Abigail and I were headed north to a surprise party tonight up the New York State Thruway. Cruise control set, middle lane, just north (for those of you who know the area) of Exit 15a, the Route 17 exit.
Which is when I noticed the car in the left most lane come within a few inches of our car, and then swerve back toward the tractor-trailer height "Jersey barrier" and then I saw it make a fishtail motion at least one more time.
That's when it smashed into us.
I had been in the process of trying to brake in a futile attempt to get us behind the swerving car when it struck us, which sent us in a spin across the thruway toward the right.
It was somewhere in there that I began to have a few things happen. The first wasn't something I really thought out at the time, but I had an utter lack of that "slow motion" thing that happens. While I'm sure that things did seem to slow down a bit to me, it really felt pretty real time. That was odd, because I've been in accidents before and they always feel like they stretch out. This one felt like a blindingly fast, well, spin toward death.
That probably explains why I yelled (I called it a scream, my wife generously called it a "man yell"), not at the top of my lungs, but pretty loud. Somewhere just below where I think I might if I were to ever go on a roller coaster. See I happen to know this stretch of road, when heading off to play paintball my friends and I used to get off at the exit we had just passed, and I know that it's a good hill slope above the highway. I was really anticipating rolling down the hill.
And that's when we slammed into the guardrail, hard enough to leave about a six foot streak of paint down it, and hard enough to rip the bumper off, crack the radiator, rip all four tires off, demolish the head lamps into a pile of nothingness, and send the back of the spinning around, leaving our car facing the right direction on on the thruway.
We both looked at each other, and realized we were not dead, and not injured.
I called the OnStar emergency button on the phone (I sound like an ad, no?) and told them what happened. Oddly, Abby pointed out, they asked me "do you want me to call emergency services?" No, m'am, I just told you that my car has been demolished and I'd like to just tell you about it. I was hoping you'd have a joke or a story to lighten my mood.
She got the Thruway Authority emergency services on the line, and I told them again where we were and what happened. I told the hyper-calm dispatcher that we had just passed exit 15. "15 or 15a?" he said "I really don't know," I said, not knowing. The OnStar rep chimed in using the GPS in our car to tell him exactly where we were.
Within five minutes the fire department showed up. First they went over to the car that struck us. Since it was facing the wrong way on the highway with its lights still on, they were able to see it better, I guess. A moment or two earlier a passing Ambulette rolled up to us en route somewhere with an old lady in a breathing mask in the back. They asked if we were okay, and i said we were, but asked them to check on the car that hit us, which they did, and then they continued transporting the old lady. That's the point at which I decided to NOT try to cross three lanes of traffic in the dark to check out the occupant of the car.
Fire truck number two pulled up to us, and they put us inside the cab to stay warm since it was roughly 15 degrees outside. We waited a good fifteen minutes for the State Police to show up, and the extremely nice trooper let us sit in the back of his car, which was terribly cramped as it's set up for transporting prisoners.
We'd called Foster to come get us, and declined the trooper's offer to drive us back to Nyack (really nice of him, too). Trooper took my license and reg, and went to work with the first responding trooper with the other car. I asked our guy if the other driver was okay "banged up a bit" and if they said what happened "he said his brakes failed." Uh huh.
Paperwork returned, packed into Foster's car, we pulled out, passing the troopers as they searched the driver-less car that hit us.
It was probably less than thirty minutes all told, but aside from being in a tad bit of shock, I'm actually pretty okay. The car (2007 Saturn Vue for those of you looking for crash-survivable vehicles) saved our life, no doubt, as did that guard rail. I'm pretty confused as to why the front and side curtain airbags did not deploy. We were first struck while going highway speeds, and then we hit a guard rail via our engine block going at least 30. That seems to me to be the perfect time to deploy.
It also taught me a bit of a lesson, something I'd wondered about. I had heard from people who survive near-death experiences that there's a certain calm that comes over you. Abby's mom later called it a "resignation" which I'd never experienced. I've had some harrowing plane flights and have been terrorized by them, but never actually thought the plane would crash. But people who have been in crashes often say that they just thought something akin to Arthur Dent's "so this is it then, we're all going to die" statement.
That's really accurate, and for me it's a tad bit liberating. Yes, that thought can also precede serious injury instead of death, but it's at least good to know that something protective sort of takes over in really bad situations, and sort of shuts your mind off.
I also learned that Turiello's Pizza and a bowl of Rocky Road ice cream tastes fantastically better after a big car accident.
And now, I'm going to see if it's possible to fall asleep after the adrenaline of an accident wears off.
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