Two or three seconds is what the video shows. The part the video doesn’t show is how a man in a hurry decided I was the problem.
Saturday marks the two years since I was passing a truck hauling postal vehicles on Interstate 55 near Pontiac, Illinois. Cruise was set at 77. The pass took a few moments…long enough, apparently, to offend a big white F-350 coming up from behind like it had somewhere more important to be than physics allowed.
He covered a quarter mile or more and parked himself on my bumper. Just a few feet. Close enough that the grill filled the rear-view in ugly, sharp detail. Then the horn. Then the high beams. Honk. Flash. Honk. Flash. As if noise and light would make my Explorer sprout another twenty miles an hour. Or as if I were blocking an ambulance instead of a man who simply didn’t want to wait.
I didn’t brake-check him. At that speed, that could prove fatal. Instead, the second I cleared the postal hauler, I tucked back into my lane — tight, almost too tight in front of the truck I’d just passed — and opened the left lane for the Ford. Go. Be important somewhere.
He didn’t go.
The F-350 eased up beside me. Two men in the cab, both of them already cooked. Screaming. The kind of gestures you don’t need a decoder ring for. They’d been feeding on each other, the way two matches feed on the same pile of dry leaves, and I was the thing they decided to burn.
I gave them the dismissive wave (with all five fingers). Then I stopped looking.
That was the mistake they were waiting for, or maybe they weren’t. The next thing I knew the white wall of truck was crowding my lane. Not drifting. Not a correction. The deliberate slide of a vehicle changing lanes — except there was no reason to change lanes. Nothing ahead. Nothing to avoid. Just me and the decision that I shouldn’t be on the pavement anymore.
They kept coming.
Soon I was over the right line, giving them room, hitting the rumble strip and then past it. My Explorer’s tires protested the rough shoulder, hunting for smooth asphalt. Tire fragments and other debris on the shoulder ahead.
Still, they came. A brand-new F-350. Trailer behind it — a car hauler or something built to the same scale. Enough mass to turn a grown man and a Ford into a headline in a ditch.
The little voice in the back of my head stopped being polite.
People die in ditches.
My mind flashed back to a couple of fatal, single-vehicle crashes I’d photographed as a newspaper and fire department photographer decades earlier. I didn’t go into the ditch. I wasn’t going into the ditch. Not without a fight. So I pushed back and we hit.
The metal grinding and protesting wasn’t pretty. But I felt his trailer shift maybe six inches. At that point, I thought to myself, so this is what a PIT feels like.
I decided if he came for my lane again, I was going to PIT that trailer for real and roll it and/or them. You want to kill me? No today, mother… You can fill in the rest.
Fortunately he retreated to the passing lane. His shiny new truck and trailer weren’t as shiny anymore.
My Explorer — the one I actually liked — took about $8,500 worth of attitude. I already had 911 on the line before I finished pulling onto the shoulder. Fifteen minutes later a state trooper was standing at my window, chuckling the way cops chuckle do when two grown men have just told him opposite stories about the same two seconds.
“They say you swerved into them in a road-rage fit. And there’s two of them against you when it comes to stories.”
I told him I had a dashcam. He sighed like a man who’d heard that promise before and watched it die thanks to a dead battery. Then we sat in his squad car and watched the file.
It wasn’t how I remembered it.
The distances were wrong in my head. The whole collision lasted a little over two and a half seconds. In my memory, it had taken ten or twenty seconds, easy. Time dilation. Tunnel vision. All the stuff I’d taught other people in classes about what happens in high-stress incidents, now living in my nervous system. The video also showed what my pride already knew: I had not invented the bumper, the horn, the lights, or the men who used a three-ton pickup and a big trailer as an intimidating message.
The trooper copied the video. He wanted a supervisor. He sent me on my way with a directive to stay safe. That advice landed as supportive, not critical. I drove home with wind screaming through holes in the body, a dead side mirror, a door handle that had given up, and a mind that wouldn’t shut up.
That night my then-wife was furious that I’d inconvenienced her work schedule. Wendy had to leave work to get the kids. She offered nothing that looked even remotely like comfort. Instead, she offered a harsh verdict and a heaping helping of blame.
She yelled at me. I should have left the roadway. I should have stopped. I had handled it wrong from the first second. You could have killed them!
I told her I was comfortable with the decision. Red-faced angry, she screamed that I needed professional help and stomped away. That didn’t feel like marital bliss, it felt like condemnation. Harsh condemnation.
I wondered if she might have been be right. I just hadn’t expected the person who shared my house to be the one swinging a wrecking ball.
