The call of the bile.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Out Back - Analysis of cell phone usage and traffic accidents - Brief Article

For all I knew, it could have been lightning. One moment, I'm sitting behind another car, waiting for the light to turn green. It does, and just as I enter the intersection and reach for the gearshift, there's a violent impact, a loud crunching sound. My left temple smacks the door glass, and my head slams back. The seat belt cuts into my chest. Then silence. The nose of a white car is rammed into the side of my pickup, its driver still holding a cell phone to her ear.

My own ears are ringing. My glasses are missing, but I do one of those silly Hollywood double takes. As she gets out and walks toward me, I catch a snippet of her ongoing conversation: "It wasn't my fault ..."

I grew up country. Fast cars were a way of life for me and my friends. I wrecked my old man's Ford when I was 14. I crawled out, unscathed, and sat in the dark as steam hissed from the radiator. I remember moonlit nights and back roads and what cops wrote up as "engaging in organized speed competition" -- on the rare occasions they caught one of us. I learned to do bootlegger spins in the pasture in my big brother's used police-special Ford. But somewhere along the line, it sank in that driving was serious business.

That might have been the night of the prom, when Sherman -- we called him Squirrely -- wrapped his Chevy around a poplar. I was there on the auditorium steps when they told his girlfriend. I can still hear her screams. (4) Or the day my cousin Allen was killed driving to school. Or the night Noland, my buddy's little brother, and his girl died on the way to Lynchburg. A woman going the wrong way on the four-lane hit his Corvette head on. She was drunk.

We've got a new menace on the roads nowadays, people just as dangerous as my hoodlum pals and I were. They take driving far less seriously. That occurred to me after my recent accident, which turned out to be minor: maybe $4,000 in damages to both vehicles and a few bruises. That rogue is...