Urban Jaguar

A Story by r.r.walker

This is a personal essay writing assignment.

Once, when I was a broke 20 something, trying to scrape by on minimum wage in Portland, OR, I had the misfortune of getting into a car accident. It wasn’t the first and unfortunately not the last but this one was certainly one of the more memorable ones.

It was a typical rainy Portland day and I was tooling down the road minding my own business when a Jaguar leapt right out in front of me! Not the animal of course; the car. The very expensive kind of car that I absolutely did not want to hit under any circumstances. I slammed on the brakes, turning the wheel toward the curb, away from the impending doom that was lined up in front of me praying to hit anything, a garbage can, a telephone pole, anything but that rare, beautiful creature in front of me. My insignificant right rear quarter panel, spun around on the slick, wet concrete and collided squarely with his vastly superior left rear quarter panel. I instantly assumed I was at fault.

Now, I was always taught that when you have an accident, you pull over immediately and exchange information-that’s just what you do. But for some reason, he wasn’t stopping! I angrily gestured for him to pull over. He saw me but still he kept moving...I was furious! I thought for sure he was planning to take off on me. I gestured again, this time pointing violently at the spot I wanted him to stop at like one does to a misbehaving dog that’s not listening. Finally he stopped with some excuse about finding just the right spot and we both jumped out of our cars yelling like 5th graders suffering an injustice on the playground.

“You pulled right out in front of me!”

“Well, you were going kind of fast.”

“I was going the speed limit!”

And that’s pretty much all I remember of the exchange.

Our cars were still drivable so we exchanged insurance information and we both went our separate ways. At the time, I was only carrying liability insurance and I was sure it wasn’t going to cover that. I convinced myself it was going to cost me years of blood, sweat, and tears to fix his money machine and I could just forget about repairing mine. It was a disaster, but I knew I had to own up to my mistake.

I filled out the accident report and sent it off anxiously awaiting my guilty verdict and my penalty. You can imagine my relief when I discovered the little diagram I had drawn on the accident report was of him making an illegal left turn in front of me! I was off the hook, but the Jaguar owner received a traffic violation and he even had to pay to fix up my little clunker-mobile.

To this day, I am extra leery of Jaguars and I always watch them just a bit more closely when they are near in case they decide to pounce, just like the real ones.