Narrative from Reel’s class plus podcast!
Blue Light Special (Camilla and the Ditch)
She sat in the driver’s seat clutching the wheel and staring out of the rain streaked glass, numb. The impact wasn’t enough to shock her, but it was shocking nonetheless. “This is going to be a rough day,” she thought, watching the wipers go back and forth along the windows of the stalled car.
The trouble all started three months earlier. Sami Hoveyda, a nineteen-year-old USC student, got her first car, a white 1997 Corolla (which she fondly nicknamed ‘Camilla’). It was supposed to be the dream car, the one that would aid her in her commute between home and school. “That was the compromise,” Hoveyda said. “I would deign to live at home if the parents got me a car. It was a deal—or so I thought.”
It ran like a dream for the first couple of weeks. It was always the same—wake up early, take the eight o’clock traffic to the campus, go to class, then repeat the drive in the five o’clock rush. Day after day she ran the same routine, the car became as reliable as her morning cup of coffee. “I pretty much lived in it that first semester, it was my baby,” Hoveyda said.
It wasn’t until it was too late that she noticed the car could be bad for her nerves.
It was a Wednesday morning. The day was gloomy and grey, threatening clouds hovering overhead and waiting to spill out a torrential downpour. Hoveyda was running late that day, a detail she remembers distinctly.
“I had spilled coffee all over myself, I couldn’t find my books, I lost my keys—it was a nightmare, I debated skipping class,” she said. “Turns out I would have been a lot better off if I had.”
She finally hit the road around eight thirty in the morning. Traffic slowed to a crawl as rain fell in sheets, making the road impossible to see. She squinted through the streams of water as she inched her way towards school.
Suddenly her car seemed to lock up. “I knew something was wrong immediately,” she said. “My car shuddered, literally shuddered, and suddenly I couldn’t move the steering wheel. But the car was still moving.”
She panicked. “I had no clue what to do…my car started slipping off the road into a ditch and I couldn’t stop it. It was like time slowed down.”
Hoveyda clung to the wheel, trying in vain to turn it this way and that, but it was too late. Her car slid into a ditch five miles from school. She was stuck by exit 107, traffic backed up on the ramp as they watched her helplessly slide into the sludge.
“What’s is odd is that I wasn’t scared at all while it was happening; I was just REALLY embarrassed!” she said, looking back. “It was the slowest car crash in the history of the world! The whole time I was sliding, I just kept thinking, nnnoooooo! I was literally sliding into the ditch going one mile an hour.”
She sat in the ditch for a good twenty minutes, hands still clutching the steering wheel, wipers still going across her mud splattered windshield. She waited for her nerves to steady as she watched the approaching blue lights in her rearview mirror, dreading the conversation that was inevitable.
“It wasn’t just the speed of the accident that made it embarrassing, it was the fact that I would have to explain to the cops that I had no idea how to gain control of my car in that situation,” Hoveyda explained. “It’s so stereotypical, but I’m a girl—a girl who doesn’t know crap about cars.”
She was rescued from her humiliation when police finally blocked off the area around her car from the prying stares of passerby. The cops questioned her as a tow truck tried in vain to pull her car from the muddy ditch. It took over an hour to free the tiny Corolla as the tow truck pulled it inch by inch. “How fast were you going?” the tow truck driver, her savior, asked as they freed her car. “Two miles an hour,” she replied, face bright red.
It’s been a month since the accident, and Hoveyda is now the most knowledgeable girl she knows when it comes to cars. “That day really freaked me out,” she said. “If I had just known a little bit more about my car, or cars in general, I would have had no problem when the steering wheel locked and I never would have gone into that ditch.”
Every week since, she gets together with a mechanic friend and goes over the parts of her car. “I strategize now,” Hoveyda said. “I’m sick of being portrayed as this helpless little girl, it’s such a cliché and I got sick of it. I was so embarrassed that day, and I perfectly represented the stereotype of girls and cars.”
Hoveyda now spends a good deal of her time preaching the benefits of being car savvy to her girlfriends. “I’m now constantly telling them, you don’t know how to change a tire? Might want to learn that so you don’t wind up in a ditch one day,” she said. “I’ve become a public service announcement and I embrace it—I’m half college student, half preacher.”
