God and the hood

Joining the ranks of the survivors of Autowa's war on pedestrians

Where I met two very nice paramedics.

I remember the walk sign.

If I close my eyes and think about it, I remember the walk sign and that my feet were wet. I remember that I had started walking across Bank Street at Albert. I think it was Bank, a street I used to dash up to get the best onion bhaji wraps in the world if I had a second, at a place that’s a pot shop now.

I started walking across Bank Street. The traffic light for cars in the same direction was red but the walk symbol was brilliant white and it told me to start walking. So I did. I guess the light turned green right after.

All of a sudden doesn’t quite capture what happens next. I was walking across the street and then … I was on my back. Time skipped a beat. There was nothing between being upright and flat. I had been walking and now, right hand spread out to my side, I could feel the hood of a car and I was, or I must have been, on my back.

And the car was still moving. I was hit by a car.

When I was a kid, I always imagined Jonah looking at the whale’s teeth on his way into the whale’s stomach. I thought that he must have realized that a giant jaw was closing in around him. Felt a tongue. Looked at whale molars and then, I guess, slid into the whale’s belly as if it were a water slide. Then, he would have looked around (it was lit by something, surely), and realized that he was in a stomach.

Now, I understand that Jonah probably went from being upright to on his back inside of a whale’s stomach. Indeed, the God-inspired scribe understood the mechanics of a man being swallowed by a whale and wrote this: “Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” There was a fish, and then Jonah was in its stomach. The Lord provided me a car, and then I was on its hood, in the middle of downtown Ottawa, late last Wednesday night.

With my body’s senses being cut down to a single sense — touch — I perceived that I was on the hood of a car by feeling it, and the car was moving. And if I fell off the front of the car, chances were that the car would run me over.

I’ve always wondered if, in a moment of panic, I would go silent or I’d scream. On Wednesday night, I discovered that I scream.

I had no sense of the windshield or of movement. I don’t remember if it was still raining. I could hear screaming. Primal screaming. That was me. I was the one screaming but in my mind, I had a thought: the moment I inevitably hit the ground, I need to jump out of the way of the car, lest I find myself crushed under it.

I couldn’t see anything, and my thoughts were skipping across the surface of the water like perfectly thrown stone.

I don’t even know where on my body the hood of their car hit me. I didn’t bruise. The car came off a left turn and hit me from behind. I don’t know how I ended up on top of it. I don’t know how my backpack stayed on, not getting caught on anything. My computer had a small dent on its side. My sock must have caught on the car’s licence plate or something because there was a hole in it. A hole in my sock and everything else, in tact. My backpack probably saved me from having a head injury.

I was screaming. Screaming. Twenty-five years of car hatred culminated in thirty seconds and I screamed as if I was dying. It felt like I was being kidnapped. In a flash. Instance. Right away. Suddenly. My body was thrown into the ether. It was as disorienting, just like flipping into a pool or rolling into a lake. I thought I was a goner.

I don’t know how I got off this hood, but I do remember that the moment I was able to, I leapt up onto the sidewalk. My soccer training — get into a safe position after being kicked or hit lest someone fall on top of me — kicked in. The relative safety of the curb. Screaming. I watched the car come to a stop. A man and a woman got out of the car and ran to me, shaking. I was screaming still.

They didn’t see me until I was on the hood of their car. The intersection is too dark. I was wearing grey. It had been raining. The man went into shock. I stopped screaming. “Get in our car. Please.” I refused, shaking. “Please get in our car, we’ll help you” they begged.

They prayed.

The driver lost feeling in his hands and I helped him into the back seat of his car to deal with the shock.

A man who works for CRA who I had seen crossing the street before I had been hit, is there and tells us — god saved me. Delivered the car but also saved me.

Another flash to my friend Alex, murdered on an Ottawa street as she walked across it, by a driver when she was just 27 years old.

I should have known that I was alive, though. In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about my kids or my partner; my life wasn’t flashing before my eyes. The only thing on my mind was survival. Do not let this thing run over you. Get out of its way. There were several tiny miracles that Wednesday night and one was that this couple hadn’t bought an SUV or a pick up. The grill would have knocked me to the ground and I would have been road kill.

I know that it isn’t exactly novel to be hit by a car in Canada. It happens all the time. And I’m pleased that none of this was my fault. I wasn’t crossing against the light. I wasn’t distracted on my phone. I was doing everything that a city asks a pedestrian to do: cross with the light. My last major injury was my fault, so it felt a little bit good that I was following the rules. Pay attention. Try not to be surprised when the car hits you from behind and you end up on its hood, screaming.

Not that someone deserves to be hit if they are distracted. Urban design should account for moments of distraction. It should account for pedestrians needing to cross the street in between intersections. It should calm speeds, force drivers to be more attentive. Limit the possibility of a car colliding with stuff.

Instead, the City of Ottawa looks at its grid pattern and has said: let’s turn this into a dozen narrow highways. Let’s get drivers used to zipping through the downtown and never even thinking about pedestrians. Used to not really seeing where they’re going. Let’s speed streets up by turning them one way so that driving through the grid of Centretown, you are constantly turning from one-way to two-way and back to one-way, all so that you save three minutes to then waste them scrolling on your phone before you leave your car.

The driver who hit me wasn’t charged. How could he be blamed for hitting me? Honest mistake. I, of course, wasn’t charged. I was just walking. Just an unfortunate accident where luckily, no one was hurt.

But we all were lucky. One day later, a man was seriously injured when an SUV hit him a few blocks away from where the car hit me. The driver of the SUV left the road for some reason and drove into a building at O’Connor and Laurier. The man was on the sidewalk when the thing hit him. Had he been hit by a car, maybe he’d be in better shape. Another vehicle hit a woman on Bank Street in March, in a parking lot, killing her (CBC called the act of the vehicle driving into someone causing their death a “collision.”) Another SUV crashed into a different building in February, killing one man and sending three others to hospital.

Does the City of Ottawa have a mowing-people-down-with-cars fetish?

The only remnant I have from the hit is a few cuts on my left leg. Somewhere out there, a piece of my sock is hanging from a licence plate. And also somewhere out there, there’s a person who will be the next victim of Ottawa’s war on pedestrians. The clock counts down until their life is changed forever, or stolen. And Ottawa City Hall, I guess, will get another shot of endorphins.