So, I’m driving Finn to his music class this morning when some idiot forces me off the road and nearly causes me to flip my car. We live near the top of a pretty large hill. I’m driving down the steep hill and a garbage truck is driving up. On the left, there’s a road that comes in at a ‘T’. There’s a car sitting there waiting for us to pass by. The garbage truck and I go past each other just above the ‘T.’ The next thing I know, the car is pulling into my lane. I don’t have time to stop. It’s raining and the road is wet. As soon as I hit the brakes, the car begins to fishtail and I lose control of the rear end. I have no choice but to swerve to the right and try to avoid a collision. But there’s a drainage ditch on the right, with trees beyond it. I have to try to keep the right tires out of the ditch, especially since Finn is strapped in on the rear passenger side. As soon as I go halfway off the road, I begin to skid and the fishtailing gets worse. I hit a dip and then a raised drain. The left tires lift a bit off the road and it feels like the car may tip over. Meanwhile, the drainage ditch is fast approaching, and it will surely flip me over.
Somehow, I managed to maintain control of the front-end and keep a precarious line. I slowly straightened out and finally was able to bring the car back on the road. I think, faced with the same set of challenges, I would crash 9 times out of 10. And some of the ways I might have crashed could have been really bad. In retrospect, I think the safest thing to do would have been to just hit the car. I’d slowed the car down enough that I probably wouldn’t have been hurt too badly and Finn would probably have been safe. But, in a split second like that, you have to rely on instincts, and my instincts told me to try to get around them.
On the way back from music class I stopped to look for skid marks. I carved a long groove out of the dirt on the side of the road. It stopped right before the dip and the raised drain.
The whole incident totally freaked me out.
