By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I could have died last week picking up a hitchhiker, but not how you might think.

She was about 40 years old, and she was sitting outside a gas station with her stuff and her dog. Her face was covered with tattoos. She was headed to Oregon, but first she needed a ride to the Health Department in Little Rock. She called herself a “traveller.”

The Health Department was at 3915 W. 8th Street. With my phone almost dead, I decided to take the exit off I-30 and look for the street number rather than use the power-sapping map. But the numbers were nowhere near 3915. Driving through downtown, I keyed in the address, thinking the location must be on the other side of the Capitol. Instead, the phone’s map showed it was farther west and on the other side of I-630.

That was confusing, and meanwhile my phone had dwindled to about 1 percent battery power. I kept looking at the screen as I took the entrance ramp and began to merge onto I-630. I was transfixed by that map and the urgency of that 1 percent, until my passenger calmly said, “There’s a car parked on the side of the road.”

I looked up, and it was several hundred yards ahead, a distance I would have covered in seconds. My lane was merging into the one to its left, and I was drifting in that direction, my mind on autopilot. But if I’d continued in the path I was traveling, I could have plowed into that car.

This was not quite a brush with death. Maybe I would have looked up and completed the merge into the other lane in time. No doubt she would have warned me again before impact. Still …

This happened on Tuesday. On Sunday, I was driving with my family in a wooded area south of Arkadelphia. I wasn’t using the phone, but my mind was focused too much on what was happening inside the car. Suddenly, I saw a deer soaring through the air to the left of my windshield, and then BAM! The windshield held, but it was smashed badly enough that glass sprinkled onto my lap, and the car suffered other damage. Had I been fully aware of all my surroundings, I might could have slowed enough to avoid the collision. (My insurance agent says you should not swerve to avoid a deer.)

That’s two incidents in five days where the outcome could have been really bad. Meanwhile, as reported in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, on Thursday a 24-year-old woman died when she rammed into a parked tractor-trailer on an I-30 off-ramp leading into Malvern. The accident occurred just before 9 p.m., but the conditions were clear and dry. I don’t mean to blame her, but I’m guessing she was at least somewhat distracted. Unlike me, she didn’t have anyone to warn her of the parked vehicle.

She was at least the 356th person to die in an auto accident in Arkansas this year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 37,461 died nationwide in 2016, which was 5.6 percent more than the previous year. Distraction-related deaths supposedly fell 2.2 percent to 3,450, but I don’t buy that number. Fully attentive drivers can avoid most accidents. I report on the trucking industry extensively and have talked to award-winning drivers who have traveled millions of miles without an accident. They do this by staying always fully engaged.

After the September 11 attacks killed 3,000 people, Americans have spent trillions of dollars, fought two wars, and changed our expectations about privacy and security. Arkansas schools are spending millions hardening themselves against potential school shooters, even at the expense of academics.

While these threats are changing our way of life, many of us are absent-mindedly inserting a bullet into the chamber, spinning it, and then pointing the gun at our head every day. We do this by messing with our phones, fiddling with our radio, and eating lunch as we pilot two-ton machines traveling 80 miles an hour on streets crowded with other distracted drivers.

I write this column to point out the potentially fatal absurdity of this and, hopefully, to solidify my determination to change. It might save lives, human or deer, if I start paying better attention. And if I don’t, then if I ever become a highway statistic, at least my loved ones will know why.