Death rushes past
It is one week before my 38th birthday, a Sunday, and I am spending the evening with my dad while my mom attends the night service at church. She returns home a little after 7 p.m., but it feels much later, because the darkness comes so much earlier now.
Twelve miles of mostly straight, mostly two-lane highway, a ribbon of road well known to me, link my parents’ house to mine. The speed limit is 55, but vehicles’ actual speed varies widely, somewhere between 40 and 80. The slower ones back up traffic, leaving the faster ones to grow reckless in their anxiety to pass. Accidents are commonplace on this road. I have known people who have died on these twelve miles. But I am lucky. I’ve had few accidents in my life and none on this stretch of highway.
Tonight there are hardly any cars on the road at all, and I am over halfway home, driving about 60 in a brown 2009 Chevy Impala with hail damage on the side panels and a passenger-side backdoor lock that sticks. In this mile of road, between a country store and a saw mill, houses are visible but not close. Trees grow in the fence lines on both sides of the road, and the cow pastures behind those fences fade into dark country. I have just descended a slight hill when beams of headache-bright light attack my rearview mirror.
Sometimes, we see accidents before they happen, and we can react to what we see is happening; we can evade our futures if only temporarily. But tonight, in the darkening sky, the car behind me approaches like a predator, and there is no time to react. The lights are high in the air, so I think they must be from a truck, which I know is going to hit me. As fast as I can form that thought, I am hit. The hit is hard and solid. It shoves me forward, setting me spinning, strapped in but turning in a way that cars are not meant to turn.
I don’t know how other people experience these moments, but for me time slows and fractures. Everything outside of the car blurs, but the inside of the car is visible and in focus. My foot is on the brake. My hands grip the steering wheel, but I know that I have no control. Somewhere in the hazy outside world, my car hits something hard—later I will find out this something is a guardrail—but the car keeps moving. I imagine it will never stop careening toward the solid things of the outside world, and yet, in this suspended time, I await another hit. One big slam is it. Even though the spinning stops, it takes a while for my mind and body to catch up to each other and the world.
There is a silence on the highway. The crashing sounds and violence have chased away the usual night noises. The Impala is perpendicular to the road, facing south toward a cow pasture. There are other cars—cars not involved in the accident, people driving home from Sunday evening services—that pull off onto the shoulder in both directions to wait and see what will happen. A woman I know, Karen, walks towards me. She tells me that before my car was hit, the driver of the other vehicle had passed her and another car on the shoulder.
Karen already has called 911, though she didn’t know it was me in the accident. An ambulance is on its way, though, I don’t know if I need an ambulance. I am standing. I am talking. I do not feel pain. No blood. I’m just as alive as when I stepped off my parents’ porch, but the hows and whys of the accident are not yet clear to me.
The driver who crashed into me is a boy, 22 years old. He’s also drunk. Before the police arrive, he throws a case of beer out of his gray SUV and across the guardrail on the opposite side of the road, which a dozen people witness, but it isn’t the worst decision he’s made tonight. It’s just an action that will not change the inevitable.
In the next hour, the boy tells at least three different stories to as many police officers about his speed and my speed, about the number of passengers in his vehicle, about how much he’s had to drink, about how it was my fault that he hit me. In front of them, he apologizes to me and extends his hand, but my hand stays at my side. The inside of my head is jarred, my neck muscles are tightening, and the cool night air is wrapping around my body—and I am not ready for what a handshake between men would imply.
It’s not that I’m not sorry for the kid. But it will take a while before I am comfortable with the knowledge that I’m standing upright and breathing regularly. It will take a while until I watch, first with indifference and then with what might be sympathy, as the boy fails the sobriety test, is handcuffed and led to the police cruiser, the trooper’s hand guiding his thin neck down into the back seat.
I’ve made some stupid, dangerous decisions in my life, and I can’t help but think how lucky I am to not be in this kid’s position. Or maybe I’m blessed. Maybe the difference between the two is just semantics. What I feel is protected by something beyond my understanding. And this isn’t the first time.
Two years ago, on a starless night and even closer to home, I had an accident of a different kind. A horse, running loose and terrified, struck like lightning—its hoofs shattering my windshield. The horse died, but just six inches closer to me and I would not have lived to live through this accident tonight.
In telling these accidents’ stories, I will not say, “I almost died.” That isn’t what happened. I was in danger, but the danger didn’t last, didn’t cling to me in the darkening night; it brushed by me, shoved me hard, then rushed on down the road towards its next appointment. Death swerved on the highway, and I survived.
On my birthday a week later, I turn 38 years old. I eat birthday cake, and there is singing. I file insurance claims. I begin the search for a new car, but every car is too small or too big or too expensive or the wrong color. I go to work and to my parents’ house, and I pass the scene of the accident twice a day. It will take a while before I stop wondering—if I ever do—why I’m still here.