Drivers License: the Accident - Essay Example

 Driver’s License: the Accident At age 16, I finally received that magical piece of paper that meant I was free to drive myself anywhere I wanted to go. Getting a driver’s license is probably an important event in anyone’s life. This is true even when you live in an area like mine where a kid can hop on any bus or trolley and go just about anywhere in the city. The problem with this, though, is that you have to move according to the bus schedules and bus stops are not always conveniently close to where you want to go. Without telling my parents my plans, I jumped in the family car, a respectable green Honda Accord, and headed straight to my best friend’s house to bully her into joining me on my first solo flight. I planned to go to the country. I could already smell the tangy scent of the wild plant-life we would encounter and wasn’t ready to put up with many arguments. Fortunately, it didn’t take much arm twisting to convince her to go with me and we headed out of town on the shortest route possible, which just happened to take us past the mall. My parents had already warned me to stay away from the mall area because the people there drove completely crazy. Of course, living in California, I had already done my driver’s training in the midst of these notoriously bad drivers, so I assumed my parents were just making a big deal out of nothing. They were always trying to keep me safe from something that I probably didn’t really need to be saved from, so I was sure I could handle it. Things started to go wrong almost immediately. I wasn’t at all prepared for the kind of traffic we encountered. The lanes were only defined in paint. The cars themselves began to move around without any true pattern and didn’t seem to even notice the lines. I suddenly felt like a lost ant in the center of the anthill. Everyone else was moving in sudden diagonals that had nothing to do with the clear paths that had been painted so carefully on the pavement and that I had spent hours studying during driver’s training. The air seemed darkened by the exhaust of so many vehicles doing their own thing, confusing my eyes and voiding my other senses. No matter how erratically they moved, though, the other drivers always seemed to know what it was they were attempting enough to move out of the way just in time. My heart rate jumped up about four notches as I realized I was way out of my league. I was terrified. I’d never noticed this craziness before and nothing in driver’s training had prepared me for this kind of situation. No matter how much I shifted my eyes around, I knew I wasn’t seeing something that the other drivers all seemed to know. How did that black car manage to get out of the way of that white truck so smoothly? There hadn’t been an inch of space a moment ago, but then the silver car pulled forward and the black car moved sideways just on time. But now something red was coming toward me and horns were blaring all around and I couldn’t figure out which way my eyes should point. I was sure even if I had a hundred eyes, I wouldn’t be able to see something very important for me to notice. I didn’t even see the guy coming. One second, I was skillfully maneuvering around the yellow corvette that had darted out in front of me and then shrieking metal, booming percussion in my ears and a blinding moment of white light and I was sitting on the driver’s side armrest instead of my seat and the car was sideways across two lanes. My friend just kept screaming and I thought maybe she’d been hurt bad, but a quick look in her direction showed that she’d stayed put in her seatbelt and was just screaming because it was scary. I had no real idea of what to do in an accident situation and I wasn’t even supposed to have the car that day. My adventure to the country had suddenly become something so much worse than anything I had envisioned. One of the first things I remembered about being in an accident was that you didn’t move the car, so I quickly put the car in park and jumped out to see what had happened exactly. The front end of a beat up red farm truck was attached to the space between the two side passenger doors of my parents’ car. What I felt had to be a man was slumped over the steering wheel inside. I couldn’t tell for sure because the person was wearing a wide straw hat that kept me from being able to see any details. Suddenly, I went from being terrified for myself to being terrified for this person. I was facing lifetime grounding by my parents and the prospect of never owning my own car. This person, judging from the deeper color of the hands gripping the steering wheel, perhaps faced much more serious consequences. One of the thousands of ants who had been crawling all around us this whole time must have had a cell phone they knew how to use because before I even had a chance to fully realize the condition of the man (I had figured out it was a man in the truck), I heard the first sirens from the police station down the street. By the time the ambulance got there, my parents had arrived, but all I could focus on was the man behind the other wheel. I felt like I was in a fog and the man was the only real thing in the world. No matter what else was happening, I just couldn’t seem to shake out of it. Somehow in this fog, we managed to get through the police reports, get my friend home and get home ourselves, all while my parents were yelling at me and trying to figure out what to do about the car. Finally, something penetrated. “That’s it! You will only understand when you have to put in effort for something and get nothing in return. You need to volunteer,” my mom said. My volunteer work at the hospital was drudge work. I wish I could relate heart-warming tales of the people I met, but most of my work was confined to shuffling papers around in an office. In spite of this, I will never consider it to have been something for which I received ‘nothing in return.’ The man from my accident had been taken to the same hospital where I was working. As he recovered from his injuries, I discovered he had a wife and several children he’d been trying to support on a migrant worker’s income. It was summer and I was out of school, so I spent all my time off playing with his children. This made it possible for his wife to get to work for a while and a chance to visit her husband alone once in a while, since I took the kids, on the bus, to see him and play on the hospital’s playgrounds. Seeing how hard they worked for how little they had changed my attitude toward others forever thanks to this single event. Read More