Dan's Papers - May 30, 2008 - City vs. Country

Some years ago, I owned a motor scooter, which I drove both out here in the country and in the city. It prompted me to write about some of the differences I found in doing this, particularly when it came to encounters with dogs.

In the city, I found that the dogs would run along the side of the road and sneak up on you by sliding out into the street to nip at your ankles. In the country, dogs so inclined would take a very different approach. Down a road a mile in front of me, I would see them wander out into the street, sit down on the white line and sound the alarm. I would just zip by them. And that would be that. They'd just sit there, amazed.

With this in mind, I would like to report on two accidents that took place with automobiles on the same day this past week, one in the country and the other in the city.

The country accident took place on the North Fork where a man named Louis Demarest was driving his Ford Focus down a country road in Orient on his way to an ATM machine at a bank on the Main Road. It was a rainy night. He approached a railroad crossing, saw the lights flashing, and hit the brakes. Instead of stopping, however, he went into a skid and came to a halt right on the tracks.

Then the red and white gate, clanging and flashing, came down both behind him and in front of him. He just froze on the spot, sitting there with his hands on the steering wheel as an eastbound train headed right for him.

"I thought, I hope I'm not on the track too far," he later told reporters. But he was. In moments, the 11:42 p.m. bound for Greenport came roaring through, shearing off the entire front end of the car with a big bang and spinning the rest of the car around so it wound up facing westbound.

Demarest, amazed, opened the driver's door and got out unhurt.

Soon, some police officers, medical people, and the train engineer, who had screeched the locomotive to a halt, arrived to find Demarest, who is 88 and still in full control of all his faculties, standing by the side of the road. He was, with his concurrence, then taken by ambulance to Eastern Suffolk Hospital in Greenport.

The hospital checked him out and he was found to be just fine. But two later trains to Greenport were cancelled and the railroad provided buses to get passengers to where they had to go.

Demarest is a lifelong Orient farmer who has three sons and six grandchildren. He stayed overnight at the home of one of his sons that night.

The city accident happened on the New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge on the same day. My fiancée and I were driving in her car back to our apartment in the city, when she said she pulled into an open spot in front of a giant semi-tractor-trailer truck. She was now in the center lane of the five eastbound lanes heading towards the bridge. Signs everywhere said NO STOPPING.

Suddenly, we were hit very hard in the rear by this giant truck. Our car lurched forward, but not far enough to hit the car ahead of us. The truck driver then hit us again and again, each time with considerable additional force.

Inside our cockpit, things had gone flying. Sitting in the passenger's seat, I had been on the cell phone. That was now on the floor, and the coffee cups that we had been drinking were upside down. Fortunately, we were wearing seatbelts, but there was still lots of whiplash.

After the third smack, I yelled at Chris - get out of this lane, get out of this lane - and she complied. I believed from the force we'd been hit with that there was major damage to the back of our vehicle. I told her to stop. She said no, she just wanted to get away. As I learned later, although I believed this was a failure of brakes and transmission and we should, in gentlemanly fashion, stop and exchange information, Chris felt this was a crazy man experiencing road rage. And so she zoomed forward and away from him, and though I looked in the rear view mirror, I could not make out the license plate number of this vehicle.

On the Manhattan side, Chris said she was fine, but I felt pain in my cell phone arm and also in my back. I told her I wanted to be checked out by a doctor. You never know with these things. She said she just wanted to get home.

I also thought we ought to report what happened. As we headed south on the Henry Hudson, I got back on the phone and called the New York City Police Department. The operator told me that there was nothing she could do if the accident happened in New Jersey even though we were now in New York. I told her the circumstances. She still said there was nothing she could do. She said I had to return to New Jersey to report this. I told her we were not going to do that.

At the office of a doctor we knew on Fifth Avenue, a secretary said that all the costs would be covered by "no-fault" since we were in New York State. I told her we were not in New York State. We were on the bridge, but we were before halfway heading toward New York, so we were definitely in New Jersey.

That's different, the secretary said. They don't have no-fault there. You're on your own paying for this.

Having talked to friends, I have come to learn that this behavior on the part of truck drivers is not an uncommon occurrence. After driving 14 hours and exhausted and irritable, they sometimes snap when they are angered by motorists and do exactly what happened to us. Under the circumstances, I think that had we stopped, it was also possible we might have been the brunt of further road rage, possibly even leading to assault. Also, even if it did come down to a non-violent confrontation, the trucker could simply deny that he ever did the damage he did. There's no damage done to the truck, after all. Where are the witnesses? Who do these people think they are?

The car, indeed, suffered thousands of dollars in damage. As for me, my injuries were not serious. We went back to the apartment, Chris went about her business while I lay down on the sofa, put ice on my arm, took two Advil and slept for the next three hours.

The moral is, don't cut in front of truck drivers. They can pretty much do what they want as it turns out. And nobody can stop them.