Our Rural Road
I am 9 years old.
Standing barefoot in the gravel driveway to the front of my house. The sky as grey as the gravel.
I am blowing bubbles, waiting, knowing my father will soon be home from work.
I don't wait up for him like this at all. And when he comes down the road in the little tin can Mazda truck that he's nicknamed the "BMW" for Brown Manure Wagon—he'll stick his head out the window and ask why I'm all t-shirt and jeans not wearing any shoes. Maybe go in the house and put some shoes on, girl. And a jacket.
But our neighbors might come outside and play and I want to stay visible. So I won't go back in.
And it happens that afternoon, with time to kill before dinner and no homework to be done, that I am witness to a brutal spectacle.
It comes over on the strange drift that the road on which I live—at the top of—takes from the highway. At a diverted slant you fail to see coming. It dips down and away over a hillside and has been a point of contention for the department of transportation, who for years now have planned to extend the highway up thru the hillside that faces south of our house. This would up the resale value of the property, so my dad is all for it. I don't know what our yard will look like after months of construction has torn up the adjacent land.
They will begin this process when I have entered into my late thirties, and conclude it in my fortieth year.
—
A line of pines prevents most of the wash and garbage people chuck from their cars from finding its way down into our long and sloped yard. A tilted landscape perfect for winter sledding.
But not all of it trash, seems. When cleaning up with my brother, we find a lot of recycling and some treasures like broken toys from happy meals or dirt encrusted keys and watches. Things people didn't mean to throw away. Or things they lost in an accident.
—
Time slows down in the instants that it takes for real and terrible things to transpire. Absorbed in the study of the unreasonable patterns that the oily colors in the bubbles I am blowing take on—behind me an inexplicable cacophony starts in. An abysmal and rare grouping of sounds registering somewhere behind the eyes as not having anything to do with what’s right in front of me.
Sounds that came from the road were mostly ignored. They blended airily into the background of everything we did outside. So my brain struggled to make associations as my ears took in the sound.
I imagine now, yards away at my back, the car doing flip turns in the air like a kamikaze ice skater, over the wrong lane, then over the bank of our neighbors long curve of a driveway. Coming to rest, top-down, on the same kind of sharp, heavy and unforgiving pebble gravel I stood upon.
I turn in enough time to see the car spin once on its roof like a top slowing to rest. Cars still passing on the road reduced speed to rubberneck, and our neighbors ran outside to approach the car. A man with his two daughters on his heels. He told them to go back and they stopped short, backstepping to where their mother stood, telephone to her ear, on the porch.
—
Usually, it was minor things at the mouth of the road. Collisions into the guardrail that mussed up a front fender and little else. The loud squeak of breaks and the cloud of white steam from burnt tire rubber and then maybe people's voices in dissent. Never the need for an ambulance.
Not two minutes and dad pulls in. He passes me in the upper drive without noticing me. Parks around the back of the house in the garage and walks up to meet me. His hand on my shoulder startled me as we heard sirens reel into the top of the road.
My mother looked on from the bathroom window. My neighbor friends sat on the edge of their porch, also watching intently. Noticing and not noticing each other.
The ambulance and fire crew turned the car over with a wrecking ball sound and removed passengers. Before they did this and got gone, my father gripped my shoulder and we turned into the house.
It seemed the phenomena of accidents on our rural road now came with a spectra of true damage.
—
The next afternoon my younger brother and I crossed the neighbors driveway on our walk to the elementary school playground where we flew kites and rode bikes and skated and had the whole place to ourselves.
In the gravel where the black car had been, a pool of blood lingered. Still and deep as decanted port, along with mangled pieces of gauze and a scintillating pile of crudely crushed pale sapphires—windshield glass.
Together on the ground, they looked like a morbid art installation. A social terrorists project.
My little brother did not know what had happened and he asked me what all of it was, lying there.
For a moment, I didn't answer, staring in awe. We both knew. Though he didn't really know anything, he could read it all on me.
It was more visceral and powerful than the crash itself to stand right there for a minute on a beautiful day, amid the accident debris. Knowing our road had finally asserted some deadly force, some power to kill, that left me with a deep respect for speed, for humanity, for the entropy of all shapes.