September 07, 2007
ANOTHER SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I HOPE TO NEVER DO AGAIN
Hard to believe, but it's been a year since I took a tumble in the Titan.
I still remember everything about the accident in minute detail. The cliche is true; all the events take place in slow motion. I recall seeing the teenage girl look out her driver window as I swerved to avoid her when she pulled out in front of me. I recall the sound of the tires as they scraped sideways on the asphalt. I recall the rollover, how things in the cab of the truck floated past me, just like how the bloodhound and the Dapper Dan cans float by in the flood scene from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" I recall thinking, in mid tumble, "So, this is what it's like to roll your vehicle." I recall how the EMTs and firefighters couldn't believe that I could walk. I recall the cars that slowed down to take a look at me as they went past the ambulances and fire trucks. I recall the thrill of finding the sombrero by the side of the road when I went back tto the crash site a couple days later. And finding a digital voice recorder embedded in the mud that still played the interview I recorded the night of the crash. It's all still pretty fresh.
But the soreness in my ribs is long gone. I don't have any scars from the scrapes. Hell, I had a new truck that looked just like the old truck in under two weeks. In a way, it was like it never happened.
But there are times when the flashbacks whack me around. Like the afternoon we went to see "The Bourne Redundancy" or whatever the hell the last one was called. There's an amazing chase scene where Jason Bourne winds up scraping his Toureg on a barrier wall and crashing into an abutment. I don't know if the sound designer for the film had ever been in a crash, but he might as well have been recording the interior of my truck that night. It was that real. The glass shattering. The lining of the roof crunching. The particular thunder made by metal collapsing on itself. Hearing those sound effects was like hearing a song you haven't heard in a long time and then recalling it note for note.
Did I learn anything from it all? Yes and no. I at first took it as a sign that I needed to thin the schedule a little. I was running way too hard. But then that stopped. Like today. I'll be back in Orlando doing a story for the second time in two days. What the hell is that all about?
But I'll be fine. I'm driving the new Titan.