head‐on with an SUV

The last moment I remembered was a bang and my car whirling.

I was in my driver’s seat, facing the outside of a blind curve. My engine had gone dead silent. Airbags had deployed, mine was burst. A round crack marred my windshield. Did my head make that?

My face hurt as though struck with a board. My upper lip was covered with blood which seemed to be gushing from my nose. More than anything, my left knee hurt. With my fingers, I pressed around my left thigh. At least my bone seemed to be in one piece.

Foolishly, I felt like I should step away from my car if I could. I unbuckled my seatbelt (thank Nader for seatbelts!), opened my door, and collapsed to the pavement.

My left leg would not move.

Pulling with my arms and pushing with my right leg, I dragged my posterior and incapacitated left leg through streams of oil leaking from beneath my hood, seeping through and staining my pants.

Sitting on pavement’s edge, my back upright against a rock wall, I shivered with shock. My car sat sideways across my lane, its front crumpled. A wheel lay on my side of the double‐yellow, the pavement apparently gouged by its axle. Down an embankment, across the road beyond a deformed guardrail, a white SUV had come to a rest, supine on its roof.

Down the road, another driver stopped, asking if everyone was all right. 9‐1‐1!, I hollered. She had a cell phone.

She and her passenger came and asked me what happened. I told her the SUV hit me, and I thought I was in shock.

Another woman was cursing, across the road. I looked up and saw her on the pavement, walking away from the SUV. As the good samaritans kindly put a thick blanket over me, she called for someone to get her baby out of her overturned vehicle.

An SUV hit me head‐on on Valentine’s Day. My tibia is broken.

• In 1965, consumer advocate Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed‐in Dangers of the American Automobile, harshly criticizing the automobile industry for failing to equip cars with safety features like seatbelts. Largely due to his persistent advocacy, in 1966, the US Congress passed the Highway Safety Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, allowing government to mandate safety standards for automobiles. As a result, all cars were required to be manufactured with safety features like headrests, energy‐absorbing steering wheels, shatter‐resistant windshields, and seatbelts. In a way, Ralph Nader saved my life.
• Two solid yellow lines are painted on roadways to mark a boundary between traffic flowing one direction and traffic flowing oppositely.
• In North America, 9‐1‐1 is a telephone number designated to call for emergency services, like ambulance, fire, or police.