I did my share of dangerous driving, and I am not proud of it. But I learned from it after surviving my late teens and early twenties, and consider myself lucky enough to have done that.
I remember getting up at 3 PM to go to work the night shift when my squadron was back at Cecil Field, working all night, leaving at 0700 in the morning driving non-stop from Jacksonville to Boston in my MG arriving around 0600 at my parents house, then immediately going out to find my friends. Spent all day with them, and went on a date with a sweet girl that night, driving 50 miles to Hampton Beach in NH. So, doing the math, that is about 60 hours straight.
I wasn’t doing drugs or alcohol. I was just fueled by my desire to see my friends and have a good time away from the Navy.
On the ride home at around 02:00, as she slept in the passenger seat, heading southbound on 495, I awoke to my head banging against the fabric roof of the MG. I had left the roadway and was plowing though the grass. It was a flat, grassy median. No embankment. No ditches. No trees. Or oncoming cars. Just bumpy grass. I steered back onto the highway, and have never driven like that again. I can still do a 16 hour drive, but I don’t ever get to the point where I am not acutely aware of my state of being. Back then, I was just diddly bopping down the highway, the next instant I was awake being jounced up and down. No warning whatsoever. No nodding off, no drooping of the eyes or crossing of vision trying to stay awake. I must have made an instantaneous transition from being awake to being soundly asleep.
I was lucky. I learned from that. I had a chance to think “I could have killed that sweet girl. Or some other driver. Or ME. And to this day, nearly 40 years later, there isn’t a time I drive a car on a long journey or at night with an accompanying passenger, and NOT feel the burden and responsibility of holding that person’s life in my very hands.
I was lucky. A lot of people aren’t. They have their one shot, and instead of rolling into flat grass, they head on a car, rocket off an embankment into a rock face or pile into a tree. They never got to learn, and I did. I won’t waste that.
And I had to learn that lesson with alcohol, I didn’t have the common sense as a young person to just accept it. I was lucky to do so.
Thanks for sharing that, and yes, you were lucky. Someone in my family wasn’t so lucky, the person next to them in the car didn’t survive, and it haunts and creates difficult consequences to this day, many years later.
Not sure what happened in the case here, but it is tragic, and I can only hope those left behind can find some solace. Maybe it’s easier to say “Darwin Award” or “win stupid prizes” but sometimes it’s just really, really sad.