SAD080

SAD080 :: Pentax ZX-50 :: Slow Super-Zoom :: Fuji 800 :: Summer, 2001

A man gets out of prison to find his wife has left him. He confronts her, and her new partner. There's shouting, a heated exchange; he promises to kill himself if she won't come back. She won't.

He buys a case of beer and sets out for a drive. As the afternoon stretches on, he becomes very drunk, and is seen urinating in public and yelling about suicide. Finally, he turns up Highway 197N, a nice, easy drive toward Tennessee. He is steeling himself for the end.

Another man is also taking a drive, charging the battery in his prize-winning Corvette, which is due at a car show the next day. As he rounds a curve, an oncoming car veers into his lane. He's a good driver, and he see's what's coming, so he floors the Vette and steers it left, to dodge the other car. But the other driver steers with him, now back into his own lane, and they hit head-on.











I drove that road twice every day, in a car much flimsier than a Corvette. It could just as easily have been me, and I would not have lived. The driver of the Vette fully recovered, and the suicidal man, last I heard, was still a vegetable.

This was the last wreck I covered, except for my own, which was pretty mediocre. I drove my anemic domestic car into the back of a stopped Silverado at 45 mph, right in front of the Pizza Hut in Spruce Pine. SMAN was with me, and we were miraculously lucky to walk away from a crash that should have killed us both.



I'm no physics expert, but I reckon my wreck had about a fourth of the kenetic energy of the Corvette wreck. I remember seeing the truck, and realizing how fast I was going, and what the steering wheel was about to do to my face, and then it was as if I were waking from an afternoon nap on a hot burlap sack, and my hands were numb and tingling. I had braced against the center of the steering column just before the airbag went off.

I had seen other wrecks in which that exact scenario had broken both of the driver's arms. The only injury I had was a bruise on my right hand. No soreness from the seatbelt. SMAN had a bloody nose, but it was not broken, and the bleeding stopped quickly. I called Cpt. Destructo from a payphone, and he was there in an unbelievably short amount of time. We went into Pizza Hut and ate dinner.

I had escaped death on the highway twice in one summer. It was time to move on.