Accident in Romania Jerry R. Hobbs I was in Iasi, in northeastern Romania, the last week in July 1999 giving four lectures at a summer school on computational linguistics. On Tuesday I stayed up til 4 in the morning at a disco with everybody. On Wednesday, I gave two one-and-a-half hour lectures, the first at 8:30 and the second at 2. I went back to my hotel in between to lie down, and on the way back I had some street food for a fast lunch. I did all right until half way through my second lecture, when I suddenly didn't believe one of my examples, broke out into a sweat, took a swig from my bottle of soda, and then didn't notice as I continued lecturing that I was pouring the soda out on the floor until a man in the front row leapt to its rescue. A little more semi-rest in the late afternoon before going out for a long dinner, and then a long night lying awake with a bad stomach from the street food at lunch. So on Thursday I wasn't feeling great to begin with. I skipped breakfast because I doubted I could keep it down. I gave my last lecture at 8:30 and after that I went to pick up my rental car. My plan was to drive to the Danube Delta, a unique natural and ethnic region. But the Daewoo Cielo (a decent car) that I had reserved was gone -- one of the employees was driving it that day, and later that day, I'm happy to report, smashed it up. The agency had only two cars. So they gave me the lower quality car, a Daewoo Tico, a top-heavy tin can on toy wheels. Back at my hotel I ate a Power Bar (carried for such emergencies), my only food for the day, and lay down for 10 minutes, and then was on my way. I thought about stopping for caffeine and carbo, but 150 km south of Iasi, I left the primary road and got onto a secondary road, and 30 km after that I forked onto a tertiary road, and there was no place to stop. But the day was clear, beautiful, and full of sunshine, and the road a narrow, tree-lined lane that skirted valleys with sweeping vistas of fields of corn and sunflowers. About 2 km south of the village of Cuca, three cars were approaching me. The middle one, a yellow vehicle with its headlights on, suddenly pulled out into my lane, about 50 meters ahead of me. In fact it looked like he was about to make a left turn, except there was nothing to turn left into. I braked and swerved out of the way and avoided him. But there was no room on the road to swerve into, so I swerved back and saw myself heading straight for the third car. I swerved out of his way and avoided him. There was quite a bit of gravel on the road, and my car's toy wheels couldn't hold it, so by this time the car was out of control. Several more large swerves and a 180 and then I slid into the embankment between two trees and landed on my side. There's another possible world in which I hit a tree and am now dead. In that world I didn't write this story. I wasn't exactly dazed. I could plan one task at once -- undo seatbelt, turn off engine, open far door, climb up and out, find glasses (the last two with the help of the twenty or so locals who had gathered) -- and I was completely passive once I emerged -- I'd do anything I was told. The only damage to me was a slight bruise on my knee and a crick in the neck that went away in a couple of days. It was really quite gentle as accidents go, no worse than your average amusement park ride. I have a very warm feeling toward seat belts now. The car was pretty banged up though. Before I knew what they were doing, the locals had righted the car, pulled the fender out from the tire, got the driver-side door open, lifted the hood, reconnected the battery cable, and started the car. I was able to drive one kilometer back to the top of a hill at the beginning of the village of Cuca, and then coast downhill the last kilometer to Cuca's police station, although since the windshield was smashed, every time the car hit a bump, I'd get a sprinkling of glass dust. I thought I was in for a long, hard night when I was taken to the only building I could make a phone call from and saw the old-fashioned plug-in switchboard. But I finally got through to one of the organizers of the summer school, Dan Tufis, and he set things in motion. I sat on a bench in front of the policeman's cottage and watched children and old women herd ducks past. After three hours two policemen and the mayor of the village finally showed up, and I was able to make my report. A picture is worth a thousand words, and when I drew a picture of how the car swerved and flipped over, the policeman wrote a thousand words. By that time a friend of a friend of Dan's had driven up from Galati, the nearest big town, to help me out. (This was a study in contrasts. He was a tall, slim man, a sharp dresser, with quick movements, driving an SUV and carrying a mobile phone, in contrast to the overweight, sluggish, uniformed policemen with their office phones that you had to crank. Romania of the '90's meets the Ceaucescu era. The first thing he did was drive his SUV to the top of the nearest hill to get a good signal on his mobile phone so he could call Dan to report that he had arrived.) He read over the report before I signed it, to make sure I was not admitting guilt to any major crimes. I think Dan was more concerned that I was in the hands of the dreaded Romanian police than that I had had an accident, but I was a celebrity for them -- the first American ever to have an accident in their village -- and they treated me quite well. They fed me dinner and even offered to put me up for the night. Then Dan's friend's friend drove me to Galati. On the way there, he called Dan on his cell phone, and Dan said he had arranged for me to be checked out by a doctor there. He wanted to make sure I was okay. The two Dans, Dan Tufis and the other summer school organizer Dan Cristea (every Romanian man is named "Dan"), had been very protective toward their foreign invitees. I can understand this. They are trying to run a modern conference in an underdeveloped, often corrupt, and sometimes dangerous country. Several years ago I was at a conference in Mexico City, and I think the organizers were petrified that something bad would happen and then appalled as attendees had their purses slit on the subway, were shaken down by the police on the streets, and were beaten and robbed in taxicabs. Wednesday night I had sat in Dan C's office telephoning hotels in Bucharest trying to find a single room with bath for about $30 a night while he sat on the sidelines shaking his head and urging me to stay in the Hilton for $269. The Dans were very nervous when they heard I wanted to drive in Romania. I dismissed their concerns; I had driven in Japan, Java, Cairo, Latvia, Rome, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and the swamps in the interior of Brazil, and I didn't think that Romania would present any fresh challenges. In general, I tried to explain to them, I like to experience a culture unmediated by someone who knows it better than I. But of course, say what you might about random, my accident had completely undercut my position. So when Dan T asked me to see a doctor, what could I say? I knew I was okay. But Dan had done a lot for me, so just to allay his fears, I agreed to it. (Also, of course, I didn't want to wake up the next morning dead of a brain hemmorage, whose only symptom was my passivity after the accident.) But when I started to enter the hospital in that town, I suddenly thought. "I'm walking into a Romanian hospital!" I don't like hospitals in the best of times. They are full of sick people, and many of those sick people are contagious. And a Romanian hospital is like every other Romanian building; it is dimly lit and the plaster is falling off the walls. The doctors had old torn lab coats, and there were bodies abandoned on stretchers in the hallways, maybe alive, maybe dead. As we walked up six flights of stairs, I grasped the bannister for support and my finger touched a wad of gum. I thought, "That was put there by a sick person, and it has all those bacteria stuck in the gum just waiting for a finger to come along and release them." As we finally found the doctor, I thought, "No way are they going to stick me with a needle!" As it was, they pushed my ribs and stomach a bit to test for sharp pains, and I did a little dance to show them all my limbs were working. I didn't mention the bruise on my knee, or my stiff neck, or my RSI in my right forearm that might have been aggravated climbing out of the car, or my two bum knees, or my stiff shin muscles from the disco. I abandoned my plans to see the Danube Delta, figuring I had already had my Romanian adventure, and I spent a relaxing weekend in Bucharest. I flew back to California on Sunday, and my suitcase flew back on Monday.