mineral point and midvale
well, it happened. one of the myriad reasons i was hesitant to upgrade from my old beater to a nicer used car was that i didn’t want to have to worry about my car getting banged up. it’s been about a month since i got the new civic (now codenamed “10 is c” / “tennessee”), and i regret to tell you all that it and lea and i were involved in my first car accident. details follow (in excruciating length).
some background: to say that i drive a bit aggressively would be an understatement. many of you have heard my rants about madison drivers; suffice it to say that i’ve become a compulsive lane changer and chronically drive 10 miles over the speed limit. my driving occasionally frightens lea, and, at times, even frightens me. to some extent, my ability to dart around the road was limited by the old hatchback, since it had the pick-up of an unmotivated three-toed sloth, though that didn’t stop me from riding the clutch and generally making a valiant effort to zip around and take advantage of the overly defensive drivers surrounding me. with the new civic, the car is more than capable of jumping into any gap placed in front of it, but respect for the newness of it has kept me at a lower frenetic level since its purchase. with the old civic, there were a handful of “near accidents,” the sorts of things where, if you tossed the coin again, i probably would have come out with some amount of damage to the vehicle, and these things were generally related to an oversight or poor judgment on my part. how stunning it is, then, that saturday’s accident was not my fault — at all.
mineral point is a busy road for madison, and the intersection with midvale is one of the busier spots on mineral point. add to the mix construction on midvale, and the place can be a bit of a zoo, in contrast to the pleasant suburban neighborhood setting. mineral point is one of the preferred thoroughfares to take downtown, if you’re out on the west side but still inside the beltline, and this is precisely the reason lea and i were on it. it was saturday morning, and we wanted to hit up the farmer’s market, since we haven’t been much this summer, and it is quite a nice thing to do on a saturday morning. we had designs on getting materials for a picnic lunch at a nearby state park, so we left for the market a little after 9. since we were stopping by the bank first, we took mineral point downtown, instead of the beltline and john nolen. mineral point is, for much of its length, two lanes in both directions, at times with a median and at times without. correspondingly, if there is a median, there is generally a separate left turn lane at intersections; if there is no median, there is no separate left turn lane. near midvale, mineral point has no median, and thus, the left of the two regular traffic lanes has cars in it which will choose to turn left. accordingly, i was driving in the right lane, to avoid the hell that is left turn on yield in madison. madisonians have a horrific inability to make left turns on yield at green lights. there is nothing i hate more about driving in madison than getting stuck behind drivers who sit tight in left turn lanes, green lights staring down on them, with no oncoming cars within 500 feet. so — like i said — i was in the right lane.
everything up to this point is normal. it is saturday morning, so there is a little traffic, but not much. it is quite pleasant outside, and lea and i are heading to the farmer’s market. as we approached the intersection of midvale, the light was red, and i was slowing down accordingly. there were only a few cars in front of me in my lane, while the left lane was already slowing down and thickening with cars, half of whom wanted to turn left, and half of whom were intending to go straight and would have to wait to get through the intersection until the second or third green light, due to the madisonian-left-turners ahead of them.
here’s the curveball: a firetruck. as we approached the intersection, a firetruck is came south on midvale, passing through the intersection in front of us. since there is no median on the road at this point, i considered whether or not i needed to pull over if the firetruck came down mineral point toward us, but since i was in the right lane already, there was not much i could do. at some point during this train of thought, my brain picked up on something very wrong with my surroundings. the hood of a car immediately to my left and slightly behind me was coming into my lane. at this point, there was nothing i could have done, even if i had wanted to, unless i wanted to run my car up onto someone’s lawn. i didn’t have time to consider or make that particular choice, though, since i had only a split second passed before i felt and heard the other car hitting mine.
my immediate and only reaction to this was anger. not fear, not worry, not confusion: just anger. i wasn’t concerned for my safety or for lea’s, since the car was just sideswiping us and i already had our car down to a relatively low speed (due to the impending stop light) and was able to quickly bring us to a stop. i knew that i was not at fault, since i was entirely within my own lane, and was even ahead of the other driver. there was just anger: anger that my new car had been marred, anger that i might be out a considerable sum of money, anger that i was going to have to spend an hour on the phone with the insurance company. i immediately brought the car to a halt, parked up against the curb, and jumped out to get the offender’s license plate, in case they decided to [hit and] run.
it turns out the middle aged woman driving the mercury sable was trying to get over to the curb to get out of the way of the firetruck (never mind that the firetruck was merely heading down midvale, and not turning onto mineral point; never mind that the firetruck would have been oncoming even if it had turned, and thus would not need the lane to be cleared anyway). it turns out the woman managed to mark up fully half of the left side of my car, titanic style, bouncing and dragging her front right corner from the back of my driver’s side door, across the rear molding, all the way to the end of the bumper (fortunately, none of this is the sort of thing that prevents me from continuing to drive the car). it turns out the sable already bore the war wounds of what appeared to be at least two other separate encounters with things that leave dents gouges (never mind the tires, which were so underinflated as to be useless). it turns out the teenage boy riding in the passenger seat fell asleep after about five minutes of sitting on the roadside, waiting for me to talk to my insurance agent, as if he had been through this a time or two in the past. oh yeah — and it turns out the woman doesn’t have insurance. great. i suppose that’s not terribly surprising, given the evidence her car displayed of prior “incidents.”
lea called 911 to report the accident, and a police officer showed up in surprisingly (but pleasantly) short order, and got us to tell the story of what happened so he could write it up. when the woman tried to claim that “i was in her blind spot,” lea pointed out that the front right of her car hit the middle left of my car, and the officer looked at lea, nodded, and said, “yeah, i know.” though the officer did not give the woman any sort of citation, on account of the firetruck, the accident report pretty clearly states that the accident is her fault. the officer gave us both a copy of the report, and we were finally able to head on our merry (disgruntled) way.
we decided to continue down to the farmer’s market. stopped at a light at the last intersection before our parking ramp, in an odd twist, the woman-in-mercury-sable drove past us on the cross street, complete with more passengers in her car. i said a small thanks for not being headed in her direction. because of the delay in getting downtown, the parking garage was packed, and the farmer’s market was out of cilantro (no kidding — everbody was sold out). on the bright side, we did get the usual spicy cheesebread, scones, blocks of cheese, and various salad materials (i.e., everything else we came for).
today, i took the car in to a body shop to get a repair estimate. $1660. since i have collision insurance, i’m “only” out my $500 deductible until (unless) the woman ponies up and pays for the repairs. the insurance agent in charge of my case assured me that if the insurance company had to pay out on the repairs (which, obviously, they do), they would go after the woman for the money. any money she repays goes to me first, until my deductible is met. so, hopefully, she’ll pay up. to the woman’s credit, she seemed relatively polite if somewhat clueless throughout the post-collision hour on saturday, but $1660 is a lot of money. the thought of that much in repairs (and that just for my car) has been enough to make me drive much more defensively over the past couple days, since i really don’t want to be on the giving end of that transaction any time soon.
and so we come to the end of this little story. to commemorate this experience, i’m throwing together a mix. ideally, all the songs on the mix would be songs about car crashes. to this end, the cornerstones of the mix will likely be two excellent tracks by radiohead, “airbag” and “killer cars.” i will probably relax my requirements and allow other songs about cars (e.g. spoon’s “car radio”), and other songs about crashes (e.g. radiohead’s “lucky”). i will not allow dave matthews’ “crash,” even though i hear it’s really about car crashes.
