Fear Itself

Before it happened it had been a long-term fear:  Driving down a two-lane highway to watch a car speeding in my lane from the wrong direction.  I’m glad I wasn’t the first car in its path, even though that car belonged to a woman with a baby and other young children.  Mine was the car behind hers, so the car with the children served as a shield.  If I could have traded places with them I wouldn’t have, which is something about myself I didn’t know.  It’s not only that the errant vehicle hit their car.  My primary fear was that upon encountering the situation I would incorrectly predict the behavior of the oncoming driver, who I would have to treat as unsound and unpredictable.  If I evaded the wayward car, would it pursue me?  I was afraid I’d make the wrong choice and that the consequences would be severe and irreparable.

The fear had done what fear does; it warned me.  For this fear has great practical value.   Fear could have been telling me not to take such roads, that two-lane highways are the most dangerous roads and that I do not want to arrive safely 99.9% of the time.  (The hardened tow truck driver would corroborate fear by telling me that he sees this on this highway all the time.  The cops didn’t seem surprised, either.)  But fear has little value once the danger is no longer hypothetical.  With the car already hurtling toward me, fear was about as useful as sweat.  I needed to flee, but I needed to flee alertly, not fearfully.  When the danger is tangible, fear becomes quiet, if not silent.  All the parts of my body that want to save me reach the consensus that fear has become dangerous. 

Now I feel that my reaction would probably have been the same as the woman in front of me, and of those behind me, and of anyone else:  The impulse was to steer away from the approaching vehicle without trying to predict the driver’s intention.  Fortunately it happened too fast to analyze.  It happened too fast to pray.  The brain responded in the way that has kept our ancestors alive since long before we developed the luxury of analysis:  flee now.  Not only is this the instinctive response, as I watched in my periphery the driver’s eventual arc off the road, I realized that the driver would only deliberately target me if he was driven to kill.  If he were veering off the road because he was asleep, drunk, having a heart attack, texting, or, for any other reason than to deliberately hit someone, he would probably continue driving away from me, or at least would not pursue me.  True, an oblivious driver could come to and decide to change course, but if I made an effort to avoid him I would probably have too big of a start for him to catch me, whether or not he did so deliberately.  If he was out to kill someone at random, the cars behind me would at that point be an easier target for him.