Happy Little Accidents

“I was an accident.”

That sentence bothers me. I’ve heard a few people say that about themselves, and whenever I do it’s like I’m hearing, “I’m not supposed to exist, but I do. (shrug)” Even if someone refers to themself as a love child, at least that has a positive tone. But an accident? That wants of esteem. Why do accidents have to be so negative?

Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Random House © 2001) has this definition for accident: “an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap: automobile accidents.” Oh dear. I’ll pass on my daily serving of accident variety number one, thank you. Webster’s fourth definition is a bit kinder—“chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident.”—but still is nothing to be particularly fond of. The fifth definition is a pallid stretch for optimism—“a fortuitous circumstance, quality, or characteristic: an accident of birth.” It still lacks positivity anything close in strength to the negativity of the first definition. If someone wants to spin being an accident, the best option they have by the books is to say they were a fortuitous circumstance. Gross.

I want a happier definition of accident.

We Westerners love to gloat in things being good because we planned them to be so and so they were. Yeah right. Some people are good at planning their best outcomes, but I am not one of those people. (The events of 2020 would suggest that modern Westerners are overwhelmingly inept at crafting their wanted outcomes, but I digress.) Much of the good I experience has come seemingly by chance. Not totally random chance, as if I’ve been the recipient of whatever entropic goodness is left in the universe. No, I’ve become a happy practitioner of accidentalism.

Let’s have a go at finding a better definition for accident.

I was driving back home from a wedding in Arkansas this summer and started developing a migraine. On the drive over to Arkansas I had stopped at Natchez Trace State Park to take a break, so I decided to stop there again on my way back. It wasn’t too far ahead from where I was. It’d be a good time to stop and take a break. Instead of going back to the same spot I had on my drive to Arkansas, though, which would have been south of I‑40, I decided to take a gander at what of the park lay north of I‑40. That was the first time I crossed common sense: instead of going back to where I knew, I drove to where I didn’t.

As I was driving north along the highway off I‑40, I noticed a regular pattern of dirt roads cutting west, figured they must lead somewhere, and decided to take the third dirt road I came to. Just to remind you, it was dark already, I had a migraine, and I just took an unmarked dirt road not knowing where it would lead. This was not the best time to go off-roading in new territory. And that’s exactly what I did.

After creeping along the grassy dirt road around some corners and deeper into the woods, I came upon a puddle. I stopped, squinted at the puddle, and figured it wasn’t that deep. Fifteen seconds later I changed my mind when I opened my driver-side door and it descended into the muddy little puddle at a fifteen degree angle. I was stuck. And I was sunk, too. By definition, I had just experienced an accident: it was unfortunate, occurred unintentionally (and neglectfully), and resulted in maladjustment of my front-left axle. But that’s not where the story gets good.

For all the reporting we hear of how phone apps are tracking our location without our permission, I hadn’t heard of how unable 911 is to locate you even when you give them your explicit location. My phone still had data, so I looked up Natchez Trace State Park’s emergency number and called them first. The park service swore I wasn’t in their park system. I’m not even sure I was in the same state as the park service I’d called. Next I called a local non-emergency number, but they didn’t know where I was, even with me giving them directions to my location and GPS coordinates. They told me to call 911 so I would be routed to a local dispatcher who could track my location using my cell phone. I had to do some fast talking when I made that third call. Emergency operators don’t like being told you’re calling 911 but not in an emergency. They gave me yet another telephone number to call and told me to get off the line. Finally, on the fourth call (to the same non-emergency service as before it turned out), someone finally thought they knew where I was. Apparently calling 911 had activated GPS reporting on my phone for them to see. On top of that, I gave the dispatcher my own GPS coordinates, told them what directions I had taken to where I got stuck, and then they said someone close would be out shortly.

Then I waited.

Forty-five minutes later I got a call. “We can’t find you. Can you come out to the main road?”

Kids, let this be a lesson.

1. Don’t go off-roading in the dark.
2. Don’t drive through mystery puddles.
3. Don’t drive through mystery puddles off-road in the dark.
4. Always carry an extra pack of beef jerky in case you get stranded and need a midnight snack.
5. Pack a flair gun. Better yet, just carry a whole bunch of fireworks right next to your spare gas can in the trunk.
6. Don’t count on your phone to save you if you get lost. GPS coordinates are great, except when emergency services doesn’t know how to reliably use them.

I walked out to the road and found the patrolling officer. He followed me back to my car, politely suppressed his obvious wondering what some idiot was doing back-road in the middle of nowhere at 1 am, and broke policy for common sense and used a tow strap to tug my car backwards two feet and save me from the puddle.

I still had my migraine, but the officer (politely) thought I was an idiot, so I figured it best to gratefully drive back toward civilization and leave the scene of the muddy little puddle behind.

Most people, at this point in time, would be unimaginably stressed and relieved to be over with the fiasco. Not me. I was delighted. I had just had a happy little accident. Why was it a happy little accident? Well, for starters, I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t stranded all night out in the cold (as I was another time when I locked my keys in my car the same night that riots broke out in Nashville and every wrecker service closed early.) There wasn’t any permanent damage to my car, either, which certainly helped. (The axle stopped creaking a few months later. I assume it’s back to normal now.) But I was glad with more strength than the negatives of the accident I’d just had. I wasn’t just pallidly satisfied with something like Webster’s definition number five of accident. I was far happier after the incident than I was before it happened. For one, I had been distracted from my migraine long enough to not notice it at its worse, which was the whole point of the excursion. I also relish in emergency situations that are rather insane but overwhelmingly inconsequential, and getting to figure out how emergency services (don’t quite) work was thrilling. But most invaluably, I had just learned a solitary place of retreat.

It’s one thing to go camping in the woods and then have five campers park in all the spots right next to you. It’s another thing to go camping in the woods and know that even if you call 911 and give them your GPS coordinates, you’re on your own. City dwellers be terrified. This introverted little Sacagawea just found his happy hiding ground.

Happy little accidents aren’t about the tragedy or misfortune of a single event. They’re about what can be learned and gained when the best of plans go out the window, when routine gets disrupted, and when the ensuing disruption invited you to experience something new. When you experience something unplanned ten, fifty, two hundred times, accidentalism becomes a habit of breaking into parts of the world right in front of you you otherwise may not have known were there. Many accidents aren’t that interesting, but some of them are, and just a few can be valuable enough to make the practice of accidentalism as a whole worthwhile.

I remember watching The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross when I was a kid. Whenever he’d put some green on his brush, you knew he was about to paint some “happy little trees.” Well, I may not be painting happy little trees, but I know how to have happy little accidents, and I think they’re just as beautiful.