This summer I lived alone in a foreign country (Spain) for nine weeks without getting robbed, kidnapped, or killed. Though it’s allegedly a relatively safe place, I was still in a city (Madrid) and had to regularly travel and navigate public transportation on my own.
That’s why it would have been really ironic had I died as soon as I returned to Kentucky. And I almost did. One night a few days after I returned to the USA, I was driving home from seeing a movie with two of my friends. It was mid to late evening, maybe 11 p.m. I had a smile on my face. Because I didn’t know yet what I’d see.
I was driving down a serpentine road with no streetlights, so I left my brights on until I rounded the corner and noticed another car just ahead. Nothing seemed amok. I trailed an appropriate distance behind him until I noticed I was closing the space between us without speeding up. I slowed down to increase the gap. Oddly, the gap decreased anyway, and the front of my CRV lurked close to the back of the lone vehicle ahead of me.
The other car was slowing down exponentially. I started getting nervous. What if another car pulled behind me, and the two drivers got out of their cars and attacked me? I realized I was probably getting scared for no reason, but still, I checked the rear view mirror.
Nothing.
The other car slowly down so much it almost came to a stop, but not quite. At least it sped up again. Instead of trailing behind it, I let it get farther ahead of me. I cruised along at 15 mph or so for several minutes until I was sure that the suspicious car had gotten far enough away.
So I returned to the speed limit, maybe 45 mph. The road was still quite circuitous, and I turned my brights on again. Just as the worry had all but eased its way out of my body, my jaw clenched to hold in a scream.
One thought came to mind: “I’m going to hit that car.”
As I rounded the corner going 50 mph, I saw a car perpendicular to the road and taking up both lanes. There was nowhere to swerve.
I slammed on the brakes, and they squealed in protest, the car seeming to clench with my jaw and with my hands on the wheel. My wheels skidded on the road, and the sound made me feel sick.
I stopped a few feet from the other car. It was the same one that had stopped in front of me a few miles back. The left side of the car was facing me, and someone was inside. All I could think was that I had been right. They’d pegged me as an easy target, and now another vehicle was going to pull up behind me. They’d break the windows and drag me out of my car…
I jerked my CRV backwards a few feet, scrambled to put the vehicle back in drive, and swerved around the parked car and onto the grass, praying I wouldn’t drive into a ditch. I pulled back onto the road and slammed onto the gas. If I had hit the car, I probably would have died.
As I drove away, I was panicking to much to think about why else—other than to assist in kidnapping me—the driver would want to sit there taking up both lanes with his lights off in the middle of the night.
It still freaks me out when I think about it.
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