The misery of a highway crash

Mark Richardson

WHEELS EDITOR

THE WORST

As I drove south on Hwy. 400 one day this summer, the minivan in the centre lane and 200 metres up ahead suddenly wobbled, slew to the left and slammed into the centre barrier.

It careened back into the roadway where the car in front of me, which never flashed its brake lights but was well back of the van, tried to avoid it and drive around. The van smacked into the car and came to a rest in the left lane.

I had started braking as soon as I saw the van in trouble, and parked in the left lane with my hazard lights flashing, well short of the broken glass and engine coolant that covered the asphalt.

Except for me and the two damaged vehicles, nobody stopped. Drivers slowed to look, then sped on by, assuming that this was not their problem.

I ran up to the van. A baby sat unharmed and secure in a child's seat in the second row and the mother was already out of the vehicle, screaming in anger and frustration. She was distraught.

The driver of the other vehicle, which had been gouged down one side, stayed in his car and phoned the police.

The van driver told me she thought the insurance on it had lapsed.

Her husband had told her there was a problem with the van and was going to get it fixed, she said. He would not forgive her for crashing it, she said.

She kept lapsing into her own language, so she was sometimes difficult to understand, but I tried to reassure her that the important thing was that both she and her baby were unharmed.

A tow truck arrived within a couple of minutes and towed the van to the hard shoulder as traffic continued to speed past. I moved my car onto the hard shoulder and waited for the cops.

When the police arrived, everything was neatly off to the side.

The officer took down my details as a witness and I told him that it seemed something had broken on the van – the woman had said the steering suddenly went and the wheel seemed disconnected from the shaft.

The officer then spoke to the woman. Over the next few minutes, it came out that she had no driver's licence and had never had a Canadian driver's licence. Any insurance that may or may not have lapsed would have been invalid, anyway.

"And you drove with no licence and no training with your baby in the vehicle?" asked the cop, though he didn't look surprised.

The woman's husband could not be reached on his cellphone. I wondered if, when everyone was finally home, he would be sympathetic.

I wasn't needed any longer and left, merging into the traffic that had never paused to help.

THE BEST

It's always satisfying to fulfill a promise.

Back in January 1981, driving out to Mount Forest in my Ford LTD to start my very first paying job, I was busted for speeding at 110 km/h on dead-straight Hwy. 9 somewhere near Grand Valley.

Sitting dejected in the back of the cop cruiser and looking out into the snow, I promised myself that one day, I'd drive that road in a fabulous car. And it took until this spring to do it, when I drove my two young sons on a trip down Memory Lane in an Audi S8.

At the first Tim Hortons, some guy in a minivan swerved into the parking space beside us and tried to sell us some dodgy stereo equipment, because "you're obviously a guy who appreciates your toys."

And in Ayton, where the farm on which I worked was deep under snow, I drove Bill Douma, the farmer, up and down his driveway in the four-wheel-drive supercar.

Over there is where I piled the delivery truck into the ditch in a whiteout! And the S8 drove confidently past.

Here's the barn where my fingers would freeze every winter morning! And I turned up the heat. And here's the one turn in the road in 30 km, which I missed once on my Honda 350F and bounced into a field. The S8 purred through.

We drove home long after dark along roads I used to know well. Back then, I'd be tired in the five-tonne delivery truck, wind whistling around the windows.

But this time, my children slept safely in the back seat, soft music filled the car, and the Audi's cruise control kept its speed in check.

It was worth the wait.

Mark Richardson is editor of Wheels. He can be reached at mrichardson@thestar.ca.

More videos from Wheels.ca and our partners