I was in my first car accident yesterday.
It wasn't a particularly dramatic accident, as such things go. I'd just picked up my mother: she'd been visiting my oldest brother, and I was going to take her home. It was quite late, around eleven o'clock, and freezing cold. The accident happened about ten or fifteen seconds after I picked her up. We were driving no faster than 20 kph down a narrow (and, as it turned out,
incredibly icy) residential street when I suddenly, unexpectedly, and completely lost control of the car. The whole incident felt rather absurd and quite unreal as we slid (ever so slowly) towards a parked vehicle where the street branched off left and right, and I remember thinking "oh, crap, I'm going to hit that car, aren't I?".
Luckily, I didn't.
I can't remember exactly
how it happened, but my car slid right, off the street, and towards a residential garden. We crashed through a rusty old iron fence and came to an abrupt stop as the car got stuck with one front tire suspended in thin air.
My first reaction was: "Great, fantastic, now I've done it; I've gone and destroyed my cool car." Not "Yay, we're alive!", because, frankly, we were going so slowly that I never felt we were in any danger. Looking back, however, the situation was potentially dangerous: had the car continued to slide further down into the garden, the metal railing from the fence could have punched through the windshield.
Still, materialistic as I am, my mind was -- still is -- with the car itself.
I remember feeling really, really sad as I turned off the engine and the radio and sat there in the dark. Not shocked, not angry, just sad. A couple of boys who'd been walking along the street when we crashed came over immediately to help out, although it appeared that we'd need a tow truck to pull the car out. They were incredibly helpful and considerate, however, as were the passengers of another car that passed by a few minutes later. Impressively so. My faith in mankind was restored.
But, like I said, it appeared we needed professional assistance, and these boys weren't it. Since the car had punched through the fence and got stuck beneath some bushes and trees, it was hard to see the extent of the damage, but it looked
bad. For sure, the hood of the car had been scratched and seriously dented in the impact with the railing, but unless I could get back onto the street where there was some light, it was impossible to say if the damage was just cosmetic.
By this time, my brother (who lived right up the road; I called him immediately following the accident) had showed up, and with his assistance I decided to try backing out from underneath the fence. Like I said, one tire was hanging in thin air, but the other tire -- the left one -- appeared to have some traction. How that could be, I have no idea. (Logically, if there was traction going back up, there should have been traction when I was sliding down, but...no.) So I got back into the car while my brother tried to lift the railing up from the hood (I don't know if he was able to or not, because it had basically embedded itself in the car), put the gear in reverse, and started backing up.
It worked! Within seconds, the car was free from the fence, out of the ditch, and I was able to roll down the hill and park the car off to the left so that I wouldn't block the street. And then I got out to take a look at the damage.
My car is a metallic blue New Beetle that I bought in August of 2000; my very first car, actually, and I love it to death. It'll need that love now, though, because it's not looking too good. Like I'd feared, the hood was smashed, scratched, and dented, and it needs to be replaced. In addition to that, the whole front of the car has been mangled and beat up. And there's bound to be some kind of damage to the undercarriage, although I haven't had a chance to look. All in all, it's going to be
very expensive to repair.
After experiencing something like this you're supposed to breathe a sigh of relief, smile, and say, "thank God nobody's hurt!"; and, sure, I'm happy we're okay, but the whole thing felt so
pointless and dumb and unfair. I was going really slowly, I've gone down this hill before, I've never had any kind of accident before (some idiot keyed my car on all four sides, but that's different), and I keep thinking my instincts misfired, and that I should have been able to avoid a collision if I'd only been a little smarter. After all, we're used to slippery roads here in Norway. True, this particular patch was
incredibly slippery, but...still! I pride myself on being a good driver! Grrr.
Oh, and on top of that, the woman who owned the fence (she came outside after we got the car out) was talking about "expensive and difficult repairs". I mean, it was a
really crappy-looking rusty fence, and after my brother did some on-the-spot repairs to the fence, it didn't look significantly worse than before. But I have a feeling she's going to pursue damages, so I guess I shouldn't say too much about that. More stress. Ack.
Now I have to start sorting out the papers, call the insurance-company, get the damage assessed, pay lots of money, and live without a car while it's being repaired... Hassle for me, but look at it this way:
You got to read an entertaining story! There's an upside to everything, right? Right.
