Joe McWilliams
I don’t want to die in an air disaster, Albert Hammond sang, back in 1974 or thereabouts. He also didn’t want to die in a freeway pileup, along with more stuff to that effect.
It was morbid material for a hit song, and I don’t think it did very well. Who wants to think about such things? I don’t, if I can help it, and most of the time I can, so I don’t.
But no amount of sticking your head in the sand can alter the fact people are dying, every day, in one type of transportation incident or another. Just recently, for example, came a story from the RCMP in Lloydminster of a pedestrian being struck by a vehicle.
And very much on people’s minds these days is the case of the truck that ploughed through a group of motorcyclists, killing two of them.
I walk a lot, and although most drivers will stop, there’s always one who won’t see you. So, you’re standing there at the crosswalk, vehicles approaching from both directions. Should you just start walking and hope for the best?
Often, one driver will stop, but the guy coming in the opposite direction . . . is he going to stop? Or will he only stop if he sees you starting to cross? Should you risk it? You know the one who is stopped is getting impatient and wishes you would get on with it. But it’s dark, the roads might be slippery, you can’t really be sure if the oncoming driver can see you. So it goes.
It’s easy enough to get into a spaced out, sort of hypnotic state when you’re driving. It happens to me often enough, where I’m not really aware of what’s happening out there – only that I’m still between the lines. My mind wanders, and I’m afraid I’m going to miss something very important. A kid in a crosswalk, maybe. Or maybe not in a crosswalk, but darting out after a ball or something. Crunch! It doesn’t bear thinking about, but maybe it’s good to do it once in a while.
I know at least two people who have been run over and killed in Slave Lake crosswalks. I was nearly a third one, walking across at the lights downtown; somebody turning left wasn’t paying attention, didn’t see me until the last second and – thankfully – managed to brake just in time.
Oops! Where did you come from?
Something similar happened one dark winter morning in an uncontrolled intersection near my home. I was crossing, the guy was turning left and gave no indication he saw me at all; made his turn and accelerated away, with me just scampering out of the way. After that I started wearing a high-vis vest when walking on dark winter mornings. It’s no guarantee of anything, but I like to think it improves my chances.
No amount of visibility helps when you collide head-on with another vehicle out on the highway, though. That, as we know, happens with sickening regularity on Alberta roads. It doesn’t seem to matter how alert one of the drivers is, how cautious, how familiar with defensive driving techniques, etc.
Nor do most of these horrible crashes seem to happen when road conditions or weather is bad. They just keep happening, all over the place, all the time, quite at random.
It makes you wonder when your number might be coming up. Or somebody close to you.
So . . . what is the point of all this morbid reflection? Perhaps to remind myself to cherish the people I love and the time I have left, because you cannot know how long any of it will last.