The return home from Prague entailed a short flight to Frankfurt, Germany, and then a long, long flight from Frankfurt to Chicago. All told, it was 15 hours of chasing the sun before touching down and heading for home. I hailed a taxi outside Terminal 5 just in time to hit the evening rush, putting yet another hour between me and home.
The cab driver was a very considerate man. He didn't talk to me at all except when I said something first, and I wasn't in a talking mood. He had the radio on, but it was at a very low volume - some old-time gospel and sermon station I found somewhat amusing.
We finally left the Kennedy Expressway, less than a mile from my home and pulled in to a line of cars waiting at a stop light. I heard a faint screech of tires and my driver grasped his head with both hands. I had felt a gentle jolt of the car and thought perhaps we had been rear-ended, but when I turned to look behind us and saw the huge grille of a huge Dodge pickup truck, I knew we would have felt a considerably stronger jolt if it had hit us. I think the cab driver had iinstinctively and only momentarily lifted his foot off of the brake. Then I noticed ahead of us, as the light turned green and all the witnesses left the scene, that a car heading in our opposite direction and attempting to turn left had been hit by a red Ford Explorer that had either tried to beat the yellow, or had run the red all together. The car didn't appear to have tremendous damage: the right front quarterpanel clearly had a dent, and I think the right front headlight was broken out, but it didn't look terribly serious. My driver pulled up to the stop line -- we still had the green light -- and stopped as the driver of the Explorer tried to navigate out of the intersection, from our left to our right. We were in the left lane, between the left-turn lane and the rightmost lane on the street. This must have confused the driver of the Explorer, disoriented as he probably already was in the moments after an accident, as he/she gunned the accelerator to cross the rightmost lane, and was immediately hit by a pickup truck flying to the intersection in the moments-earlier clear lane!
Two accidents within twenty seconds, both involving the red Explorer. Even though he was quite clearly at fault, in my opinion, especially in the first accident, I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the guy. On the other hand, talk about instant karma! Asshole move : just desserts!
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the cab driver. I thought we should stop and render assistance, or at least to stick around and tell the police what we saw. I didn't voice this, but I thought it. The cab driver pulled away and took me home. As I was paying him he said that he was going to head back to that intersection to tell his account of the accident, hoping that the one responsible for the crash(es) would be the one actually blamed.
2 comments:
Perhaps you should call the police and direct them to your post. Sounds like a fairly accurate description of what took place.
Red Explorer Guy should have his license yanked.
I guess sometimes lightning does strike the same place twice..
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