easier.” Later a passing motorist hailed the troop
er and asked if the red Hispano had got a ticket.
'.'No,” said th£ trooper, 'I hated to spoil their
party”. "Too bad you didn’t,” said the motorist. "I
saw you stop them—and then I passed that car
again 50 miles up the line. It still makes me feel
sick at my stomach. The car was all folded up
like an accordion—the color was about all there
was left. They were all dead but one of the kids
—and he wasn’t going to live to the hospital.”
Maybe it will make you sick at your stomach,
too. But unless you’re a heavy-footed incurable, a
good look at the picture the artist wouldn’t dare
paint, a first-hand acquaintance with the results of
mixing gasoline with speed and bad judgment,
ought to be well worth your while. I can’t help it
if the facts are revolting. If you have the nerve to
drive fast and take chances, you ought to have the
nerve to take the appropriate cure. You can’t ride
an ambulance or watch the doctor working on the
victim in the hospital, but you can read.
The automobile is treacherous, just as a cat is.
It is tragically difficult to realize that is can be
come the deadliest missile. As enthusiasts tell you,
it makes 65 feel like nothing at all. But 65 an
hour is 100 feet a second, a speed which puts a
viciously unjustified responsibility on brakes and
human reflexes, and can instantly turn this docile
luxury into a mad bull elephant.
Collision, turnover or sideswipe, each type of
accident produces either a shattering dead stop or
a crashing change of direction, and since the oc
cupant—meaning you—continues in the old direc
tion at the original speed, every surface and angle
of the car’s interior immediately becomes a bat
tering, tearing projectile, aimed squarely at you—
inescapable. There is no bracing yourself against
these imperative laws of momentum.
It’s like going over Niagara Falls in a steel bar
rel full of railroad spikes. The best thing that
can happen to you—and one of the rarer things
—is to be thrown out as the doors spring open,
so you have only the ground to reckon with. True,
you strike with as much force as if you had been
thrown from the Twentieth Century at top speed.
But at least you are spared the lethal array of
gleaming metal knobs and edges and glass inside
the car.
Anything can happen in that split second of
crash, even those lucky escapes you hear about.
People have dived through windshields and come
out with only superficial scratches. They have run
cars together head on, reducing both to twisted
junk, and been found unhurt and arguing bitterly
two minutes afterward. But death was there just
the same—he was only exercising his privilege of
being erratic. This spring a wrecking crew pried
the door off a car which had been overturned
down an embankment and out stepped the driver
with only a scratch on his cheek. But his mother
was still inside, a splinter of wood from the top
driven four inches into her brain as a result of
son’s taking a greasy curve a little too fast. No
blood—no horribly twisted bones—just a gray
haired corpse still clutching her pocketbook in
her lap as she had clutched it when she felt the
car leave the road.
On that same curve a month later, a light tour
ing car crashed a tree. In the middle of the front
seat they found a nine-months-old baby sur
rounded by broken glass and yet absolutely un
hurt. A fine practical joke on death—but spoiled
by the baby’s parents, still sitting on each side
of him, instantly killed by shattering their skulls
on the dashboard.
If you customarily pass without clear vision a
long way ahead, make sure that every member of
the party carries identification papers—it’s diffi
cult to identify a body with its whole face bashed
in or torn off. The driver is death’s favorite tar
get. If the steering wheel holds together it rup
tures his liver or spleen so he bleeds to death in
ternally. Or, if the steering wheel breaks off, the
matter is settled instantly by the steering column’s
plunging through his abdomen.
By no means do all head-on collisions occur on
curves. The modern death-trap is likely to be a
stretch with three lanes of traffic—like the notor
ious Astor Flats on the Albany Post Road where
there have been as many as 27 fatalities in one
summer month. This sudden vision of broad,
straight road tempts many an ordinarily sensible
driver into passing the man ahead. Simultaneous
ly a driver coming the other way swings out at
high speed. At the last moment each tries to get
into line again, but the gaps are closed. As the
cars in line are forced into the ditch to capsize or
crash fences, the passers meet, almost head on,
in a swirling, grinding smash that sends them
caroming obliquely into the others.
A trooper described such an accident—five cars
in one mess, seven killed on the spot, two dead
on the way to the hospital, two more dead in the
long run. He remembered it far more vividly than
he wanted to—the quick way the doctor turned
away from a dead man to check up on a woman
with a broken back; the three bodies out of one
car so soaked with oil from the crankcase that they
looked like wet brown cigars and not human at
all; a man, walking around and babbling to him
self, oblivious of the dead and dying, even ob
livious of the daggerlike sliver of steel that stuck
out of his streaming wrist; a pretty girl with her
forehead laid open, trying hopelessly to crawl out
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