There is this small lake community near the area where I was born. It's the local place where everyone spends their summers, basking in water of questionable cleanness, braving past rushes where you're fairly sure snakes live. As a small child, I lived for days at the lake. I loved everything about it from that first contrasting step into the water where your upper body is hot from the sun but your feet are in very cold mud to the feeling of being in clothes that are drying from the windows being down as you drive home.
The roads around the lake had two very uncomfortable aspects, vicious curves and some precariously high areas. During the first years of my life, I spent lots of time as a passenger over these roads and thought little to nothing about them. This all changed when I was four.
I don't know if my mother was drunk (it's always a possibility), but from what I remember, we were going to visit someone and she was mad. She was driving a red Falcon, I don't know the year.....it seems that she lost control of the car, just....completely lost control of it. No brakes, no ability to really steer. We weaved dangerously over those curved roads that circled the lake before finally ending up in someone's yard and crashing into a tree.
Even though I was really young and lack a lot of detail, I very clearly remember the feeling of being completely out of control. I knew I had no ability to alter anything that was happening. I was in a car, moving at speeds that seemed both extremely fast and horrifying slow. I remember my mother's panicked, screaming as she tried to do something about this. I remembered wondering if I was going to die.
Most of all, I remember the moment we hit the tree. The loud POP as metal met wood. I remember being tossed from my seat painfully into the dashboard and the feeling of all my breath leaving me. I remember the violent suddenness of all of it and hating that so much. Hating that reality reaches the only conclusion it could and there was nothing, nothing at all, I could have done to change it.
It gets kind of fuzzy past that. I know we ended up in the hospital and neither of us were dead. I know everyone kept trying to calm me down. I know I acted like everything was fine as quickly as I knew that was what was expected of me.
I was worlds away from fine though. From that day on, I developed a sicking horror of sharply curving roads. Any time my parents would drive over them, I would bury my face against the seat and keep my eyes closed. I would stay this way until I felt the curves were over. I started counting during this, memorizing the number of seconds it took to get past the curves. And all the while I had my eyes shut and my face buried, I would wonder if it was the best way to go, given that I could die at any second.
I would beg and plead with my parents not to take the routes that brought us to the curves. I would suggest alternatives, trying to sound casual about it (I wonder now how freaked out and paranoid I sounded) or even act uninterested in whatever they wanted to do that required driving over the curves.
The worst part came when I started school. My two hour bus ride, bad enough for a child prone to car sickness, became a dread fest because the bus WENT OVER THE SAME ROADS WE WRECKED ON. We drove past the scarred up tree five days a week.
Again, I knew I had no choice in the matter. I would sink down in my seat and hide my eyes as we took that cumbersome, big-ass bus over the narrow, dangerous, horrific curves. Every day, I was fairly sure we were going to die.
Then again, my kindergarten teacher was such a miserable and evil person, there were days when death seemed like the better option.
It's funny because I can remember that fear and the total phobia of going over the curves. I can remember all the murky thoughts about what could happen to me and the panic attacks I would sometimes have just thinking about trips I knew I couldn't get out of, but I don't remember when it stopped. Because it did stop. I can go over those roads all day long now and not bat an eye. Beyond that, the commute from my hometown to where I went to college is far more curvy and dangerous . . . but I'm so calm about that trip I could do it in my sleep (and possibly have).
I still dream about that wreck sometimes. I find myself back in those awful moments where there was no control in the car whatsoever and all I kept thinking was how there was nothing I could do, nothing I could do. Sometimes I wake up just before we hit the tree. Sometimes, I wake up just right after it.
To this day, I'm honestly not sure which one is worse.
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