OK, last month, Pocket gave me this story from The Atlantic: "We Should All be More Afraid of Driving."
Summary? Joshua Sharpe works for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Reports on "police scanner news," to put it bluntly.
That includes car wrecks.
Of which he's had two himself.
The first? Hit a woman standing in the middle of I-75. Here's the intro:
I thought I saw something in the road.
Meth addict, as it turns out.
Much later, he makes contact with her. The accident allegedly scared her straight, but it's unclear whether that lasted or not.
OK, for a while afterward, Sharpe peeled back on ambulance chasing. We're being blunt, remember. But eventually, he picked it back up again.
Two years later? Second accident:
I thought I saw a car veering toward me.
It was a bright morning in February 2018. I was driving to work on Clairmont Road when a car suddenly appeared to be merging into my lane from the right, bound to hit me. This time, I did swerve. I wrenched the wheel and turned into oncoming traffic.
Note the parallel in the opening?
That said, as he eventually did after the first accident, he contacts the others involved. (Well, some of them.) The driver of the truck basically half hates him. The passenger fully hates him.
What's missing from the story?
No attempt to contact the swerving driver. No attempt to find out who it was, in fact. (Hold on to that idea.)
So, I DM'ed Sharpe on Twitter after tagging him, then seeing his account was open to messages.
Here's what I asked:
One thing about your Atlantic piece on accidents I just DON'T GET! You said the 2nd accident was caused by a swerving driver, but ... you never talk(ed) to him. Did you never even try? Or was the "thought I saw" not actual, and itself an artifact from PTSD from the first accident? (I've been in one wreck bad enough to have a plate in my left forearm, so I get the background.)
No response yet, for three-plus weeks.
To me, beyond the basic warning of the story, not having this information just leaves it limp to me.
Maybe Sharpe did "hallucinate" a swerving driver? Maybe he's afraid to say that, even though that could be part of his message? Or even, arguably, "should" be, not "could" be. Or per highway traffic engineers, there's the lack of mention just how big today's pickups are. Whether the accident was his fault due to a PTSD episode, or an actual swerving driver's fault, it might have been less severe had he not swerved into a monster F-250.
And, that's why I've posted it here.
The tale is designed to be cautionary, but for whatever reasons, Sharpe pulls multiple punches on that. And, it can't be him having a journalistic concern about "personal involvement," as Sharpe mentioned his having PTSD early on.
It's also bad editing. This IS Atlantic Monthly, after all. And, it's a journalistic magazine, not a repository of modernist or post-modernist short stories. Either Sharpe really saw a driver swerve (and was unable to identify him or whatever), or he thought he saw a driver swerve due to PTSD. Sharpe's editor should have insisted on Paul Harvey's "the rest of the story" or else rejected it.
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