As it were…

This morning we were cruising along I-96 headed to target listening to Bill Cosby. It was the one about his hernia, which is far funnier than it might seem. I was laughing along with everyone else.

When I woke up the car was stopped. I looked at Cate and she was looking at me. She said “You passed out!” I wondered how on earth I’d managed to park the car while unconscious and went to get out and the door wouldn’t open. I looked to see what was stopping it, and realized I could see outside through the hinges.

I then looked around and realized we were in a median. I asked Cate where we were and how we got there. She said “You started drifting and I looked over and you were all red and I asked if you were going to pass out. Then you drove off the road!”

There was a guy standing outside her door and he asked if we were ok, so we did a quick inventory and everyone was fine. A few minutes later an MDOT truck pulled up and called the cops for us. A few minutes after that the fence repair guys showed up. Then a state cop. Then 2 ladder trucks. All while I was trying to talk to AAA.

I got out and looked around a little bit. The two front wheels got ripped off about 100 feet before we actually stopped. We were headed straight into oncoming traffic at full speed when we hit those new guard wires, and they turned us away. Who knows how many people would have died if not for them.

Everyone we dealt with was great. I didn’t get a ticket, I didn’t get my license taken away for passing out, the tow guys grabbed all the detritus and cleaned it up, and knew just what to do with my car, etc.

Our feelings at this point are very conflicting. We’re tremendously grateful to God for protecting everyone, including the people we could have hit. On the other hand, we really loved our car Sherman. Losing him is like losing a pet. Yes, it’s “just a car”, but it was our special gift from God, the car I put a Christmas bow on for my wife.

Add to that the plain stress of going through something like that and there’s been a fair amount of tears today.

We had full coverage, so it’ll either get fixed or we’ll get a check for what it was worth. The chances of it being worth as much as we owe on it are mighty slim if you ask me. That’s the way it goes. People have offered to let us borrow cars until that gets worked out, but we don’t want to risk other people’s cars any more than we have to.

I feel confident that God will bring us just the right car again, but it’s really hard to imagine at this point that it could be as perfect as Sherman was. We shall see.

UPDATE 15 Nov 2014

A few months after the crash my neighbor said “I went on a date with this guy, and he works for the state.  He travels around to crash sites that involve those new wire boundaries and takes pictures to see how effective they were.  He showed me some, and I think I saw your crash!”

We asked her if she could get us copies, and sure enough, it was our crash site.  So here we have some good pictures.

Here you can see how we stressed the fence, and how close we were to oncoming traffic.

Here you can see about how far we went AFTER hitting the wire. Tire in the foreground.

The tow guys were really nice. Very calming. We’ll take care of everything! they said. And they did.

Here you can see the path through the snow to where we hit the fence, almost going into oncoming traffic.