Those black markings made by a vehicle’s wheels when it comes to a shrieking stop on the road - what do you call them?
Skid marks. I always called them that - skid marks. When I was a kid riding bikes with my friends, we used to accelerate and then jam on the brakes to see who could make the longest skid marks. Later, when I began driving a car, I saw skid marks that went on over surreally long distances, or that curved over and went right off the side of the road, or that ended in a scatter of broken plastic and glass.
But in my novel, The Reconstructionist - which mentions a number of such marks - you might notice that they’re never called skid marks.
Instead, those black markings on the road are called tire marks (or tyre marks, in proper British English). When I first began working in the field of accident reconstruction I called them skid marks, and I was quickly corrected. It turns out that not every black mark on the roadway leading to a collision is a skid mark. Some are skid marks, but some are yaw marks, and some are a blend of skid and yaw marks. You have to do some analysis to figure out which is which. But tire mark safely covers all the possibilities.
What’s the difference between a skid mark and a yaw mark? A skid mark is generated by a tire that has stopped turning, usually because the driver is braking. But a yaw mark doesn’t require braking; instead it is caused by a vehicle that is turning (i.e., yawing) hard. While the vehicle turns, the wheels might still be spinning, but they’re turning in one direction while the vehicle is traveling in another direction, so the tires are scraped sideways over the road and leave a trail of black rubber behind.
It turns out that there’s a handy way to determine whether a mark was made by skidding or yawing. Car tires today, of course, are textured with patterns intended to improve traction in foul weather. These patterns will create striations in a tire mark, and when a vehicle skids to a stop without yawing, the striations will run in the same direction as the tire mark. But if the tire mark was created by a yawing vehicle, the striations will be perpendicular to the direction of the tire mark. The tire mark will look as if it were made by many small back and forth brush strokes.
You might suppose that you could also tell a skid mark from a yaw mark simply by whether the mark runs straight or curves. But, while it’s true that a yaw mark is more likely to curve while a skid mark is more likely to be straight, a vehicle can skid and yaw at the same time, and even a vehicle in pure yaw may move in a very broad arc if it is going at high velocity. In fact, if you can look at the striations in a tire mark and determine that it was in pure yaw, then you can calculate the vehicle’s speed by measuring the radius of the arc and assuming that the frictional forces between the tire and the road were equal to the centrifugal forces on the car. The broader the arc, the faster the vehicle was going.
My novel is about an accident reconstructionist, a man who has spent years analyzing accidents, trying to figure out how they happened. A reconstructionist’s work is full of examination of tiny detail, studying and analyzing tire marks, headlight bulbs, seatbelts, dents and scratch marks, in the service of recreating a few seconds surrounding an accident - an accident that changed lives forever. It always seemed to me that there was a strange juxtaposition between the reconstructionist’s obsessive recreation of a few seconds around a crash and the long arc of the actual lives affected by that crash - the dead, the injured, their family and friends.
The reconstructionist’s approach is analytic and scientific, but ultimately what the reconstructionist is trying to do is develop a narrative that describes the events immediately preceding a crash. So, a reconstruction is a kind of storytelling. But it is a curiously truncated kind of storytelling, a deformed storytelling, because it ignores the before and the after, and it ignores the stories of the lives involved. It examines a moment of crisis in extreme detail, but it decontextualizes the crisis from the humanity of the crisis.
There’s a danger in this; by ignoring the humanity involved in an accident, the work can eat at the soul. It’s a tension that I found fascinating, and that I struggled with when I worked in the field. And while The Reconstructionist is about a number of different things, I always had this tension in mind as I wrote - the juxtaposition of the analysis of a crash with its actual effect on human lives, and how the stress of that juxtaposition can create fissures and spaces in the lives of people absorbed in the reconstructionist’s work. How else, after all, to work out a problem of deformed storytelling, except by telling a story that explores it?
The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin is out now. Order it from rbooks, Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, or your local bookshop.
