The crash

We were headed home on the kind of road trip that seemed to have started long before I was born and wouldn’t end until long after I die. A legacy that I don’t recall entering and wouldn’t remember exiting – one that I just happened to be in.

Porno-marts and Wendy’s scattered the outskirts of the highway like a colossal, nymphomaniac truck driver had littered them out the window of his Peterbilt.

Someone had planted a town around the banks of the road, or possibly the road had sprouted like a weed in the rock bed of a town. Driving through, it’s impossible to say which came first – the highway or the family restaurants – a proverbial chicken and egg dilemma (not the scientific chicken and egg debate, in which the egg obviously came first because that’s where mutations happen).

The lull of our white Volkswagen Routan barreling through time and space had become redundant. I sat in the middle seat of the car reading John Green’s road trip novel Paper Towns – it was super meta. I sat considering how our minivan felt like a paper cutout rolling over construction paper roads. Nestled in that space between the front and back seats, and my family’s loving bones that reside in each of their bodies, we tunneled through the vortex of an intersection. We had just zoomed beneath a stoplight, the red, yellow, green sphincter designed to pinch the flow of traffic, when –

The short-lived sound of rubber screeching and burning on asphalt pierced through the dusk air. One of the drivers had slammed all of her weight on her brakes in a fleeting attempt to avoid the fate of collision. And then, the impact. A single clap of metal colliding with metal, a red truck sucker-punching a black SUV. Crash.

“Jesus Christ,” my mom Barb yelled, her shoulders folding down and ducking into themselves. I turned over my own flinching shoulders, startled, to survey the intersection we cleared mere seconds before impact.

Tire and street and metal and glass screamed behind us. A cloud of gray smoke hung suspended in the middle of the “t” intersection, a tribute to the battle that had just consecrated the asphalt. Hunks of car spun from the tornado. The red pickup bounced, bounced away from the epicenter and into a ditch, one of its dislodged tires spinning toward a gas station on the corner. The black SUV flung from the wreck like the car itself was a chunk of debris. Having spun like the needle of a smashed compass – directionless – it swerved to a rest in the intersection, narrowly avoiding tipping onto its side. The black siding was peeled from the car, its skeleton exposed. An airbag in the cabin burst like a jellyfish, a stinging cushion to the driver’s face. Both cars finally came to a halt, casualties of the collision, and Barb accelerated onto an interstate on-ramp.

“What should we do?” my other mom, Beth, asked, shaken.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Barb said into the rearview mirror, the crash framed in black plastic.

“Did people get killed?” my nine-year-old brother Henry wondered aloud from the wayback.

“No,” said Barb. I wasn’t so sure, and I don’t think she was either.

“Everybody say a prayer that nobody got hurt,” Beth hoped aloud in the same fashion Henry wondered.

“Prayer,” Henry said disinterested, his voice dripping with insincerity as his eyes remained transfixed on his iPod.

I pray that those people are okay. I pray that those people are okay. I pray that those people are okay. It was more of a plea than a prayer, but I squeezed my eyes, and I begged.

We sat in silence for a while, the engine whining as it carried us away from the crash. I breathed, and my skull pinched my brain, squeezing it until it pounded. I leaned into my sister’s Eeyore pillow pet on my lap and closed my eyes. My stomach lurched.

To start with the obvious, it could have been us. As an ambulance drove past us on its way to pull limbs from cars, my mom and sister established that the red truck must have taken a left into the oncoming SUV. Had we driven through the intersection seconds later, our van would too have spun, shedding sheet metal. But that’s not what got me.

To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what it was that shook me in my core, but I was thoroughly shaken. There’s something about a car wreck that is inherently startling and scary. It wrenches your guts. Maybe that’s because it’s not supposed to happen. We drive in cars every day and generally speaking, they don’t crunch into each other. But every once in a while, they do. Crunch.

That’s what I think really got me. It wasn’t just cars that kissed each other so hard that they shattered each other’s teeth. Inside the metal beasts were people – flesh and heartbeats and pink brains and clumpy hair and red blood. Living, breathing beings who maybe weren’t living and breathing so confidently slumped against their steering wheels, hanging – if only by threads – in the uncertain limbo between life and death. The physical proximity that I was from potential death was a violent reminder that I’m always within that proximity. We all are.

I hoped flesh wasn’t torn too badly or the red blood fatally spilt, but hoping is the extent to which I could help – a far cry from the medical attention the vehicles’ occupants would certainly need. There was nothing I could really do. Thankfully, though, my helplessness paled in comparison to the people trapped in misfortune and a miscalculated left turn. They didn’t even know it was coming until it came. God, I hoped that they were okay. I hoped that when each of those two people woke up earlier that morning that they told someone, I love you. And I hope that someone said it back.

My heart cried inside my chest, and my brain tried to forget.

“Just be glad we weren’t involved,” Barb finally said, breaking the period of silence. Barb and my sister Frannie were finishing their conversation of trying to piece together what exactly happened, when Henry interrupted.

“I have to poop,” he said.

Barb and Frannie carried on their detective work.

“Are you kidding?” Henry became agitated. “They’re not even listening. They don’t even care.”

“Okay. We’ll find a place to stop,” Barb answered, peering at Henry through where he had replaced the crash in the rearview mirror. And so, we barreled on toward a bathroom and toward our destination. Moments continued to chase moments, each one on the brink of infinite others – none more or less plausible than the next. Nature calls.

*****

Authors note: I regard driving as one of the best metaphors for learning. If I hit the curb taking a right turn, I make a mental note: take right turns a touch wider. If I’m speeding, and I fly by a cop hidden back from the road, I tap the brakes and I hold my breath. Then, I count my blessings and obey the speed limit for a week or two. It struck me that for these people, the crash was a pretty steep learning curve – a mistake more costly than an “oops.” It won’t be so easy for them to correct, and the mental note will be more of a traumatic ghost, a reminder of a temporary lapse in judgment. Obviously, the crash functioned as a teachable moment for me because it made me feel something. I hope it makes you feel something, too.