close shave

Yesterday at about 7 p.m. I was on my way back from my relatives', sweating away in my non-airconditioned car on the not-quite-congested motorway, brooding about some things that were bugging me when suddenly the car in front of me, one of those nondescript family vans, skidded towards the emergency lane with screeching tyres. Raising quite an impressive cloud of dust when it hit the hard shoulder, the van bounced back to the motorway and slithered across all 4 lanes until it grazed the guard rail on the left and bounced back once more like a pinball to the second lane from the left, the very one where I was driving at normal motorway speed, i.e. 130 km/h. It all happened so quickly and yet I more or less anticipated each "step", making a quick calculation if what they'd taught me in Physics was right after all, that angle of incidence=angle of reflection. Indeed, that equation is pretty accurate I must say after having seen it put to practice.

I managed to swerve out of the lane of the out-of-control car, check my rearview-mirror to see whether those cars behind me would be able to brake on time and hit the brake myself all in one swift process.

Crisis averted and having seen that the driver (Had he fallen asleep for a second?Had one of his kids distracted him or the family dog licked his ear? Who knows.) had regained control over his car, I continued the journey, surprisingly un-shaken.

I was this close to being the first domino in a massive motorway pile-up, most likely fatal. And yet, I had almost forgotten it by the time I arrived home half an hour later. None of the horror and weak knees I experienced when I whitnessed a dead body being pulled out of the Danube or saw a man being hit by a tram, then running off in what must have been shock.

Strange, this.