March 28, 2006 03:30 PM
Driving Dangers--Haven't We Learned Anything?
As my daughter nears the big 1-6, I worry more everyday. It's not really because she's a terrible driver, because she isn't. If anything, she goes a bit too slow sometimes, and while that can be a bad thing, at least she's still scared to drive too fast. But I tell her, as we moms are fond of saying, "I trust you, it's everyone else I don't trust."
She gets it now, I believe, largely because of something that happened to her last weekend. She and her boyfriend were on their way home from dinner, and were just a few miles from our home. It wasn't late but it was dark out already, and rather than sit dead stopped, bumper-to-bumper, on the busy main road home, they took one of the many low-traffic side roads. As they were coming up a hill, they spotted something in the road and stopped. It wasn't an animal or anything like they'd originally thought. It was another car, coming at them in their lane, with no lights on. Neither my daughter nor her boyfriend (a good driver, from what I've seen) knows whether it was a mistake by the other driver or a game of "chicken" they'd stumbled into. But they did say that they were able to stop, and the car coming at them swerved and passed them at a high rate of speed. Scary stuff.
This came just days after my own little incident on the road involving a car full of teenagers. I was sitting at a traffic light, and cars were stopped in front of me, to my left, and to my right. I heard an ear-piercing screeching sound and when I looked in the rear view mirror, I saw a car driven by a teenage girl coming up behind me. For some reason, she didn't seem to notice that ALL the traffic in front of her had stopped. She hit the brakes, and her car screeched and swerved to a frenzied stop, sending smoke and the smell of burning rubber all around. She managed to stop about a foot or two behind my car. When I saw her coming, I braced myself for impact--I had nowhere to go because cars were all around me. I understand everyone makes mistakes, but what I found really upsetting was that when the girl finally stopped, she and her car full of passengers (three other teens) erupted into hysterical laughter. The man in the car next to me started yelling at them, and they yelled and laughed back. It was all a game.
Directly to the left of where all this took place stood four wooden crosses, hammered into the ground, with flowers and teddy bears and notes surrounding them. This was the precise spot where four local teens were killed in a high-speed accident in January. I wondered if anyone, teens or adults, could learn from all the tragedy on the roads of my community. I'm still waiting, and I just don't know the answer.
Comments
My older son just turned 16, but we're managing to keep tight reigns on the driving situation and have so far managed to keep talk of licenses off in the distance for now. Good luck to all of us.
Teens in particular - and quite a few I know who are much older - have that sense of immortality, or at least little sense of mortality. Add to that any peer dynamics, and them breaking up laughing is exactly what I'd expect in the situation. I'm not condoning it, just expecting it.
Beyond that, there's a cheesy, low-budget Rod Serling or maybe Crypt Keeper stand-in wanting to turn your story into one where the four teens and their car were the ghosts of the four who were memorialized by the roadside. Of course, where does one take it from there? We could be completely irresponsible and say that they routinely relive the most thrilling moment of their lives, abridging the ending to fit their sense of continued existence.
...but that's not a very responsible message for me to be sending, so I'd best drop that one.
Posted by: Mike Norton at March 29, 2006 11:32 AM
