I left for work at about 5:15 this afternoon to work a closing shift at the store. I was running a few minutes late, but my manager’s are almost all very laid back, so I wasn’t too worried about being three or four minutes late. I showered right after an early dinner of good old American meat and potatoes: pot roast, baked potatoes and carrots and biscuits, and felt for the most part that I’d rid myself of the mood that was following me around earlier in the day. (I’m particularly susceptible to a sort of hazy gloom as summer unrolls its oppressive waves of heat on us. This isn’t something I’ve found I can really affect, only learn to deal with.) In short, I was feeling good, or at least better.
I got in the car and headed down the same route that I always follow to get to work: right on Harpersville, left on the Parkway, right on Coliseum, left into work. While I was on the Parkway, stopped at the light at Big Bethel Rd., I was more than usual engrossed in my own thoughts. Listening to an album that I’ll be reviewing here soon for my podcast (I should have thought to cross-post my other blog about it…at any rate, you can read that
HERE), I was organizing critique in my head and assessing the ins and outs of the groups arranging style and delivery. A sharp clapping sound (like lightning striking) interrupted my thoughts. I looked out the window to my front right and saw that there had been a wreck in the middle of the intersection.
A large white SUV, a monstrous tricked-out GMC, had smashed into the passenger side of a silver Chrysler convertible who‘d tested her luck and run the red light. On the other side of the convertible, an old pickup truck with a faded cab had rammed into the driver’s side of the convertible and bounced away.
For about thirty seconds, nothing moved. Not me, not the other people in the cars around me, and none of the drivers of the scrapped cars. There was almost silence. Then, after that short vacuum of sound, the Hispanic woman who drove the SUV got out, as did the short, plump woman driving the pick up truck. Both paced around the outside of their vehicles, clutching their cell phones, desperately assessing the damage to their cars. They didn’t notice that the driver of the convertible wasn’t joining in their post-traumatic ritual.
I started to panic. I felt like I was suffocating. It was the a cappella music. I turned it off, having completely lost whatever thoughts I’d had about the review. I scolded myself for even thinking about the damned review, because it seemed that no one had noticed that the third driver hadn’t gotten out of her car.
What made this worse was the image that first flashed through my mind- it was of the method I often use to remove a shriveled and curled up dead beetle from the dusty corners in my room. I grab a tissue (or two, depending on the size of the insect), and grasp the bug holding the middle of the two tissues, bunching it up furiously as soon as I’ve made contact with it in order to avoid it touching my bare skin. The convertible looked very much like the tissue. I felt instantly nauseous when I thought of the poor beetle woman inside.
I couldn’t even see her. The metal and glass had crumpled so over itself that she wasn’t visible. As my panic rose, I searched for my cell phone. I’d left it at home. I put my car in neutral and yanked on the parking brake, thinking for a second that I’d get out to help her. Then I worried about leaving my car in the middle of a busy road. Then I considered just driving off, but argued internally that the police might need witnesses. I argued with myself for about twenty seconds, and in that time, luckily, a host of different people were pulling into the median and onto the side of the road, parking, and rushing from their cars to the scene.
Because I live about three miles from an Air Force base, there were several men in camouflage fatigues who rushed to stand around the cars. One of them began directing traffic. Another tall, muscular man who looked like he’s just left the gym ran to the convertible, and after surveying the damage, leapt onto the trunk of the car to try to see down into the crunched up driver‘s seat. After about another minute, the car was completely hidden from view by the wall of concerned and nosy citizens.
A man who’d parked his own SUV in the median and run towards the wreckage with emergency flares returned to his parked car which was right by me, when the man in the car to my right shouted to him, “Is she ok?” The man with the flares seemed too preoccupied to answer, so the man to my right yelled his question again. The flare man heard him this time and stopped, looked confused and then very anxious, muttered something unintelligible and went back to whatever duty he’d been given.
The military man directing traffic wasn’t following the cues of the traffic lights (which hadn’t actually malfunctioned), so I sat through another two green lights before being beckoned to drive through, awkwardly, on a red light. I drove past the devastated cars and the crowd of people and then over the hill to Coliseum drive, where I took a right and got to work only a few minutes late. I saw two emergency trucks flying down the road the other way to get to the accident. The people on their side didn’t slow down or pull over like they’re supposed to. I was struck by the disrespect for human life, so discreetly buried in their lack of action.
After I got into work, got to the computer where I clock in, put my keys away and got a swig of water, I realized that I was shaking rather violently. I’d been grasping the steering wheel and gear shift so hard during the accident that my hands were achy.
I went about the tasks that had been assigned to me in our notebook (and I think its worth noting that there was more work than usual…seems the two guys who were working the shift before me had given themselves an easy day), and all the while felt like I was in a dream. I have to be honest with myself; I have to speak frankly. The woman in that convertible most likely died. She was buried in the fuselage from her own car. How could she have survived? And if she did, what must she look like now? I was so shaken that I was ignoring my co-workers questions (he doesn’t work very much in that department and asked a lot of questions) and ignoring customers asking for help.
From the outside, it seems so cliché when someone mentions a jarring shift in perspective. That said, seeing the gruesome crash changed my perspective on my life, right now, deeply. It molded and morphed the shape of things I juggle daily; how much sadder I now feel that Alex wants nothing to do with me, how much heavier it is to know that my mother’s creating (or so she says) a new life without us, how much more terrible is each day that passes and I don’t sing. But conversely, how silly is my crush on the larger room in my new apartment in Charleston? How ridiculous my unspoken arguments with my alma mater, or my fretting about an extra 5 pounds on my frame? It all seems so different. I hesitate to brush it all aside as “trivial” or “meaningless”; before today, they mattered, and after today it all still matters. It all matters. Every last worry, every last anxiety, every last bauble that tinkers back in forth in my head when I wish I were sleeping. They all matter. And perhaps, in spite of what I’ve just said, the smaller things matter
more when I consider the inherent temporariness of the “big” things. (How much
more valuable is it now when Iago comes up to me as I type this, and puts his paw on my arm. Is he comforting me or asking for attention? Either way, its worth the world right now.)
At any rate, the day exhausted me. How fitting that I’m ridding
Invitation to a Beheading. Cincinnatus, who’s been sentenced to death by beheading, lives tortured day after tortured day in an absurd prison in which the date of his execution is kept from him, his visitors are bizarre and otherworldly, and he has no choice but to ruminate daily about his very secret but very imminent and bloody demise. He lives each day thinking the next is his last. And then, of course, it isn’t.
That guy, what was his name? (Googling now...) Ah! Matt Nathanson, the guy who wrote that song, 'Car Crash'. If I recall correctly, it was a fairly popular song last year. "I wanna feel the car crash/I wanna feel the capsize/I wanna feel the bomb drop, the earth stop/'Til I'm satisfied"...He's clearly never
seen someone die in a car crash, otherwise he wouldn't want for it so desperately.
My opinion is that no day is a good day to be rudely confronted with one’s own mortality.
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