While driving back to Blacksburg this afternoon, I got in what is perhaps best termed a “fender-bender.” The post-Thanksgiving rush was heavy, and the traffic stop-and-go. At one point, as a column of cars was accelerating from 0 to perhaps 15 mph, something happened up ahead such that we all had to slam on our brakes. All of the cars veered off to either side of the car in front of them to avoid a collision. I did the same, but didn’t manage to dodge the bullet, and the right corner of my car collided with the van in front of me. 
The van just has a couple of small dents in the back, but the right front corner of my car is pushed in, enough to bend the hood, the side panel, break the headlight, and crush the coolant tank. We got off the road, and did the whole information-swapping thing, worked with the state trooper, etc.
The folks that I collided with were really quite interesting. It was a family with two children and the wife’s father, all traveling home to Tennessee from a trip to Washington D.C.. The husband, Ming-Hui, is quite an accomplished surgeon and vascular researcher. He’s on the staff at the University of Tennessee. They moved to the United States four years ago. During our wait in the median of Interstate 81, Ming-Hui was telling me that he’s had to reprove himself as a doctor and scientist under U.S. standards, in the manner of somebody with no credentials at all. It would have been nice to have met them under better circumstances.
Ultimately, AAA had the car towed up to Charlottesville, and my sister left work in Blacksburg to wade through traffic to pick me up just north of Roanoke. Having plotted out an awkward-but-trafficless route that didn’t involve 81, I was finally deposited at my apartment seven hours after leaving C’ville.
I saw on the news this evening that in the same fifteen-mile-long traffic jam that I was in this afternoon, a tractor-trailer jackknifed, a half dozen collisions similar to mine occurred, and there was a four-car pileup. The fact that others made the same mistake that I did doesn’t make my rear-ending any better, but at least I know that I’ve got some company.