I can’t remember exactly which year it was, but it was certainly during summer vacation from college, so it’s not like I was a brand new teen driver. And I was a pretty careful driver, and I’m fairly sure I no longer had that tendency to veer toward the left that I had when learning how to drive years earlier. (The incoming traffic made me nervous back then.) I think I was cured of that when I took off the right side of my parents’ garage door one day when putting the car away. Luckily my parents thought it was kind of funny. “She always drives too far to the right!” my mom said with a mixture of humor and exasperation.
But that was years earlier, and the car-boat incident had nothing to do with my earlier rightward road drift. I had borrowed my mother’s car for some errand or other, the purpose of which has been lost to time and the overriding memory of what happened after.
I checked the driver’s side mirror. I looked out the at the oncoming traffic behind me. I perfectly clocked the speed and location of the car I was going to follow into traffic. I carefully pulled the car from the curb as the car went by and—KKkkkeeeEEEEEccCHHHhhhkkkeee—somehow neglected to to see the LOOMING BOAT being towed behind the car on its trailer.
Technically I had the accident with the trailer’s bumper, not the boat. But it was the giant boat I should not have missed and I cannot tell you why I did. I could swear on a stack of the No. 1 Ladie’s Detective Agency books (because there are so many) it was INVISIBLE until the moment I plowed the front left of my mom’s gold Chevy Nova into it.
Luckily for me the man whose trailer I bashed saw how mortified I was and was very nice about it; in fact, I think he thought it was somewhat amusing. After all, the trailer still worked ok and the boat was certainly untouched. He just needed the bumper repaired. My mom made some compensation deal with him and I had to pay her back for it in heat, humidity and fumes as I painted our backyard porch that summer.