The next morning I was a human weather system. Rage that two men in a rolling fortress had tried to bully me off a 70-mile-an-hour Interstate because I had the audacity to finish a pass. They could have killed me in a schoolyard bully stunt. A weird, sick euphoria that I was still walking. Hot flashes. Dry mouth. Nausea when the movie replayed in my head — grill in the mirror, horn, lights, the cab full of teeth, the white truck filling the lane like a door closing.
Then a fresh wave of deep anger at the woman who had looked at the wreckage of my car – and me – and only saw my poor judgment. At the gym I broke down sobbing in the locker room like a kid who’d just learned his parents were getting divorced.
I wasn’t going to pick a therapist out of a hat and hope she didn’t think the correct response to a violent attack is to become a better victim. I texted the local sheriff and the assistant chief of police: Who do you send cops to after they use deadly force? Who do you send victims to?
Both of them, inside of a minute, sent the same name. Emily Barker. Nurse practitioner. Trauma and PTSD. Normal, Illinois.
I called and left a voicemail that didn’t sound like a man who writes about guns for a living. She called back and offered her weekend, but I had a class and would be around real friends and not my wife. Instead, four hours, Monday at 6pm. Two hundred dollars an hour. I sent her the dashcam and my narrative so she wouldn’t have to take my word for it.
I had spent most of my adult life treating therapy as a punchline. Remember R. Lee Ermey in that Geico ad? Then two lawmen I know and respect pointed at the same door and I walked through it because the alternative was letting this thing infect me from the inside.
We talked the incident down to the bone — the postal hauler, the six feet of grill, the wave, the slide, the impact, the anger, the helplessness, and the aftermath. We talked about the bullying I took as a kid, including the metal hanger across my throat on the school bus and the ligature marks and bruises that when I walked into the assistant principal’s office.
She put me through the kind of work that looks like nonsense until it isn’t: alternating movements while I replayed the two seconds in high definition. Over and over. The tension started to leak out of me like air from a tire. Four hours later I was empty, physically and mentally exhausted. She told me to go home, stay off intoxicants and anything else that blunts the edges, and sleep. I would be raw for days.
I was.
The rawness came back when I gave a statement to my insurance company. It came back when the other guy’s company first pretended he hadn’t done anything and they wanted me and my insurance to pay for his damages.
Then the Illinois State Police cited him. State Farm watched the video and said they would stand behind me all day long. Then his insurance company got the link to the video. Suddenly they rolled over and paid for my repairs. They asked me how much therapy I would need. They would pay for all of it. The silent witness on the windshield had done what my memory and my marriage could not.
I wrote about all of that in December, 2024. I wrote that a gun can save your body, but it won’t fix your head when it’s on fire. I wrote you are not weak for calling someone who knows how to put that fire out. I said put a dashcam in the car if you drive like a human being.
That was the article.
Two years later, the Explorer is fixed. I am mostly fixed. I still have a tinge of PTSD, but not much. I am still out several thousand dollars the universe hasn’t seen fit to refund. No big deal. I’ve moved past it anyway.
Interesting fact: the vehicle owner’s address came back to the French Consulate in St. Louis. The driver, a kid in his early 20s, wasn’t the Consul, though.
The collision wasn’t the only thing that ended. The way she glared at me that night, it was one of the four big reasons I filed for divorce last summer. Surviving an attack shows you who will stand in the wreckage with you. Sometimes the answer is no one who lives in your house. My best friends all stood with me and supported me. My wife didn’t. Hence, it’s a big reason why she’s in divorce court on her way to becoming single again.
I am much better than I was in that locker room. Not because time is magic, but because I did the unfashionable thing and sat in a room with a skilled woman who knew how to take a two- or three-second incident (and a lifetime of old bruises) and keep working until my nervous system stopped treating I-55 like a loaded gun pointed at my face.
Treatment made me a better person. Not the greeting-card kind, the kind who knows the difference between standing your ground and standing alone. The kind who will tell another man or woman, without a smirk, that the gun on your belt doesn’t treat trauma in your head the way a tourniquet treats a bleed.
A pass. A horn. A grill in the mirror. Two men who deciding that I should leave the highway. Two seconds of steel. A dashcam that (thankfully) told the truth. A marriage that didn’t. A four-hour night in Normal that started the repair followed by about a dozen or sixteen more to file off the rough burrs.
The Explorer is straightened out. So am I. The money’s gone but the lesson isn’t.
If someone tries to kill you, survive first. Then get the help that keeps you from living the rest of your life in those two or three seconds fighting for your life.
And for the love of God, put a dashcam on your windshield.
The road doesn’t care who you think you are. The people in your passenger seat might not either. Find out which ones stay. Fix what can be fixed. Leave the rest in the ditch where it belongs.
Thanks for sharing.
For the record you are why I have dashcams in our cars.