The rules of the road change, but not the rules of adolescence. Some teenagers will slip behind the wheel of a car and survive the years safely, and some will not. At Loyola High School the other night, hundreds of tearful mourners gathered to remember 17-year-old Dennis Woolford, who died in a car crash with another teenager on Jarrettsville Pike, in Phoenix.
As The Examiner’s Jason Flanagan reported, Woolford apparently crossed a double-yellow line in his 1997 BMW and crashed head-on into a 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee. (see baltimoreexaminer.com for Flanagan’s report). Bundles of flowers now mark the spot. The other driver, Gabrielle Payne, also 17, survived. She is lucky. But she is also part of some breathtaking statistics across Maryland.
A year ago, 18,993 teenagers were involved in car crashes across the state. More than half happened in the Baltimore metro area. Since 2000, there have been more than 180,000 crashes across the state involving teens.
A year ago, 112 of these kids were killed in those crashes. Since 2000, there have been more than 1,000 teen fatalities. Since 1994, more than 1,700.
Across the nation, it is consistently reported that driving is the No. 1 cause of death among teenagers. In 2005, the last year for which figures are available, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration reported 2,598 adolescent drivers were killed. Another 1,222 teenage passengers were killed with teenagers behind the wheel.
The teenage-driver rate of fatalities is roughly two and a half times higher than drivers 30 to 59, and the teenage-passenger rate of fatalities is roughly 10 times higher than older drivers.
It goes on despite lectures from parents, and it goes on despite supervised driving programs and school safe-driving programs and statewide bans on teenagers using cell phones while they drive, and it goes on despite improvements in car safety.
It happens now, and it happens across the generations.
In their hearts, all adolescents believe themselves indestructible. They hear the lectures, which become a blur, and they imagine the tragedies will always involve some other, unluckier people.
Sometimes, surviving the teenage years seems strictly a roll of the dice.
You want examples, here’s one straight from the annals of grand adolescent stupidity: It’s late one winter night a lot of years ago. My mother informs me I can drive her ancient Plymouth to high school the next day — the only time, all year, I get such a privilege.
The next morning, as my mother sleeps in, I head for the car. But there’s trouble. There’s been an overnight ice storm. It takes several minutes to pull the door open, and then it’s a struggle to get the motor running.
I can’t get the ice off the windshield, or the side windows, or the rear window. The defroster doesn’t help even slightly, nor does several minutes of hacking away with an ice scraper. The ice is simply too thick. And the side windows are frozen shut.
Inside the car, I am in complete darkness — with the exception of a tiny opening, no larger than a donut hole, in the center of the windshield.
And that’s enough for me. This chance to drive a car to school, and not wait for the cross-town bus, or stand in the cold and hitch-hike, is irresistible.
So I’m driving from my house in northwest Baltimore across town to City College. In complete darkness — except for that tiny donut hole in the center of my windshield, through which I’m leaning over to peer through.
On Liberty Heights Avenue, I pick up a classmate. Being a perceptive fellow, he notices in an instant that we have no concept of the world outside the car. He has an idea. While I continue driving, he holds his cigarette lighter up to the windshield, attempting (without success) to melt the windshield ice this way.
And this is how these two geniuses make our way across town: down Liberty Heights to the old Baltimore Junior College, across Park Circle and the 41st Street Bridge, down to University Parkway and up 33rd Street.
And it does not dawn on us, for even a moment, that we are in the slightest danger. We are teenage boys; we are indestructible.
The memory of that morning has stayed with me through the years. Once, I saw it as an amusing example of my adolescent fearlessness and joy of life. Now I realize the stupidity and blind luck involved. Our adolescent bodies are newly muscular, which is never to be confused with indestructible.
Flowers lie against a guardrail on Jarrettsville Pike north of Blenheim Road, where Dennis Woolford, 17, was killed in an auto accident. — Kristine Buls/Examiner
