I was driving on Route 17 to Santa Cruz to see my girlfriend. Our relationship had been feeling difficult and complicated. It was 2008 or 2009. I was in my silver 2.5 Subaru RS. I loved that car. It wasn’t as fast as the higher end, flashier Impreza models, but 165 horsepower was plenty for me, and I loved how it hugged the road on a curve. I liked how its headlights looked like bug eyes.
It was the first sporty car I ever owned, and it felt like a match for where I was in life - early 30’s, young professional, recently out of a marriage to a girl I’d been with since college.
I was talking to my mom on the phone using one of those bluetooth, single-ear pieces that people used back then. It was raining. Stronger than a drizzle, but not pouring. Route 17 is a mountain road, very curvy. I narrowed my concentration, but I wasn’t worried. I’d driven Rt. 17 plenty of times.
The highway has two-lanes traveling in each direction, with a dividing wall maybe four feet tall between north and south. I was in the left lane traveling north. Rounding a curve, I began to lose the felt sense of my tires making contact with the road. My mind produced the word, “hydroplaning”.
I began to drift into the right hand lane. I glanced over my shoulder, and there was a car to my right, its nose reaching about halfway to the trunk of my car. Out of the corner of my eye, I could make out that there was a second car not far behind the first.
I drifted further into the right lane. I was losing control of the car. I prepared to crash into the car next to me, but the impact never happened. I’m not sure how.
I cranked the wheel left, but I overcorrected. I was now pointed directly at the dividing wall going about 45.
The moments before impact seemed to stretch and open up, allowing more space for thought than seemed possible. “I am going to hit that wall and flip over it,” I thought. “I am either going to die, or I am going to wake up in the hospital.” I wasn’t scared. I felt detached, almost bemused.
How odd and unexpected an ending to my life, I thought. Just me in my early 30’s driving to see my girlfriend. No wrap-up where loose ends are tied, with her or any other part of my life. Oh well, here it comes.
I didn’t flip over the wall, and I don’t remember the impact. I don’t remember how my car ended up neatly parked in the breakdown lane on the other side of the two lanes of northbound traffic. I wasn’t knocked unconscious, so I believe a trauma response kicked in - actually I think it kicked in when time slowed down. My mind assessed that I could not escape, and turned off the lights of consciousness, saving me from the terror of smashing into the dividing wall. My body though, stayed awake, and steered me to safety.
When I came to, I was clutching the steering wheel. I wasn’t scared in that strange moment before impact, but now fear ran through my body. I was shaking. Aside from some bruises on my hands and a light scrape or two, I seemed physically intact.
The airbag had been deployed. Smoke was rising from the hood which was crumpled from the point of impact - the left front of the hood. I was afraid the car would blow up. Someone was talking to me in one ear. I realized I was still on the call with my mom. “Mom, I had a car accident,” I said. “I’m ok. I have to go.” I didn’t know where the phone was and didn’t think to look. I just needed to get out of the car.
I opened the door and stepped into the rain. I walked a short distance from the front of the car. I stood there. Cars were driving by. Lots of cars. One after the other. No one stopped. I began to wave my arms. No one stopped. I stood in the rain, my body still shaking. My clothes began to soak and I started feeling the cold. No one stopped. I didn’t understand.
I felt completely alone. I felt like a homeless person who people walk by and pretend not to see.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Then a small white pick-up pulled over in front of me and my car. There was some rust around the tailgate. In the bed was a metal ladder and a box that looked like it held tools.
A man got out of the truck and approached. I don’t remember what his face looked like. What I remember is that he was middle-aged, about my height, and dressed like he worked construction - jeans, tan lace-up boots, untucked plaid button down. He looked Latino, maybe indigenous: straight black hair, brown eyes, dark skin.
He approached and stopped a few feet in front of me, looking me directly in the eye.
“Are you ok?”
“Yes,” I said. He may have put his hand briefly on my shoulder.
When he looked into my eyes, I could feel his solidity. He was fully there. I could feel that his question was really: deep down, was I ok? I could feel that if I was not, he would know what to do. He wasn’t coddling me, and he didn’t stray from the intensity of the moment, the fear and abandonment he must have seen in my eyes.
In these moments, he gave me everything I needed. I was no longer alone.
He walked to the back of his truck and retrieved some cones which he laid out in a row behind my car, protecting me, the vehicle, and other drivers. Then he walked back to where I was standing. He looked me in the eye once more and said the police would be arriving soon. I don’t remember him making a phone call. I had the sense he did not want to be there when the police arrived. He walked back to his truck, got in, and drove off.
The police did arrive, two or three minutes after he left. The rest of the story is straightforward. I sat in the police car and made a report. The cop was friendly enough.
The cop said the car would be junked, so I had to retrieve my phone as well as anything else I wanted to keep. I had a small bag of weed in the trunk, so I had to get it out of the car, and put it in my sock without the cop noticing. I took whatever was in my car that I could carry and was worth keeping. I silently said goodbye to the best car I’d ever owned, and thanked it for the good times we had shared.
I stayed in the police car until the tow truck arrived. I rode in the tow truck to the junkyard where my girlfriend picked me up.
For the next eight or nine months, I felt scared to drive. I knew if I stopped, the fear would only increase. So I kept driving. For the first few months, I drove 45 on highways where the speed limit was 65, hanging out in the right lane, being passed like a grandma, feeling embarrassed. But when I went faster, I felt the fear shoot through my body.
Worse, at random moments, I’d have that feeling I had felt before my accident, like my tires had lost contact with the road, and I was driving only on water. This happened when it was totally dry. I knew I was not hydroplaning, but my body kept reliving that moment. Gradually, I was able to increase my speed, and the hydroplaning flashbacks became less and less frequent.
That’s the story of my car accident and my slow recovery. A dozen years later, what remains most powerful isn’t the crash, the trauma response, or regaining my driving confidence. It’s the man in the white pickup.
Here’s the thing: I think he might have been an angel. Maybe being in a state of trauma when the memory was formed lent some aura to the experience. Maybe he was just a kind and competent Good Samaritan who helped a stranger who was in a crash. Maybe. But when I think about it, I have this sense that my life was touched by something greater.
It’s hard to put my finger on, but it’s like the sum feels larger than the parts. Like it all fits together too well. I was standing in the rain, trembling and alone as car after car drove by. Then this man arrives right when I need him. He did just what was necessary. And then, minutes before the police arrived, he was gone.
It was like he just knew. Knew I was in trouble. Knew when to show up. Knew the presence that would soothe me. Knew exactly when to leave. He even had cones. Who drives around with cones?
It was like he had some kind of powers, but he was rolling incognito in that beater white pick-up. None of this occurred to me in the moment. It was later, replaying the scene in my mind, that I began to sense I had experienced something beyond the ordinary. It started like a dim light and then grew brighter inside my brain.
I want him to be an angel. It feels more special that way.
At that moment, standing on the side of the road next to my steaming wreck of a car, maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s a man or an angel who showed up. Whoever he was, he saved me. Saved my belief in other people, my belief that the Universe sees me, and cares. I wish I could let him know the impact he had on me, but I guess if he is an angel, he already knows. Maybe what matters is that when I felt afraid and alone, the Universe sent an agent, and the message he delivered was: you are not alone.