PILE UP

by Rob Lopresti

Today I was almost the sixth car in a five-car pile-up.

I was on the highway, driving home from a business meeting, when a car zoomed past me in the left lane. He (why do I assume the driver was male?) tried to find a way between two cars in front of me and plowed into one of them.

One car landed in the ditch. Another spun around and wound up facing the wrong way with its front end smashed in. A third car married the car in front of it, and a motorcycle was totaled.

I steered my car off to the shoulder. This was my first time driving a Prius (company car) and all the little motions didn’t come automatically, so I struggled to make sure I was turning it off safely. (For some reason safety was very much on my mind just then.). Foot on break. Hit the Parking button.. Foot on brake. Hit the Power button. Pull out the key device. Everything still? Okay.

By the time I got back to the mess a lot of people were already doing the hard stuff. I moved some debris out of the one usable lane, checked that nobody needed another untrained rescue worker, and got back on the road.

My first thought was: Boy, am I lucky son of a gun. My second was: Boy, would I be a lousy witness.

Nobody’s witness

Go back to my description of the accident. I don’t know where the car who caused the mess wound up. Was that the one in the ditch? Beats me. Who hit the motorcyclist? Dunno. I saw it, but it didn’t register. I was using all my wits to brake the unfamiliar car and hoping the drivers behind me weren’t wasting their attention on cell phones.

If a court had to depend on me to settle what had happened, nobody would ever get to the bottom of it. This is awfully embarrassing for a writer, and especially a crime writer. As Holmes said to Watson “You see, but you do not observe.”

It isn’t even the first time this sort of thing happened. A decade ago I saw a truck smash into a van at an intersection, spinning it like a top and flipping it on its side. So, was the light facing me red or green (meaning, who was at fault?)

Not a damned clue.

Derby day

Robert Benchley wrote about this topic some fifty years ago. He noted that if you look at any photograph of a disaster – some emperor getting the axe or a building on fire – you will probably see someone looking the other way, missing the whole event. Benchley says that man is usually wearing a derby. He remarks on one photo that shows a man looking at a clock as a riot breaks out behind him. “At any rate, there’ll be one guy who knows what time the trouble started — provided he knew that it had started.”

I sometimes wonder if stuff I see at a time like that is locked in my head. Maybe there’s a way to get it out.

You are getting sleepy

Do you ever watch Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel? If all science programs were this good students would be fist-fighting for the chance to take Physics.

In one episode the stars decided to see how well hypnotism works for recalling the details of a stressful moment. They hired two actors to play eccentric deliverymen and start an argument before the other castmembers. The cast were then asked to fill out a survey about what happened, and they did no better than I would have.

They then brought in a hypnotist who did what was, to my mind, the schmaltziest, most Vegas-y, most obviously fake hypnotism bit imaginable. Each of the three castmembers were put under his alleged spell and told to fill out the survey again.

And I’ll be damned if each of them didn’t promptly recall useful details they had missed before. For example, one, who had sworn he hadn’t seen the name tag one actor was wearing, nonetheless correctly recalled the name on the tag. Everyone except the hypnotist was flabbergasted..

I have always heard that what hypnotism does in cases like this is lower your inhibitions. In other words, in a sudden traumatic event your brain absorbs thoughts, images, glimpses, all jumbled together. When asked to report it only allows out the stuff it is confident about to a level of, say, 75%. Under hypnosis it lets information that it is only, say 50% sure really happened. So you get more information, but more of it is likely to be false.

If the Mythbusters crew produced false information, they didn’t tell us about it on the show. So I don’t know if that’s true.

What I do know is that I’m glad the Prius got home without a scratch on its escutcheon, and that I’m here to write the tale.

Please drive defensively.