I'm just gonna go ahead and post about this, since otherwise I would go take a nap (seems to be a theme of this blog--"Well I did a post because otherwise I would have napped"--it's like I don't even think about schoolwork). The background of the story is that for about an hour or two there had been pretty heavy rain, so the roads were real nice and slippery, and I was chilling in the far right lane because I am almost phobic about driving in the rain, especially at night. I'd gotten better recently (and have gotten better since) from having to drive even when it rained, and so I was going about 65, passing cars in the right lane who were going too slow, getting back in the right lane, nervously eyeing puddles, you know. Good stuff. Anyway, the rain had just let off maybe twenty minutes ago and I was thrilled. The roads were still wet, so although I was now going about 75 in the far left lane, I was still watching for any spontaneous lakes that may have happened and still really monitoring the cars around me (since I don't trust anyone on wet roads). This sets the scene for what happens next.
I slam on brakes, and so does everyone in front of me, to the right of me, and behind me. We come to a stop. There are flashing lights and sirens everywhere. I'm maybe six or seven cars back from the very front people, so I can see a lot of what's going on but not all of it. I can see the front (hood) part of the car but not the back (it's facing away from me and the cars in front of me are blocking my view). Two ambulances are already there, as I'm looking, another ambulance comes flying down the left emergency lane, then separately and a little later, a few more police cars, one more ambulance, maybe another. There were at least four ambulances there by the end. The accident is in the median, which is grassy and wide with a cable separator. All the cops and EMS folks are gathered around the lone car, which is a red pickup. The pickup is flipped over onto its roof, and height-wise it looks about half of what it used to be. Maybe less. I'm already getting really freaked out. I'm wondering how many times it rolled, how it lost control, why the hell the hood is facing northbound instead of southbound when it's on the southbound side of the median. My slight phobia is wondering how much the rain played a role or if it was mostly the driver at fault. I don't see any blown tires, I don't see any other people except the mass of people around the driver's side door towards the hood. I can't see much past the front quarter panel of the car, so I can't see the door. I can't see the driver himself. Every once in a while one or two people will walk away from the group of people beside the car, but most of them are there steadily. I can't see what they're doing, but I can tell from their activity that someone is stuck in the car, someone who (from the looks of the truck) is probably not doing very well. I call my husband, I call Dad. I tell them about all the scary stuff that is happening and I get off the phone and I continue freaking out. I am a very weird person when it comes to stuff like this. If I'm at a football game and one of the players, a stranger, gets injured and has to be taken off the field, my eyes are tearing up. And here I am, indirectly watching this driver die, while I'm sitting still in comparative safety, at night, alone in the rain, with my music off to respect him. This was one of the strongest emotions I've felt. I was praying so hard for that driver, and thinking about how I'd just been driving in the rain, and how my car isn't the newest and doesn't have side airbags, and how that guy never even imagined when he got in his car and got on the highway that this would happen. I kept looking at the clock. How much time has this guy got left? Why aren't they cutting him out of the vehicle? I wonder if he's conscious. After sitting like this for maybe half an hour, an ambulance drove off. I was immediately excited, but it drove slowly, without sirens on. The cops and EMTs dispersed a little bit from the car, and then another ambulance drove off, again without sirens. I was thinking maybe, maybe(!) that they had gotten him out and that was where the first ambulance went. I knew deep down that if he had been in it, alive, they would have had the sirens on. They would have had to. But I still hoped. After another ten minutes or so the cops started letting some traffic by.
The first thing I saw when we all got around the cop cars blocking the lanes was to the right side of the highway, a black truck parked with a dented roof (looked like a roll impact almost). Had the red pickup shot into the air and fallen from the sky onto the black one and then rolled into the median? I mean how on earth was this guy involved? Then I looked left, where I saw the red pickup truck in all its morbid, awful glory. It was about normal length, but half the height like I estimated. The strangest thing about the truck itself was that it wasn't just those little ripply dents that occur everywhere in the car if you have a little sedan roll over once, like had happened with the roof of the black truck. The thing looked like it had been stepped on. I had no idea how a person could even have fit in there. I noticed it looked like an older Dodge, but obviously the main thing I was interested in was the driver's side window.
A white piece of cloth hung over the bottom of the window (the bottom now being the top) and down over the rest of the window to the once-roof of the car. The fellow inside was dead behind that sheet. Probably hundreds of people had stopped stock-still for over half an hour in memoriam without even knowing it. The ones who couldn't see anything were complaining to their spouses or listening to their music or making mental to-do lists. They were wondering what the hell the hold up was and why the traffic wasn't moving at all. People were saying, "Oh, this must be really bad," but not knowing how bad it really was, kids were texting, drivers were yawning, and life went on (annoyed and oblivious) as that driver fought for his life and lost. That was what I left with. That haunting image of that horrible white sheet, and the strange realization that the traffic jam was like a gigantic, involuntary tribute. That any standstill traffic jam I'm in could be a tribute to a dead driver a few hundred feet up the road past what I can see.
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