So I’m walking to work, as I usually do when the weather is nice like this.  During spring and fall here in the Mid-Atlantic states it’s usually neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for a good brisk walk in the morning and evening.  My path takes me through mostly residential neighborhoods, first my own, then after a small patch of strip shopping centers, Roland Park.  I turn a corner on University Parkway, and I’m on San Martin Drive, where the Space Telescope Science Institute is located.

San Martin Drive winds crookedly along the parameter of Wyman Park, which is just behind Johns Hopkins University.  The road itself is park like, with a mostly forested scenery all around it.  I walk down a tree shaded winding road, until I get to the Muller Building, where the Institute is located.  There is one final sharp bend in the road.   As I walk I suddenly find myself stepping over broken glass.  At some point in over the weekend, there was a bad accident there.

I walk through the debris field, looking around.  The point of impact is on my side of the road, near the curb.  There are tire marks gouging the grass.  It looks like the person coming the other way tried to go up onto the grass to avoid an oncoming car that had taken the curve way too fast and drifted over into their lane.  But tire marks gouging the grass from the other direction tell me that the avoidance maneuver was to no avail.  The oncoming car went up over the sidewalk too.  It would have been close to a direct head-on collision.

Glass is scattered all around the debris field.  There are bits and pieces of car here and there.  Parts of a headlight.  Parts of a bumper.  A bit of sideview mirror.  I look down and see a car’s horn sitting uselessly in the grass.  Ironic.  Next to it I see a little plastic part of a child’s toy.  A little red fireman’s helmet.

It’s easy to visualize the act of driving as an exclusively adult situation.  Children don’t get driver’s licenses.  You look around in traffic and you see only adults behind the wheel.  Oh, the occasional teen maybe.  But that’s a kid making the transition to adult.  And so you’re out there on the road and you’re seeing it as being you and all the other adults there on the road with you and it isn’t.  There are kids out there on the road with you.  Passengers in other people’s cars you mostly either can’t see or don’t notice because they’re not behind the wheel.  But they’re there.  You teach them not to play in the street.  The sight of a group of children playing games in the middle of a freeway would horrify an adult.  But the highways are full of children at any given time.  In the cars.  Blithely trusting the adults to take care of them as children will do.

Visualize yourself driving down a highway with children scattered around everywhere on it.  And they aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing.