Winged on the road

Accidents are such unique experiences. In a mere few seconds you have a whole array of emotions, a visual lesson in Newtonian physics, and reactions that seem to exceed their natural speeds. In my life I now have had four accidents involving other vehicles and they will be indelibly etched on my memory. 

The first was on Khyber Pass back in my early university days. I was driving a Japanese friend home on night and had reason to do a U-turn. I checked my wing mirror and simultaneously did the rapid acceleration and turning of the wheel, nailing an old fashioned VW Beetle in the passenger door. In my blind spot there had been a car. The driver, who coincidentally was also Japanese was not impressed. Somewhere nearby there was also a policeman, who dashed over and breathalysed me. (Being teetotal at the time, this was a mere formality.)

The second was the funny one, in my mid-twenties. I was a keen vegetarian and a regular at the old Huckleberries on the corner of Balmoral and Manukau Rd. On quiet weekends it was easy to get into but I dreaded going to it in traffic. On this occasion the road was heaving. From the city, there was one tiny, sharp entrance on the Manukau Rd side. I got into the left lane and indicated ready to turn and signal to the traffic behind me that I was going to slow down. That was then a guy in a 4WD who had been in the Huckleberries carpark drove to the entry and prepared to turn onto Manukau Rd. He saw that I was turning and prepared to pull out into the tight gap in front of me, but before he even moved I hesitated: I did not think I would be able to squeeze through the entry with this vehicle. I decided not to bother and switched off my indicator to go straight, and rammed into his now committed vehicle. After exchanging details with the other drier, and then corresponding later on, we were both surprised that despite my inadvertently hoodwinking of him, I was in the clear of responsibility for the crash - a lesson that I call the "free hit rule". He was in a lot of angst over losing his "no claims bonus" for something he didn't see as his fault.

The second to last one might have been a year later and can count as a surprising one. I was travelling along Mt Albert Road in heavy traffic, coming back from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare. At the time, I had made a discovery that I could lift my greatest language learning weakness, listening, by listening to the Chinese radio stations for extended lengths of times, and there is no better time than when you are stuck in traffic. Or perhaps not. It might have not been the intense concentration on decoding meaning, but I think just a random thought that made my tired mind look away from the road, and up to the right ever so briefly. This was followed by the sensation that all drivers will have experienced at some stage of the object in front of you coming up quickly in your field of vision. The car in front had stopped. And despite trying, I did not quite manage to stop in time, and had my first cliched crash, the nose-to-tail. The surprise was that the driver, a middle-aged Samoan, said he didn't think the damage was sufficient to bother with insurance. Instead I met up with him for coffee a couple of times. 

That would have been sixteen or so years ago now. And I dread thinking about the fact that last Friday I broke the drought and had my fourth accident with another vehicle. It is tied up in a lot of emotions. Both my wife and I loved our car, our Wingroad. It was more homely and felt more permanent than our home in some ways. To be clear, I hadn't treated it well. I had inflicted a few scratches on it in the five years we've had it, so I guess the writing had been on the wall that I might do something worse. The story that goes along with it is clearly one of hypotheticals.

I was going down to Hamilton for work, but we had also planned a long weekend in Hamilton and Cambridge to spend our anniversary. (Hamilton doesn't conjure up romance for most, but we just wanted some time out of town.) Christy, being an online teacher, could teach from down there and then we could go straight into celebratory mode without having to drive far once down. Usually I would drive the work vehicle down to Hamilton and decided to just check whether it would be possible to have a work car over the weekend. That was a negative. Then the day before we were to go down, I accidentally left my power cord at a campus. Since I was working that Friday I would really need the cord and so the morning we were about to go to Hamilton I had to make that pitstop and head into an office to retrieve it before we actually got on our way. All of this circumstance might have had things happen more differently...

After collecting the power cord, I jumped back in the car, probably a bit annoyed that I had to waste the time. Annoyance and impatience are where most of my scratches have come from. I went up the drive-way of the campus to turn left onto the road. It is an annoying turn because cars park right up to the entry way and it is hard to see around. I believe I checked the best I could before emerging onto the road without the appropriate cautious crawl-peer, but rather with the hustle of a person who feels like he has to get moving. And I hustled the front right corner of our car into the left wheel of a white sedan. It was all slow motion, just like it always is. Our cars went some way along the road together. Fortunately neither car hit any other car. I had to evade parked cars on Christy's side of the car as we came to a stop. I jumped out and apologised and said it was my fault, that I had insurance and that we needed to exchange details. In another cosmic coincidence, the other driver was Samoan as well. 

The smallest of mercies was that even though our car was looking very sad out front, it was still drivable and I got it home. I learned another lesson: At the time I got the insurance out I was asked about the value I wanted to be compensated in the event of a crash. I never know how to answer that question - it does tie into the premium. It also becomes the threshold for what value of repairs they are happy to cover. If the value is too low, it is in the insurance company's interest to "write off". I think I changed the value down at some point and as a result the assessor took on look and told me to take all our belongings out of the car. 

A week on I think I've moved on. We have another car now. A hybrid. And it drives rather well. We just have to take this setback as a forced upgrade and a lesson to reflect and take care on the road.