We were up in DC today, and on the way to church, i rear-ended some bloke at a traffic light. A combination of following too closely, wet roads, and possibly even cultural driving differences led to a bashed-out right headlight on my side and a busted rear bumper on his side.
I was approaching an intersection on Main Street in Fairfax and another car was in front of me. The light had turned yellow, and the car in front of me stopped as the yellow light ripened to red. I blinked and didn't put on the brakes hard enough, I guess, and Rachel made a noise of alarm as i slammed down and swerved as much as i could into the left lane. Our corners still bashed together, and i sat there vexed and stunned. The other guy pulled into the entrance of the housing development to our right, and i did the same. Sometime while i was doing this, Rachel said, "Oh Ben, i wasn't wearing my seltbelt!" I put the car in park and noticed with amazement the spider in the upper right part of the windshield that Rachel had made. We got out of the car, and i asked the other guy if he was okay. He said he was okay, as i saw that the left end of his bumper had come loose.
A guy and his wife were standing on the sidewalk and he offered the use of his PDA cellphone to call 911, which i did. I called Mom on my own cellphone next, but had to ring off as the police officer drove up. The policeman took everybody's legal documents, gave us each a small information form to fill out, and while he sat in his cruiser processing those things, all i could do was hang my head and wish that I could start this day over.
The police officer sent off the other guy, and then talked to us about tickets he wrote us: one for me for "Failing to maintain proper control of vehicle", and one for Rachel for "failing to wear a seltbelt". His grasp of the finer points of traffic law and friendly voice was strangely comforting to me. We got directions to the nearest hospital, and after he drove off, talked to my parents again, who said that they would meet us after church at the Fairfax hospital. We had decided to take Rachel to the emergency room since she had bounced around a little more than she should have.
I drove the few block to the hospital with my emergency blinkers on, dropped Rachel off at the entrance and parked in one of the lots. We waited the first of many interminable amounts of time in the room of the same name, and then got called back. The more time passed, the better she felt, and the worse she felt about coming in at all. Practically speaking though, i said, she was in a car accident without a seatbelt, so it was only right that she get checked out. We both had our own regrets to ponder as we waited through those hours together. My parents made contact, and came through the curtain with a "knock, knock", and we split up to do more useful things: Mom waited with Rachel, and Dad and i walked out to the parking lot to assess the damage and report it to the insurance company.
My parents had graciously offered us the use of their car to drive back home to Carolina that day whenever we were done with our self-inflicted tour of the urgent medical bureacracy. So while i called in the car accident to the insurance company, dad switched the baggages of the two cars. After this was done, we went back in to wait with Rachel and Mom.
The doctor came in, and kicked my parents and I out into the waiting room. The Steelers/Redskins game was on the TV, and I had my book, but the wait was pretty maddening. All told, it took us about five and a half hours to get out the doors. We were all frustrated, but relieved that Rachel was okay.
Rachel and I followed my folks to the body shop, and I parked my Corolla, filled out a form and put the key in the envelope, and slipped it through the slot in the door.
We went back to the condo for turkey sandwiches, hugs, and sendoffs. We left Arlington around 6pm. The traffic was pretty awful for the first hour or so coming out of the DC area. Given the events of the day, I was extremely careful to follow that rule taought to all of us when we first learned to drive: for every 10 miles per hour, stay that many carlengths behind the car in front of the car in front of you. And my adherence to the rule did actually come in useful a few times.
We landed on our driveway around 1:30am, accomplishing a sort of mirror image of how we left Columbia. All this and work the next day, too.
