"Failure to Yield"

In my mind, the people who drive down North Territorial Road are evil. They meander down the road, without a care in the world, waiting to hit someone, to get away with it, to get something out of them. Everything about these people, from the motion in their wrist, turning the key to start the car, down to the careful pressure they apply to the accelerator, exudes a sentiment so strong that the air around them reeks of it: 

“I don’t care. And I don’t have to care.”

Of course, my cynical daydream that all people are evil does not extend into reality. I tell this to myself all the time.

“But how else am I supposed to accept the violence of it all?” my brain-monster answers,

 “What about all the injuries? The damage? The suffering that did not need to happen?” (Oh, my gosh, dude, could you be any more melodramatic?)

I think I find it easier to blame someone than to accept that awful things can happen and not be anyone’s fault.  

Well, except for the fact that it was technically my fault - according to the accident report, at least.

I grew up on a dirt road in a beautiful, rural-ish area a mile from one of Michigan’s best metroparks and 15 minutes from the nearest gas station. If you turn onto my road and continue past my house, you’ll find that the road slightly narrows, the trees become denser, and the houses gradually disappear. You’ll find yourself alone, except for the occasional driveway and the trees surrounding, composing an intricate canopy that speckles in little bits of light to illuminate the path ahead. 

If you go the other way, however – well, good luck. 

At the end of my road is an intersection. Here, my modest gravel street becomes a paved road, continuing straight on towards town. Isolating one side of my road from the other is North Territorial, a busy two-lane county road that meanders through miles and miles of trees and farmland at 55 miles per hour. In both directions from the intersection, about a quarter mile from it, the road shallowly dips. This, combined with plenty of trees and bushes, create truly awful visibility conditions for the yielding traffic on my road. Hung above the intersection is one solitary, flashing yellow light.  

Growing up, the school bus would cross the intersection every morning and every afternoon. Some days, there was lots of traffic at the intersection. Sometimes there was snow. Sometimes there was an SUV on its side, sprawled violently across the road with chunks of plastic and glass scattered everywhere, a child seat visible in the backseat through the busted rearview window.

“Everyone knows that this is just a bad intersection”,  the officers would say. 

Nothing would change.

After I got my license, I saved up to buy my own car: a crappy 2008 Dodge Avenger that I bought off my mom’s coworker’s daughter. I’d drive myself down the familiar roads every day to school and back. Having so much practice, I thought that out of everyone and anyone, the least likely person to get into an accident there would be me.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I was home for the summer and headed to my girlfriend’s house in Grand Rapids. Ready for the long drive, I had my music queued up, my gas tank (mostly) full, and my eyes glued to the road. I pulled up to the intersection and waited as the cars zipped by. 

“That side’s clear… is that side clear?... No, not yet…”

“What about now?... I guess I could go… I’m not going to risk it…”

“Jeez, why is everyone out today? Are you done yet?”

“What about now?”

I waited for well over 3 minutes while traffic continued to pass. Somewhere during that time, a red pickup truck pulled up behind me, waiting to turn right. It was one of those lifted ones with insanely tinted windows that just looked like it had an ego. I could sense that they were getting impatient, inching closer to my bumper every 15 seconds or so. 

“Dude, back up. I’m not going to launch myself into traffic. You can wait.”

The traffic seemed to lift up a bit. 

I checked left, and then right, and then again.

The red truck behind me decides that they are done waiting. 

The road was clear. I lifted my foot to gently press the accelerator.

The red truck pulls up next to me. I can’t see through their tinted windows. 

I has already begun to roll forward, checking for cars as I went. 

The red truck made a leisurely right-hand turn.

My foot was on the gas. I was in the intersection. I was crossing the road, a mile into my drive to Grand Rapids, I crossed that road all the time, everything was going to be fine, I waited for a large gap to go, I checked for cars religiously, the red truck blocked my view at the very last second but that wasn’t going to-

The world whipped around me.

I was on the shoulder of the wrong side of the road, facing the wrong direction.

Before that, a crunch.

After that, I took my foot off the gas.

Somewhere in there, tires screeching. 

Sometime at the beginning, the sound of the red truck flooring it as they fled the scene.

In the end, my phone blaring the emergency noise, accompanied by the cheerful song that continued to play through my car speakers.

Well, f*ck.

I was okay, the car was not. I was able to drive it a mile back down my road to my house, where it sat until someone took it away for scrap.

The police officer that showed up to the scene issued me a ticket for “failure to yield”.

“Everyone knows that this is just a bad intersection”, he said, before he handed it to me.

I was pretty young the first time I worried that someone nearby might be dying. Someone just like me, a girl in elementary school, perhaps, could be hit in a car crash, she could be stuck in her seat, she could be bleeding out in the middle of the pavement. 

Those dreams never really stopped haunting me. 

After I got in the crash, they only got worse.

See, the difference between what I knew as a kid and what I know now is who lives on the same road as me.

I went to school in an affluent school district. Known at the time for its quality education, my parents chose the town to “give us a chance in life”. After a few years of renting, in 2009, we closed on a cheap house with a USDA-subsidized mortgage. I was 5. The families of my peers had money, like, three-international-vacations-a-year, our-maid-comes-on-Fridays, unlimited-skiing-in-the-winter kind of money. They liked to pretend that their affluence was, somehow, just middle class, and they regarded anyone poorer as stupid dirt. 

