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LINCOLN, Maine — Sixteen-year-old Evan Boobar of Howland had passed his driver’s education class at Quality Driving School of Lincoln. He felt ready to take his driver’s test on Thursday, but no way was he going to do it in his dad’s big Buick Park Avenue.

“He didn’t like parallel parking in that thing at all,” said his aunt Pat Worster, 54, of Lincoln.

So Worster lent him her 1994 Plymouth Acclaim.

You could forgive her for regretting her decision.

New driver’s license in hand, Boobar left the Maine Department of Motor Vehicle offices with his mother, Chandy Boobar, and was about to return the car to Worster when a loaded logging truck T-boned the Acclaim as the car turned left from the southbound lane of U.S. Route 2 toward Worster’s driveway at about 1 p.m.

After the crash, the truck went off the road into a ditch and rolled onto its side along the road, scattering most of its logs. The Acclaim was demolished, and it took three hours to tow the truck from the ditch.

Surprisingly, no one was seriously hurt.

It was Boobar’s first excursion as a licensed driver.

“Even with all that happened, that was the first thing I asked him about,” Worster said. “I said, ‘Did you get your license?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’

“The poor kid. He was a little shell-shocked. I think they both were,” Worster added. “He feels so bad. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ But it couldn’t be helped.”

It was in some respects a lucky ride for the Boobars. Although the truck’s fender bashed in the leading edge of the driver’s door, no one suffered more than cuts and bruises, Lincoln police Officer Jeff Rice said.

Rice said he believes that Boobar had stopped to make a turn when the truck driver, Thomas Sprage, 58, of Weston, passed on the left first a red van, then tried to pass the Acclaim just as Boobar was making his left turn. No charges were filed Thursday.

Worster said she didn’t blame Boobar for the accident but regretted the loss of the Acclaim. The car, she said, was a recent acquisition that had only 31,000 miles on it and had never been driven in the winter.

“It was literally a little old lady who drove it,” Worster said. “She never took it anywhere.”

Nor, for that matter, had the woman ever been in an accident with it.

Worster said she won’t be too troubled by the loss.

“Cars can be replaced,” she said. “People can’t.”

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

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