the speed limit, but speed limits are designed for ideal road conditions; something that we were taught in drivers education and that the roads that day were not. Unfortunately, my friends’ panic caused her to countersteer, which is an ill-advised thing to do in situations where a car is losing control. In no way do I hold this against her, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done the exact same thing in her place, but this experience is the perfect example of why proper, in-depth driver’s education can be a life-saver. My friends and I were grateful to be able to walk out of a crash that the police later described as “a miracle we were okay,” by the power of seatbelts- which is arguably the most important takeaway from that situation.

Vehicle transportation is an everyday ordeal for most people in our country and that fact is not going to change anytime soon. Along with our increasing population, there’s more people on the roads, and a plethora of new technologies at our fingertips- dristacting to say the least. Making driving a safer activity is going to require a lot of work, but it’s not out of reach. Individuals must continue to remain as alert and attentive as they were the first day they were handed the keys to a car. It is vital that after we get the initial driver’s education required to operate a vehicle, we keep up to date on the rules of the road. No text message, trip, photograph, etc., is more important than a life. If not for yourself, think about the new mother and father bringing their baby home from the hospital for the first time or the elderly couple on their way to church; be responsible in order to keep them safe. I do my part by buckling up every time I sit down behind the wheel, and refuse to continue until all of my passengers are as well. Simple, yet impactful things like using the blinker, obeying speed limits and traffic signs, can be the difference between life and death.

Too many innocent lives are stolen on our roadways. Every year, 34,000 people in the United States don’t get to come home to be mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters because they never made it out of their cars. If that number could be lowered to even 33,999 people as a result of a driver’s education course, it would be worthwhile. Teach your loved ones to drive with care, because somebody cares.