It Could Have Been Worse

Reflections on Near Misses

The other night, I was driving home. It was after dark, and I was traveling on a relatively unfamiliar stretch of twisting, two-lane road. The speed limit posted was 45, which I remember feeling was a bit high, because it was hard to see around the curves in the dark. I remember wondering what I would do if a deer leapt into the road. At least it’s not raining, I thought, since I have trouble seeing well when driving at night in the rain. It could be worse.

So I was in a highly alert state when I came around a bend to find an oncoming car straddling the yellow line. The car must have drifted into my lane while taking the curve, the kind of lazy driving so many of us are guilty of when it’s late at night and there aren’t many other cars on the road. I don’t know if the car tried to correct its course, if it pulled back into its own lane at the last second. I didn’t wait to find out. I twisted the wheel sharply to the right, skidding onto the shoulder, somehow keeping control of the car through the sheer force of will.

As the car passed and I swerved back onto the road, I felt a thump under my right front tire. I had driven over something on the shoulder — a rock, a log — and blown out the tire. As my heart pounded and I began to shake from the after-effects of adrenaline, all I could think was, goddammit, I blew my damn tire.

It wasn’t until later, after I’d left my car at the tire place, after I’d made it home safely, that I recognized the danger I’d been in. The crisis of the evening was not “I got a flat tire,” but “I was almost in a car accident.” All of my first instincts had been to blame myself for the damage. It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that things could have ended much, much worse.

My life is littered with these near-miss scrapes. A hundred different moments where, under slightly different circumstances, disaster might easily have struck. A fire put out before it had a chance to spread. A mugging thwarted. A confrontation with an angry wild animal that didn’t end in bloodshed.

And each time, as soon as my brain is able to process the idea that that could have been so much worse, my very next thought is inevitably, how lucky. But is it truly luck?