A couple learn something about driving--and themselves--in the aftermath of an accident.

“Hello. My name is Lynn, and I’m a passenger.”

There, I said it.

On the Road of Life, according to Volkswagen, “there are drivers and passengers. . . .”

The implication is clear: Drivers are exciting people--gutsy, take-charge types. Passengers are wusses.

So it’s hard to admit you’re just along for the ride.

But some of the rides I’ve been on have been pretty wild. I’ve survived two rollovers: one in a Volkswagen Bug when the driver was blinded by oncoming headlights; another, 30 years later, in an SUV derailed by Mother Nature.

Sometimes no one is in control, and we are all just passengers.

Take the most recent accident, for example. It was just before Christmas 1998 in Yosemite. My husband (the driver) and I spent the day plowing through a blinding snowstorm, and by late night we thought conditions were pretty good: The road was clear, the night was starry, and we were tooling along in four-wheel drive. Our trusty 1992 Mazda Navajo was heading slowly but surely for the Ahwahnee Hotel, where we had always wanted to stay.

One minute, Tina Turner was belting out “Proud Mary” on the radio and we were about to round a gentle curve.

The next, we were hanging from our seat belts upside down in a tree. That was the view from the driver’s-side window. Out the broken passenger-side window, all I could see was snow and dirt from the hillside.

The motor was running, the headlights were on, Tina was still singing. But the world was topsy-turvy.

We had hit black ice, one of nature’s little reality checks.

It all happened so fast. I had no time to issue my trademark “Eh, eh, eh!” passenger-to-driver warning. When it became clear that we weren’t going to make the turn, I looked over at the driver. He was turning the wheel, but nothing was happening. All four wheels had lost traction.

“OK,” I thought. “We’re going to hit that snow marker and stop in the snowbank.” But we kept right on going in slow-mo.

“We’re rolling over!” I thought in disbelief. And we did. But I don’t actually remember it. There was just a feeling of sliding. I don’t recall any noise either.

It was otherworldly, almost dreamlike. I saw myself in the situation, but I didn’t feel as if it was really me. Dream Me spoke to Dream Driver. We established that we were both OK and marveled about it. Then we realized the truck was wrecked and we felt awful.

*

Self-preservation kicked in. Thinking of all those action films in which the car runs off the road, rolls over and bursts into flame, the driver reached out and turned off the engine.

I remember telling him I was scared as we hung there like rag dolls. His matter-of-fact answer--”I don’t blame you”--cut off any panic attack. Sort of like your grandmother saying “Oh! Look what you did to my stairs!” to startle you out of crying after you took a header.

But for a passenger, it wasn’t a good moment. The driver wasn’t being, well, driverly. He wasn’t taking charge; he didn’t have a plan. That was scarier than being stuck in the snow in an upside-down SUV.

Action seemed to be called for, so I announced I was going to release my seat belt. I dropped to the roof-cum-floor of the truck, landing on hands and knees, and began crawling through broken glass into the back-seat area so he could drop down too.

I spit out what must have been a piece of window glass--I thought I had chipped a tooth, and it made me angry. But at least I wasn’t scared anymore.

Then I thought of a plan. It was a simple one: Find the cell phone, dial 911.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Being in an upside-down vehicle is disorienting. Paper was everywhere--maps, business cards and seven years of gas receipts. It was hard to maneuver with the seats hanging down from the “roof.” And the glove compartment didn’t seem to be in the right place. When we managed to open it, the cell phone fell out. When we turned it on, it said “no service.”

But looking around, we realized we weren’t actually hung up in the tree. Rather, we were lodged in a V-shaped space between the hillside and the pine. The Navajo’s wheels pointed straight up; the roof was about three feet above the sharply sloping ground.

As I crawled around finding his snow boots, down jacket and gloves, the driver made a comeback: He began tapping out SOS on the horn. In the crumpled rear end of the truck, I made a series of sad discoveries. We didn’t have road flares, and the earthquake emergency kit (with its solar blankets, water and survival food) was missing.

We didn’t even have a flashlight. Luckily, the light from the headlights bounced off the snow and back into the car, illuminating the front-seat area.

“Great,” I thought. “We’ve survived the crash only to freeze to death in the snow.”

It was 1:30 a.m., and the temperature was down around 15 degrees. Should we stay in the truck and hope help finds us, or get out and try to flag someone down?

We decided the driver would go, the passenger would stay. The best way out seemed to be through the moon roof. In a gutsy, take-charge move, the driver popped out the glass and dropped down to the snow-covered slope. The passenger in me approved.

Soon I heard him shout that we were only about 20 feet downhill from the road. A little later, he yelled that he had gotten through to 911 on the cell phone. Almost simultaneously, help arrived by chance in the form of a huge road grader driven by Chris Flanagan of the U.S. Forest Service. It would be the only vehicle to come by in the more than three hours we were there.

*

Deposited at the posh Ahwahnee by tow truck, we sat in our luxury-in-the-wilderness hotel room and took stock. We were out one truck (later declared a total loss by the insurance company), each of us lost a hiking boot, and we got a $70 citation from the Forest Service for “mountain driving.” Translation: If you can’t stay on the road, it’s your fault.

We faced an expensive retreat from Yosemite. Car rental companies--even Enterprise--don’t deliver there. We spent about $300 on a bus, a train and two planes.

But we were unhurt. Chastened but not cowed, we would live to go off road--intentionally--again.

And as the passenger, I got to laugh when the driver shucked his pullover sweater to reveal a T-shirt from a race kart driving school.

“Been There, Wrecked That” was emblazoned on the back.

The driver just looked sheepish.

*

Lynn O’Dell, a frequent contributor to The Times’ Orange County edition, wrote about car art for Highway 1 in March 1999. She can be reached at highway1@latimes.com.