Near-certain death lurks at 65 mph

I almost died this afternoon at 65 mph on a six-lane stretch of interstate just east of Greensboro. I was cruising toward home on a perfect traveling day under a blue sky with temperatures in the low 60s. I was not talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, eating at the wheel, looking at a map or changing CDs. But the person who decided to take over the space occupied by my front fender may have been doing all of those things — and at a speed considerably higher than the posted 65 mph.

All I saw was a flash of a gold- or yellow-color front fender of a truck just as it veered into the few square feet my little sedan was traveling. I didn't have time to honk the horn. I was too busy slamming on the brakes and veering to the right, out of the path of the wayward truck. My wife, who never saw the other vehicle at all, screamed as the car left the travel lane for the shoulder and the tires squealed and smoked. The rear end fishtailed, and I attempted to correct the spin, but the tires weren't gripping anything, and the car veered too far back into the travel lane as other vehicles swooshed past. The rear end whipped loose again, and I again tried to correct the veer as we continued traveling almost as fast as the other vehicles just a few feet away. This time, the skidding and correcting culminated in a maneuver you see on car-chase movies, a 180-degree spin that sets the car headed back in the opposite direction. Suddenly, I was looking west through the windshield, not east. But I wasn't interested in reversing my travel. I was just trying to get the car to stop. I pressed the brake as hard as I could and hoped that nothing was behind me as I felt the car bump off the paved shoulder into the grassy dirt. Finally, amid a strong odor of burning rubber, the car came to a stop.

All the lights on the instrument panel were on. The dashboard indicated that all four doors were open (but they weren't). The whole frightening ordeal had lasted about two seconds, during which my heart had pounded a hundred beats and was still racing. My wife began to breathe again. I turned off the ignition; the engine had stalled. I cranked the engine again, and the dashboard display returned to normal. I checked the traffic coming toward me, looking for a space to pull off the shoulder and onto the interstate again. "Let's just sit here a minute," my wife said. We did, until our breathing returned and a gap opened in the traffic.

Then her cell phone rang. It was her sister, who had been traveling behind us. They had seen the white Accord sitting on the side of the road facing the wrong direction. "Was that you?" she wanted to know. Yeah, my wife explained, breathlessly, what had happened. What kind of vehicle was it, she asked. All I saw was a yellow or gold fender of a truck, but whether an SUV or a moving van, I couldn't say. Was it a gold Dodge Dakota? Could have been. That vehicle had just cut them off, too, but without quite so much excitement. The truck never stopped.

We made it safely home from our trip. But just slightly different circumstances — a car or truck close to our car when it began fishtailing or a tire biting into the mud and causing the car to flip — could have ended much, much worse. We were 100 miles from home when we started out again, and I grew nervous each time a vehicle pulled alongside of me the entire way. In more than 40 years of driving, that might have been the most frightening episode I have ever experienced.