Inspired by my 20-minute writing exercise today around the theme: “Recall a time when you’ve been in an accident.”

It was the summer before I started university and I was working at a resort in a small town about 20 minutes from my childhood home.  The resort and town were very evocative of Dirty Dancing or some other wholesome escape from city life, and attracted a lot of people from Chicago as well as international students to work at the resorts.

I worked at both the front desk and as a beach cocktail waitress at Barefoot Bay, the slightly older and less sexy resort in town – but likely more fun (or at least that’s what we told ourselves).  The staff were incredible.  I bonded with some of the performers from the musical variety show and also with a Dutch girl named Dirkje.  She was tall, with short blond hair and a caring but confident smile, and we connected over our love of flavoured vodka and flirting: with risks and people, of all types.

My favourite shifts were the happy hour cocktail time on the deck overlooking the lake.  Paul would be playing his one-man keyboard and vocal show with lots of predictable favourites – potentially intended to plant a (not-so-subtle) seed for the vacationers to keep the fancy, fruity drinks flowing… Margaritaville, The Pina Colada Song, but also Brown Eyed Girl, where Paul would change the lyrics to “blue eyed girl” in order to flatter me and get me to blush as I hustled around the deck.

After one of these shifts, I jumped in my hand-me-down tan, Mercury Ford station wagon to drive home.  I had a quirky tin lunch box: green, with a frog theme, that I had picked up from one of those Sanrio Japanese stationary stores at the mall.  I tossed that on the seat next to me and drove along the winding roads from Elkhart back to New Holstein.  I had driven this way dozens of times and knew the curvy hills well.  I had the radio playing and was likely going a bit quick for the terrain, when my tin lunch box bounced from the passenger seat to the floor.  Now this car was a wide boat, and when I leaned over to pick up the lunch box, it put my entire head and body way below the windshield.  I launched into this maneuver right as there was a bend in the road and I total missed it.

Along the curve were those metal highway signs with arrows, to alert drivers about the bend.  And before I knew what was happening, my car was plowing into them like dominoes.  I was going too fast and couldn’t recover, smashing into the deep ditch on the right of the highway.  The embankment was steep and there was a gravel driveway to a nearby farm with a culvert.  I was astounded by how far down, into the tall, grassy weeds, I had landed.

Luckily I was wearing my seat-belt and got out of the vehicle unharmed.  Not a scratch or bruise on my body.  But the car, which was old to begin with, did not fare so well.  The local farmer heard the noise and called the police (these were the days before cell phones).  I rode home in the back of a police car, my broken Ford wagon would need to be towed – ultimately to the junkyard. 

When I arrived home my parents were gone.  They had taken a day trip to do some shopping and I remember waiting with anxious anticipation about how they would react.  It wasn’t great – but they were more calm than I expected (and ultimately happy that I was okay).

But for the rest of that summer, I had no access to a car.  I had to bum rides from friends or pedal around my little town on a bike.  I had to pay a relatively steep fine for a reckless driving ticket, which ate into my cocktail tips. I had to adjust my schedule at Barefoot Bay to hitch a ride with a colleague, a woman around the age of my mother, who had lived a much more gritty and hard-working life.  She lived only a few blocks away and was overly generous and accommodating, helping me to finish out my working days before I moved away.

That summer I learned a lot about responsibility and humility.  I learned to park my judgement at the door and to never, ever take the access to a working vehicle for granted.