This morning I returned a rental car and got a ride to campus from the Enterprise driver, a UI grad (English major) who, having given me rides before, is fast becoming my friend. We were chatting about the 6-8 inches of snow that got dumped on Central Illinois last night, and he mentioned that there were 187 auto accidents in Champaign yesterday. I told him how, on my return trip yesterday, I stopped counting around 20 or 25 the number of cars and trucks that had either crashed into each other or--more commonly--had veered off the road and were sitting in the sloped medians. My trip really was like one slow-mo version of the movie Crash, the midwest winter edition.
By the stadium, we pulled up to a traffic light and watched disbelievingly as the driver in front of us decided to take a quick left when the light turned green (a maneuver known in Pittsburgh as a Pittsburgh left. There is, to my knowledge, no such thing as an Urbana left.) The truck came very close to the cars waiting to go, and it took the driver a whole block to get the truck straightened out--it just skidded and spun while we looked on in white silence.
I could see the driver's thick sweatshirt hood shaking back and forth, and then he peeked out from it and said to me, "You see, people need to understand. A car can kill you."
