Heavy Machinery

I am married to my car. Her name is Bessie. She’s a 2003 Charcoal Gray Chevy Suburban that I bought used, and still has a cd from the previous owner stuck in the player. Every song on that CD is in Spanish, and listening to that CD the first time you ride in my car is a ritual. She’s a staple of North Myrtle Beach High School’s drama club, having been used as a bus or shuttle to rehearsal, competition, and shows more times than anyone can count. My mom and I lived out of Bessie for over a month with our dog, traveling from Colorado to Texas to South Carolina. I grew up in that car. I love that car. I totaled that car last week.

I was having a great day. I was in a really upbeat mood, driving to my girlfriend’s house to pick her up and grab food before rehearsal. It was a beautiful warm day, and I had every window down, with “Work Song” by Hozier playing full blast on the radio. I was driving behind my friend Bionca, who I had my last period with. When we stopped at the red light by the school, I started looking at her brakelights and got really concerned. She had black opaque covers on them that only left a small amount of the light visible. I remember thinking, “wow, those are really hard to see, I hope it doesn’t cause problems for her.” But I thought nothing of what problems it could cause me. The light turned green, and we moved forwards again. I wasn’t on my phone, I wasn’t looking for a map or talking to a friend. I wasn’t doing any of the things they warn you about in drivers ed. One moment, I was listening to my favorite song, windows down, going ten miles under the speed limit; and the next I was slamming into Bionca’s spare tire, smashing the entire front end of my car. No one was injured, thankfully, but I haven’t emotionally recovered.

If I was doing something wrong, like checking my phone or speeding, I don’t think I would be this messed up over it. But I was just driving. The same route I take almost every day, at the same time I always take it. I was comfortable in the driver’s seat and didn’t pay enough attention. Now I’m interviewing for a second job to get a new car before the busy summer months, scrambling to find rides to and from rehearsal, and having nightmares every night about what happened. I got too comfortable. I genuinely believe that one of the main reasons we get into accidents is because we get too comfortable. Once we’ve been driving for a while, we get lazy. We feel comfortable checking our phones because we’re confident in our driving ability. We feel comfortable speeding because we’re confident in our ability to react on time. We feel comfortable rolling down the windows to listen to music because we’ve taken the same route hundreds of times. But the smallest lapse of attention can cause a life-altering crash.

Drivers ed teaches us not to get distracted. To obey traffic laws and pay close attention to the world around our car and give cars in front of us plenty of room in case they decide to make a last-minute decision that causes them to slam on the brakes. In drivers ed, cars are treated like heavy, dangerous machinery that should be used with as much care as a giant crane or forklift. Society doesn’t share the same precautions. As a society, we’re all completely used to being in cars every day. We see driving on tv, we watch our parents handle their vehicles comfortably, and we think nothing of it when cars are speeding past us on the highway, because we’re used to it. To bring vehicular deaths down, we have to get rid of this mindset. Only by treating cars as the dangerous machines that they are can we stop being careless on the road. We need to remember just how easy it is to kill and be killed when driving a vehicle, and never get too comfortable as a driver.

The accident I got into wasn’t fatal for anyone but Bessie, and it still completely changed my life. I didn’t realize how much I relied on my car until it was taken away. As an individual, I will never lose focus on the road again, and I will encourage others to do the same. I got lucky in my accident, but others don’t. We need to treat cars with the same focus we use on other machinery, or face the fatal consequences.