I didn’t go to Colorado to ski. I went because my father, to help me conquer my longstanding fear of driving, talked me into attending a two-day class at the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in Steamboat Springs.
Everyone in my family — my parents, my brother, my husband, my sister and even her fiancé — came along. The first morning, we sat in a small classroom and listened as our instructor, Robert, drew on a whiteboard and told us what to expect. The course, he explained, was designed to make the cars slip and slide on ice and snow. It would force us, as drivers, to learn how to recover. The thought of it made me panicky, but everyone else in the room nodded as if that were a good thing. “If you listen to us,” Robert assured the class, “you’ll be fine.”
When I was 4, I was in a car accident. My father was driving our Volkswagen Rabbit while my mother held me on her lap on the passenger side. My brother was in a car seat in the back. (My sister wasn’t yet born.) We were outside Washington, and sleet began dropping from the sky in long, heavy pins. One moment we were following a logging truck; the next we were spinning into a ditch alongside the highway, where we landed upside-down. I remember the way the windshield looked — cracked but not shattered, a spider web of fractures — as a fellow motorist gently helped me from the car.
Cristina HenríquezCreditMichael LionstarNone of us were seriously hurt that day, but over the years the trauma transformed into anxiety, and recently that anxiety became disruptive. When it snowed, I often called another parent at the elementary school my daughter attends to ask if he or she wouldn’t mind driving my daughter the half-mile to kindergarten in the morning. I stared out the window at the snow covering the road and imagined the stop sign a block north where I might not be able to stop, the right turn where the car might fishtail, the small hill where, in the dark corners of my mind, the car would slide down, out of control, and crash into a tree, another car, who knows what.
That first morning in Colorado, after we left the classroom and headed out to the track, my heart was racing. I let my driving partner for the day, Michelle, get in the driver’s seat first. The instructors drove separate cars, and they communicated with us via two-way radios, first leading us around the track and then pulling off to coach us through exercises from the sidelines.
Michelle completed the exercises tentatively but competently. The instructors radioed that it was time to switch drivers. My stomach felt unsettled; my hands were sweating. By the time Robert said: “Cristina, your turn. Ease onto the track,” I was lightheaded. “You can do this,” Michelle said. I squinted at the road; its white lanes were barely differentiated from the equally white snow banks. I slowly pressed the gas. “Bring up your speed,” Robert intoned over the radio. I sped down a snow-covered hill. “Now brake! Brake!” I punched my foot against the brake pedal — once, and off, twice, and off, a third time, and off — as we had been instructed to do. I was supposed to then turn sharply to the right, around a cone. I pulled the wheel too hard and hit a patch of ice. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Michelle grab the armrest as the car spun almost 180 degrees. The world careened around us as I braced myself for a crash.
When the car came to a stop, I sat rigid, trying to catch my breath. Part of me wanted to get out and never drive again. How had I ever been talked into this? But I was sitting there, wasn’t I? Not a scratch on me, or Michelle, or the car. I had experienced one of my greatest fears — losing control of the car, but also of myself — and I had survived. I even felt a little exhilarated.
“Are you O.K.?” I asked Michelle.
She nodded. “Are you?”
I took a deep breath and put the car in reverse. I could do this. And the rest of that day, I did. I spun out a few more times, but I got better, enough so that a week later, when I arrived home and there was snow on the ground, I didn’t even think about calling another parent to drive my daughter to school.
But before all that, even before I nosed back up the hill again, I looked at Michelle. “I’m O.K.,” I said. And I was.
Original Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/magazine/need-for-reduced-speed.html