Collision Course

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Sometime last January, my car, my four passengers, and I had our up become down. I remember cursing myself as the car went whirlybird, and then the next moment I was looking up, through the passenger window directly above me, at the big, white, scarred surface of the moon. For the next few days, things were a bit different: I looked at the world through a different lens, I lived each day to the fullest, I appreciated what I had rather than lamented what eluded me, etc. Without putting to fine a point on it, I experienced a basic fundamental fragility and saw how unnecessary it was to the world’s basic functioning that I remained upright and breathing.

The site of the accident was about 15 miles from the nearest town, and that night temperatures dipped into the teens, so the wait for the ambulance to arrive was less comfortable than it could have been. I made a frantic attempt to gather materials to build a fire, before realizing that I was in shock and had no way to make wet rotten wood burn. More than anything, I remember the enforced silence – the girl who was more injured than the rest of you soundlessly crying, the rest of us huddled around her with sleeping bags and occasionally stamping our feet to keep warm. Not saying anything wasn’t a choice or a reaction, like the silences that come in the wake of a racist joke or someone slipping and falling. It was a silence enforced by the shock the crash elicited, and the sense that making any kind of noise was apt to fuck with the precarious in-betweenness into which we had settled. The tears of the injured girl were fine, labored breathing could be dealt with, blood was not beyond the realm of the manageable, but saying something was beyond the pale.

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When I was little, I used to try to make myself stay awake. Sometimes I wanted to watch late night television after my parents had gone to bed, or to sneak around the house playing some kind of spy and/or war game. So I would try to scare myself, and at some point I realized that I didn’t need Jason Voorhees, Freddie Krueger, or God to scare myself; I just had to think about death. First it would be abstract death-as-nebulous-gray-space, then a personal me-my-life-this-body-going-to-die. Very much imprinted on my memory is the realization I had at a young age that someday the pictures were going to stop.

In January, it was more like I couldn’t get the pictures to stop. Hollywood has nothing on my internal replay of the crash – facial expressions, slo mo, a soundtrack (I was listening to a tape (a tape!) of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief for some reason on that night) multiple angle flashcuts, etc. that continued to keep me awake for days after I felt any physical effects from coming to a very abrupt stop. That was the one thing that lingered like a hangover, and continued to prevent things from resuming the normalcy to which I had been accustomed. And, curiously enough, for the month or so that the images held sway, so did the silence.

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But why the fuck am I bringing this up? From whence does the nostalgia spring? Yesterday morning individuals from my normal carpool had an accident. A very bad, made-for-TV accident. Two girls, co-workers with whom I normally share the 30-mile trip to work, were going in early because they had a meeting with their landlord at 3:30. So no carpool yesterday; the five of us break off into two cars, housing one group of two and another of three.

Picture two large hills, shaped like breasts of a female torso on its back. Picture a road that demarcates the one hill-breast from the other, leading you down about 200 feet on a steep grade before snaking to the right into an S curve. There are no guardrails, and a thin skin of ice greases the road.

Picture our two girls, better thought of as women perhaps, but girls in this picture nonetheless. They silently descend into the cleavage, except – you guessed it – they slide across the skin of ice, and plunge DOWNWARD fifty or so feet into a gully, narrowly missing a large tree and flipping once before coming to rest beside the creek.

The girls stagger out, claw their way up the face of the gully, bloodied and in shock but remarkably none the worse for wear in terms of skeletal damage/irreparable puncture wounds, and flag down a car going back into town.

Five minutes later, the second car, caring two other carpoolers and I, see the tracks leading off the edge of the road. We stop. We see the car, or what remains of the car, and unwisely attempt to run down the hill rather than take the natural switchbacks. But there is no one in the car. What the fuck?

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You can guess the rest. A very silent car ride to work. Extreme relief when the phone call came explaining that the two girls were at the hospital and were fundamentally OK, albeit uncomfortable. The return of the no sleep syndrome last night. Incidentally, my usual seat in the car that crashed was vaporized. Assuming you follow the “what if” sequence to its logical conclusion, my face would be like that squashed rat you saw in the alley in Chicago that one time when you were taking a shortcut to get to that party before she left and went somewhere else.

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But so, again, what is the point? Things – objects – trees – faces – asses – all fodder for my visual perceptive apparatus have once again become wondrous. Enjoy the pictures while you can. Ripeness is all.