Driving home from seeing Spring Awakening in San Jose tonight, I felt a bit tired when driving. It’s not something new; my eyes were just a bit droopy, I wasn’t able to fully focus on distant road signs, and my body and mind just felt tired.
It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who’s had to drive late at night after a long day or simply for a long distance or period of time.
It’s also what I blame for probably the most calamitous moment of my life so far: when I flipped a friend’s car into a ditch.
I was in college and Katie and I were going up to a small town in Canada for spring break. We were almost there (probably a half hour away or so) and I had volunteered to drive for that stretch when we considered stopping for dinner in a small town on the way. In one of the biggest mistakes of my life, we decided to forge onward.
It was snowing and a light blanket was covering the roadway. At some point, I thought I saw something scurry onto the road – an animal, a wisp, something – and I quickly jerked the steering wheel to the left. It skidded and I felt myself losing control of the vehicle, even as I corrected my sudden turn. As the back end of the vehicle started swinging to and fro, I think I touched the breaks, which caused the car to do a sudden 360+ degree turn before flipping side over side and off the road.
In retrospect, this accident also affected me spiritually. While it would be disingenuous to say the experience converted me into a full-blown Christian (or anything else), it would also be a lie to say that it didn’t make me consider that something was watching over me. The fact that no one – not even my irresponsible non-seat-belt-wearing friend in the back seat – suffered so much as a scratch, the fact that our car managed to go off the road at the precise location of a clearing of the trees, the fact that the friend who owned the car managed to get a brand new one completely free from his insurance and I wasn’t penalized or charged in any way – it all seemed to perfectly come together.
Anyway, the lesson is: don’t drive sleepy. If you’ve got someone else, pull over and switch. If you don’t, stop somewhere and take a quick walk in the cold night air or buy a Big Gulp. I don’t want you to flip your car into a Canadian ditch, even if it does mean getting to talk to a real Canadian police officer about crime rates in his country and curling.