personal narrative

Have you ever been reckless on the roads and it got you into an accident? Well that was what happened to me at the beginning of this year. On the night of January 6, 2009, my sister, Amy, my boyfriend, Alan, his two brothers Justin and Andy, and I left Alan’s house around 9:00 p.m. to go to my house. I remember when we walked out onto the porch, the ground was already very slippery. As we walked down the driveway, I saw my sister sliding down the driveway and saying, “Whoa! It’s so slippery!” I then noticed it had been freezing raining pretty hard, and the ground was mostly ice. We all ran into Alan’s 4x4, and he started driving. I have a bad habit of not putting on my seatbelt when I am in a car with my friends, so this time I did not think anything about not buckling up. As we were driving, the freezing rain pelted the car and made small clicking noises as it made contact. The music was turned up fairly loud, and we were all singing along to it. We slid a couple times on the road on the way home and Alan had a hard time braking because of the icy ground, but we did not think it was that big of a deal. It took at least fifteen minutes to get to Cherry Hill, which is the main road my house is by, and I remember how hard it was to stop at the red light.

As we turned onto Lotz at the red light, I turned around to talk to Justin and Andy, who were also in the backseat with me. Alan and Amy were in the front seats, and they were both still singing along to the music. None of us were paying attention to how fast we were going until I looked up and saw the street sign we were supposed to turn at. By then I realized that we were going too fast to be able to slow down and turn in time. As Alan pressed the brakes down to turn, the car slid and the brakes did not work due to the ice on the ground and because of how fast we were going. The car made only half the turn before smashing into a telephone pole. A split second before we crashed, I remembered I did not have my seatbelt on, and my first response was to grab onto the seat in front of me. The sound of the car smashing into the telephone pole was the loudest sound of metal crunching I have ever heard in my life. It was almost as if someone had taken a giant hammer and had smashed the front of the car with it.

As everything calmed down, everyone started talking and asking if everyone was okay. There were no major injuries but there were minor ones. Alan had hit his head on the steering wheel, Justin got a small cut from the seatbelt, Andy got elbowed in the eye by me, Amy was fine, and I hit my head on the ceiling and then on the window. I remember the metallic taste of fear in my mouth as I realized what had just happened. My heart was racing fast, and I was gripping the seat in front of me so tightly, it hurt. We all sat in the car, shocked at what just happened before we noticed that was a car parked to the right of us. Amy rolled down the window, and we heard the lady in the other car ask if we were all right. We answered with a “yes,” and she made sure a couple more times be fore slowly driving away. As soon as she drove away, we all slowly got out of the car to check the damage.

We al got in front of the car and stared in shock. The entire front bumper had fallen off onto the ground and into the snow, and both the headlights were smashed in. The sudden realization that there was a possibility that someone called the police, we all quickly got back into Alan’s car, and Alan pulled away from the telephone pole and started driving to my house, this time, very slowly and on 4-wheel drive.

This experience was quite an eye opener and was very important to me. I chose to write about this because I think almost everyone can relate to being reckless on the roads or just being less careful when they are with their friends in the car because they can be distracted. I think that even if you are with your friends and having fun, safety still comes first, especially in a moving vehicle, and even more if it is the winter season, where it can be icy and hard to drive. In my case, we were lucky that nobody got seriously hurt, but for others who are put in the same situation that we were in might not be so lucky. Having fun with your friends is not wrong, but you should always put safety first when you are with your friends.