Last Friday (say it in a big, scary, horror movie voice with me: the thirteenth!), my brakes failed while I was on my drive home, about a mile from my house, just as I was approaching a busy intersection at rush hour. I’m not kidding. I’ve been told that many people have nightmares about such a scenario. I can tell you now from actual experience that it’s quite terrifying. I was approaching the intersection and applied my breaks to slow down. The pedal went all the way to the floor. No amount of pumping would revive it. I slipped into the turn lane, which was empty, and kept trying to stop the car. For a moment, it looked like I might be able to shoot the gap, as crossing traffic hadn’t resumed yet. But, as I reached the intersection, the crossing traffic had the field. I pulled a hard right in a desperate effort to run parallel with the crossing traffic and to soften the impact.
I struck a mini-van on it’s sliding side door (which, oddly enough, contained all the damage that car sustained). The force of the mini-van’s motion spun me to the right. I spun around and came to rest in the grass just to the right of the highway I had been traveling on in the fist place. My bumper kissed the bumper of another mini-van parked in that lane, waiting to turn right, but it did no damage to him or to me.
The good news: no one was injured. Everyone walked away from it unharmed. The bad news: I’m terrified what this will do to my insurance, there are logistical problems to work out, and I feel like my beloved ’92 Honda Prelude is jinxed.
Just a half-hour or so earlier on the same day, I passed one of the worst wrecks I’ve ever seen in my life, on my drive home to get into this–by any comparison–very minor one. There was an eight-car pileup on I-526, in the westbound lanes, involving an 18-wheeler that burst into flames, killing five people. Eight cars were involved in the accident.