The kids who rode the same bus as me were regarded by my peers as largely undesirable. Some were known as “rowdy”, others “gross”, others “weird” or ignored. Our bus driver lived along our route. Somehow, it never dawned on me until after I graduated high school that we had more in common than any of us thought. We treated each other like sh*t, judging and looking down upon each other, just like the rich kids did to us. But we were all the same. 

We were all stupid dirt.

Where I grew up, no one cares when bad things happen to stupid dirt. It makes sense. Low-income areas have higher incidences of traffic crashes, injuries and deaths, largely due to poorer infrastructure. In other areas, intersections like mine have stoplights, not a useless flashing yellow. 

In my area, the only people who get listened to are the ones with money. They can sue. 

So now, when I hear of a crash near me, I know that no one will help, and I know why. 

So consider it my worst nightwear when, in the fall of 2024, I get an ominous Snapchat from my mom. She sent me a picture, with no context, of a silver minivan on its side in the middle of the road with a blond-haired guy standing off to the side. 

“Okay”, I think, “Weird... And random.” 

I tried to move on with my day. I honestly thought that someone else had gotten into a crash at the intersection, which is depressingly commonplace, and my mom had taken it upon herself to send me a picture of it. When my girlfriend saw the picture, she pointed out one small, extremely significant detail: The guy in the picture was, undeniably, my younger brother. 

So, the minivan, on its side, with glass everywhere, was my family’s old, silver minivan.

I heard the story in bits and pieces.

“I pulled up to the intersection, and I hate that intersection, so I try to avoid it if at all possible”, he said. “So if there are lot of cars going by, I turn right and go the longer way. But there were literally no cars out. So I said ‘fine, I’ll go across’.”

He was driving to water polo practice. He had turned 16 a few months prior, but had plenty of experience with crossing the intersection. In part due to my own accident, he was always extremely cautious.

“I have a process every time I go to cross. I pull up, and I’m checking for cars. I come to a stop, and I fully scan for cars, looking left and right multiple times. If there are cars, I wait for them to pass and start the process over. When it’s clear, I check again. I start to pull forward, and I check again, then I start driving through the intersection, and as I’m going, I’m still checking just in case.”

I’d heard of his process before, and I always thought it was borderline excessive.

“So when I pulled up to the intersection, there was another car across the intersection from me. I had waited for cars, done all my checks, and the lady in the car waved me forward, indicating that it was clear, and she wanted me to go first. So I checked again, and I went.”

At first, this was the last thing he could remember. 

“I was 90% of the way across the intersection when the car goes spinning, flying faster than a roller coaster. Then it bumps into the car across the intersection from me, tips to the side, stays like that for a second, and then completely falls over. I was sideways, in the air, and all I could think was ‘what the f*ck, what the f*ck.’”

He was stuck like that until someone from the tractor shop nearby crawled through the busted glass and cut my brother out of his seatbelt with a knife.

“The person that hit me had to have been going well over 75 miles per hour. She just kept saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so glad he’s okay. I just got off work, I was trying to get home. I’m so glad he’s okay.’ It was like she knew she had done something wrong.”

The lady across the intersection from my brother had her account taken as a witness to the crash. “I had absolutely no idea that car was there”, she said. The accident was recorded as no fault. Since there are no cameras around in the middle of nowhere, where the stupid dirt lives, there was no proof that the other driver was speeding. Our insurance refused to cover anything.

At this point, my mom had witnessed two of her three kids get hit less than a mile from her house, in situations that were arguably not their fault. So she tried to do something about it. She filed a complaint with the Washtenaw County Road Commission, explaining the awful visibility, the reckless driving and speeding of the through traffic, and the countless accidents we had witnessed while living there.

They dismissed her. Their official reply read something like:

“Thank you for your inquiry regarding the intersection at x Road and North Territorial. A board of engineers has reviewed the circumstances and does not find reason for any changes at this time. We will continue to monitor traffic conditions in the future.”

No one cares when the stupid dirt gets hurt. They can’t sue, and the County will face no consequences.

My brother and I are far from the only people to find ourselves in this situation. Over the past 5 years alone, not including the current year of 2024, eleven traffic crashes were reported at my intersection. Of these eleven, eight of them were cars “attempting to cross North Territorial” that “failed to yield” to east- or westbound traffic. 

I’ve witnessed at least two additional crashes that happened this year, whose reports have not yet been sanitized and released to the public. 

The kicker is that it wouldn’t take barely anything to address the situation. There’s already a blinking yellow at the intersection, so the mast arms are already there, the wiring is already there, and installation would shut the intersection down for barely any time at all. The materials themselves would likely cost under $10,000. But they don’t want to hear it.

I can’t help but wonder, how long until it’s a teacher? A school bus? Or, god forbid, a rich person? Will it matter then?

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that anything will change until something like that does happen. Until then, the County will dismiss our concerns, the lawyers of the squeaky wheels will get the grease, and we’ll be left to fend for ourselves, out in the middle of the pavement, surrounded by broken glass.

“Thank goodness it wasn’t worse”, most of us will say. Others have not been that lucky.

“Everyone knows that this is just a bad intersection”,  the officers will say, handing over a ticket for “failure to yield”, sometimes accompanied by a harsh warning to “clear the intersection properly”.

Nothing will change.

(Unless, of course, someone can get their head out of their ass enough to give us a stoplight.)