There I was, dragging 40 tons of liquid oxygen around behind me in a B-train one Sunday afternoon about five years ago, enjoying the sunshine and contemplating my role in the grand scheme, when it struck me. I’m in their way. There were people everywhere in their cars, rushing off somewhere, to the beach or a garage sale or maybe to a roadside chip stand. They had plans, and those plans didn’t include me.

Folks recovering from the accumulated stress of a five-day work week, trying to cram all the rest and relaxation humanly possible into 48 short hours, don’t want to be stuck behind a big truck lumbering along a skinny two-lane highway. Who can blame them for wanting to pass, or for leaping out in front of me? There are only so many hours in a day. I felt like a sitting duck.

The guy at the far end of the 10-car line behind me doesn’t know that my company has a policy demanding that I drive at the speed limit. The driver at the next intersection probably doesn’t understand the laws of physics that’ll make her next move a very risky one.

As I approach, however, the woman on the corner weighs her options — get out there now, in front of that damn truck, or be stuck behind it in that line of traffic. Her decision made, she jams her foot down on the accelerator and she’s gone.

Unlike me, I thought at the time, she still trusts the technology: convinced her car would perform as it always had and go like hell to get her out of harm’s way — out of my way.

Unlike her, then and still today, I carry the burden of understanding the folly of the move. I’ve seen the kind of damage a big truck can do. A good friend of mine bears a similar burden. Mine, mercifully, is just fodder for a nightmare. He’s haunted by the memory of a real event.

He has re-lived it countless times, searching for a way to avoid the inevitable. Each time, he plays it back a little differently from the way it really happened, but the outcome is always the same. He continues to plumb the depths of his subconscious for a way of avoiding the car, but there never will be one. The car pulled out in front of him, and the laws of physics did the rest.

He once described to me how he felt, the instant before he crushed a beautiful young mother and her much younger daughter.

“I sensed she knew at exactly the same moment I did what was about to happen,” my friend said. “I wondered what must have gone through her mind. I don’t think she had time to panic. She just stared at me. I wonder if she thought about her daughter, or her husband … I wonder if she thought about me?”

That memory is seared into my friend’s very being. Those images cost him his marriage. They stole the soul of a true professional, a good father and family man. His imaginary attempts to thwart destiny continue to haunt him. My friend told me he could hear her begin to scream as the gravity of her situation dawned on her. He could hear her wail even above the howl of tires and the splintering glass. “But worst of all,” my friend said. “I heard the scream stop.”

My friend did nothing wrong that day; the scrutiny of the law proved that. But that was little consolation. He had the horrible misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I brought 20 years of experience to every mile I drove back then, and like most other professional drivers, I found the value of that experience paled in comparison to the short-sighted haste of the people with whom I shared the road. My fondest wish then, as it is now, would be for every other motorist to drive a mile in my seat and share the weight of the baggage so many truck drivers carry around.

Would all that baggage make any difference to the woman who is just about to stomp on her accelerator pedal, or to that guy at the back of the line? Maybe, but how do you convince them of the folly of their next move? As my friend can attest, there’s no feeling in the world as sickening as the helplessness of seeing someone make one of those mistakes. He’s just a shell now. That woman, in her haste, killed my friend as surely as he killed her.

I hope you never find yourself in the position my friend did, and I hope you never have to make the kind of decision that he never had time to make. I hope, also, that you never find yourself in too much of a hurry to remember that you’re as vulnerable as that car driver who’s about to pull out in front of you.