By Kevin S. Giles

Navigating the insane traffic on a recent cross-country road trip reminded me how I once aspired to the simple pleasure of driving my parents’ car down Main Street.

The license I coveted would allow me freedom behind the wheel. The freedom I envisioned involved “cruising the drag” with friends in our small western Montana town.

A teenager doesn’t think ahead to crowded interstate highways where speeding multi-ton vehicles pass within inches of each other. That’s the stuff of adult life.

I can’t say for sure what brought this issue to mind. Maybe it was witnessing the aftermath of a two-car crash in Kentucky recently that summoned more than a dozen emergency vehicles. Maybe my early learning of the ultimate rule of driving — beware of the other guy — took on new relevance.

A real-life crash

My friend’s crashed Ford pickup resembled this one in color. It had custom wood paneling on the sides.

Our nation’s crowded highways suggest we’re awakening from the pandemic, even as the pandemic continues. Like water bursting from a dam, tourists flood forth, blinking at the sights. Big trucks hog the roads. Demands for goods after a year-long shutdown put every semi-trailer in America into service. Or so it seems.

Surviving a journey through Midwest big-truck hotspots such as Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville requires more than a nod to basic traffic safety. It pays to know that a serious traffic accident can happen in an instant.

Crashes take lives

I was a sophomore in high school when teachers herded students into the auditorium for a showing of Mechanized Death, a ghastly driver training video shown in the 1960s. They closed the curtains, warned us we would see blood and suffering, and flicked on the projector.

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Repulsive color images of crumpled bodies appeared on the screen. Speeding. Drinking. Speeding and drinking. I think a state trooper wept in one segment when he found a baby’s body wedged in the wheel well of a mangled vehicle.

I remember that afternoon well. We sat in hard wooden seats that folded down, staring at a screen on the stage where countless high school drama productions took place. Strands of dusty sunlight filtered from the covered windows. We shifted uncomfortably.

A few students bolted for the door. Others stared at the floor. I watched the entire movie, sickened and riveted at the same time, recalling a story my father had told me of a driver passing him at high speed on an icy road in Minnesota. My dad found the wreck a few turns ahead, the steering column impaled through the driver’s chest.

How it happened

I’ve read that Mechanized Death was a standard safety film in its day. At our school, the point was to teach kids like me that driving was no joke.

I got the message — for a while.

It was the summer after my freshman year at college when a friend and I crashed his pickup a few hours before dawn after hours of drinking beer. We hit a highway guardrail in a mountain canyon. The pickup vaulted over the rail against a hillside. On the other side of the road, it would have tumbled a hundred feet into the trees.

The impact threw me sideways into the dashboard. I fell out the open door after the pickup stopped. He hit the steering wheel. His left arm shattered the side window.

This wasn’t the era of seatbelts.

We rode to the hospital in the back seat of a speeding patrol car. Our parents came. What I dreaded most was getting the business on the drive home. It was mostly silent in the car until my dad, who had gone to view the crash site with my friend’s dad, threw anger over his shoulder to me in the back seat.

“Smelled like a damn brewery out there,” he told me.

I’ll confess that I wasn’t legally old enough to drink alcohol. Several six-packs of bottled beer we had stacked behind the pickup seat smashed when the seat tore loose from the floor. I recall a stream of beer and blood trickling from the cab.

We spent a few weeks recovering from lacerations and bruises. He lost his pickup, which was a total wreck. I lost my glasses. Thankfully, we still walked and talked above ground.

We got lucky

Even so, I doubt I fully understood that day how few people survive a highway-speed crash with minor injuries. Being young and defiant, I emerged from the “accident” feeling somewhat immune from the gory fatal images in Mechanized Death.

How stupid.

I once owned a Ford Econoline van. The motor sat between the front seats under an insulated cover. An eighth inch of sheet metal separated me from oncoming vehicles. Think I gave that danger much consideration?

I’m older now and probably think of these things too much. Yes, we have seatbelts. Yes, we have comprehensive education campaigns to discourage impaired driving. We also have new perils — most notably, people who text and drive, surf social media and drive, make phone calls and drive. And, still, drink and drive.

I suspect our viewing of Mechanized Death saved lives. I hope it did. I hope it lingered with other students longer than it did with me.

Since the 1950s, the automobile has been the coming-of-age icon for American teenagers. It’s represented young love, stretched boundaries, peer prestige and youth rebellion. There’s talk that teenagers in 2021 drive less and don’t subscribe to traditional fascinations with cars. A glance at high school parking lots these days suggests a different story.

Crashes mean injury and death

Be careful in any case.

Last year, in the midst of the pandemic when far fewer people drove, U.S. traffic deaths rose 7 percent. That’s the biggest increase in 13 years.

Causes? Drivers taking more risks by speeding, failing to wear seat belts, and driving while impaired, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Some things never change.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.