Driving on the Motorway in Bad Weather by Herge Smith

Driving on the motorway in bad weather

I’m starting to feel genuinely scared.

I can no longer see more than 20 metres ahead of me and everything is blurry and swimming around. I can just make out the taillights of the car in front and that’s all. Huge articulates thunder past me and more than once I get caught between two of them racing through the storm, vying to be ahead by a metre or so.

The phone’s already off. Two reasons; firstly I can’t bear to talk to anyone right now, this is a cardinal sin and if I don’t take a gun into work with me Monday morning, then I’ll be having a chat with the boss about this infringement to our detailed and extensive list of ‘non official’ rules.

Secondly, I fear a moment’s lapse in concentration during a vigorous bout of ‘lets close you’ will get me killed.

No joke.

I can’t see the painted lines which separate the lanes anymore. I know they are down there somewhere, on the lakebed, I just can’t see them so I judge my position by most distance from the central reservation and other motorists.

This storm has raged for hours and I don’t seem to be able to drive out of it. Of course, I am driving way too fast for these conditions, what the police describe on TV as ‘dangerously fast’, but then who doesn’t?

I’m gripping onto the steering wheel so hard my fingers are numb. I nervously release each hand in slow rotation to allow the blood to circulate. Every so often, I hit a deeper patch of water and the wheel jerks away from me as the tires lose their last grip on the road. My heart skips a beat every single time. But I go on.

The stereo blares out and I sing along desperately trying to take my mind off the danger I am in, but it doesn’t really work. At least I won’t have any interruptions from the RDS; turned it off ages long ago. What can they tell me that I don’t already know? – Weathers bad, stay home if you can, only make a journey if essential – making a living, is that essential enough?

I hate this so much; all I am is a bag of meat and thin bone in a ton of metal travelling at 90 mph in torrential rain with limited visibility and a constant pounding headache. Just a single mistake, and I’m under the wheels of a lorry load of Coke or Huggies and that’s me done, just one of the 4,000 poor bastards who will be killed on the road this year.

Side impact bars, ABS braking system, traction control and air bags verses ten tons of wheels, axel and engine.

The same thought goes through my head on a loop; not seeing them in time, braking hard, sliding and having that single second of shear undiluted panic before impact.

“I’m going to die - ”

The rear of the lorry smashing through the windscreen and I become recognisable only by my dental records.

No, no, no, not going to happen, not my time. I’m going to get home, get out of this suit, put on an old T-Shirt and jeans, order a pizza, take a pill for the headache. Watch some classic Buffy and go to bed. Start again the tomorrow.

Someone says in a movie that the more you drive the dumber you become. Close, but I believe the truth of it is the more you drive, the more you become detached from humanity. Got to really, because if the high speed, high impact car accidents don’t get you, the interminable boredom from the six hour traffic jams will tip you over the edge.

Or you’ll pick up a nasty skin-eating infection from a Welcome Break toilet.

I’m drinking out of a travel bottle (i.e. inflated price) of Evian when it happens, and God it happens fast.

I’m in the centre lane, cruising, a lorry sits to my left and I’m between the trailer and the cab. There is no way this guy can see me now, so unless he caught sight of me as I went in to his blind spot, I simply don’t exist. To my right is a family saloon, which I glanced across to a second or two before. The driver, Dad I assume, with his head and chin raised up talking through the rear view mirror to his kid or kids in the back. Next to driver is a woman (Mum) sat with her head propped up against the window with a small travel (i.e. inflated price) cushion.

It’s dark; I can’t see a thing other than two sets of red tale lights in front, vaguely sketched out like a pastels on an oil painting. I’m not at a safe distance, none of us are, there are no safe distances in this weather, only at home in bed.

Then both lights suddenly blaze. Instinctively I brake. The heart attack doesn’t kick in, but the ABS does, and I feel the car judder. I instantly see that old tire advert where you get a cross section of the ring of rubber forging through the rain drenched road like Moses across the Red Sea, and I pray to the God of the Jews that I have that tire. Then everything slows down.

The lorry to the left and family car to the right shoot past me, the lorry is slower but the momentum cased by its weight drives it forward. The fate of the family car decided by a moment’s distraction caused by sibling argument over who said what to whom and who pulled whose hair.

Too late for both; they plunge into the vehicles in front.

I’ve never seen an accident like this before. I’ve seen the aftermath on TV and have often driven by as the police wave me on sneering at my voyeuristic urge to see the ‘carmageddon’. Easy for the police to sneer when that little badge gets them front row centre to every act of violence, destruction and vice our fragile bodies are capable of. It must be the best show in town, like a continual parade of CSI’s and Law and Order’s, but without all the glitz and resolution.

I tense for impact, its inevitable, as I look to my left catching a glimpse in my rear view mirror, nothing there, the lorry is starting to skid but it’s skidding away from me. And then it hits, the back arches up and then crashes down, all is glass. I turn to my right and the family car is embedded in a white van in front; my car is now stationary less than a metre from the motor in front. Before I can finally let the exasperated air out of my lungs, a second car piles into the family car, condensing it from a saloon to a sub compact in less than a second.

I brace again and look up at my mirror, but still nothing.

I sit for I don’t know how long, waiting for something to happen. All the time my bitch is smacked up at three quarters of the maximum volume.

I remember as a child seeing a safety awareness play performed in a school assembly by one of those dreadful touring companies, so well satirised by the League of Gentlemen. Jack and Jill go out on the piss then they crash the car and Jill is killed and we all learn the evils of drink driving, except we don’t and the headmaster is sacked when he loses his licence six months later for a similar offence. What really stuck in my mind was when those two twenty-something, sad, desperate, wannabee actors, drove round making engine noises they did so with The Carpenters playing over the top. They crash and all is silent apart from Karen banging out ‘Superstar’ as fiercely as her badly emaciated frame can handle.

And I remember it sounding so utterly pathetic.

And that’s all I can hear how.

Sitting in my car in the middle of chaos and carnage and my stereo is blaring out phat beats.

I lean forward and switch it off. Screams replace it.

I unbuckle my seat belt and get out of my car, stepping onto the surface of the motorway for the first time in my life. The rain soaks through my shirt in seconds. I look around and there is glass and pieces of moulded plastic all over the carriageway. The traffic moving in the opposite direction has stopped. The family car is crushed beyond recognition and no sound comes from it. The driver in the lorry is screaming for help. Behind me, cars are turned over, and one is alight. Those that are out of their cars seem dazed, as am I.

I look at my own car. Not a scratch on it.