Guest Post: Summer of '92

The guest blogging continues.  This is quite a story with many lessons and thought provoking turns.  Mary is one of my favorite writers.  She is an amazing mother and wife and a great lady.  She befriended me this past year after I joined DC Metro Moms and the rest is history.  Here is her story.

It was a sweltering summer day in 1992. My boyfriend at the time had a bit of wanderlust and we both had a deep abiding affinity for trains, so we were messing around in his truck on the rural roads of Frederick County, Maryland, looking for interesting railroad features. The AC didn't work so well, so the windows were down and we were wearing as little clothing as possible, trying not to sweat to death, and trying to stick to roads with little traffic and higher speeds, to ensure the air going through the truck kept flowing as fast as possible. In typical Washington DC fashion, I think both the temp and humidity were hovering around 90%. I was wearing a bikini top and shorts, I had my shoes off, bare feet up on the dash, and we were driving along, radio on, fire/rescue scanner squawking, just talking about trains and life.

The higher-pitched whine of a motorcycle engine became louder and louder as my boyfriend, I'll call him Jim, said “Look at this!” just as a small japanese motorcycle with two larger people on it passed us on the wrong side of the double yellow, just sailing. They were easily doing close to 100 mph; they flew past us like we were parked, and we were doing about 60. I said “What an idiot!” as they flew off into the distance, and the road made a little dip and then rose for us. We lost sight of them for a fraction of a second. As we crested the rise, the road ahead erupted in a hail of flying debris and dust.

It took Jim only a few seconds to get the truck stopped, but in the time it took him to slam on the breaks and pull onto the shoulder, I had my shoes on my feet and was opening the door to the truck. There were pieces of debris everywhere, screams, and I ran to the tiny pickup truck first, four little girls in the bed that had been torn open when the bike hit the right rear quarter panel. It looked as though a giant had ripped open the side like tin foil. The little girls were all visibly shaken, but physically fine; the two women in the cab of the truck were okay as well, one of them with minor cuts on the back of her head from slamming it into the back window of the truck, but both of them were moving and getting out to tend to the little girls. People had started to run from the nearby farmhouse to help, so I left them to handle the truck people and searched for the bike riders.

I could hear the female screaming, and three other people had pulled over behind Jim and me, so I ran past the debris scattered over at least 25 feet to the guy lying on the road. He was slightly younger than me, heavyset, shirtless, wearing a helmet and a pair of faded jeans. His right arm was waving ineffectually near the left side of his chest as Jim and I approached and it looked like wind was blowing a torn piece of t-shirt as I approached. I knelt beside him and looked closely, and then realized that the torn piece of t-shirt wasn't a t-shirt, it was his chest cavity. The force of the impact when the bike hit the truck drove the handlebars into the kid's chest. My stomach heaved as I looked directly at Jim, reading his face to see that he saw what I did; there was nothing we could do for that kid. Another woman approached from our side, telling me that she was a nurse, but then she looked down and sucked in her breath and shook her head. She asked Jim to take off his t-shirt, just a plain white t-shirt, and we used it to cover the boy's chest.

When the bike hit the truck the force of the impact threw the girl up in the air about 30 feet, and she landed in a nearby ravine. She had bounced, leaving about a 5 inch indentation in the soft ground, but was with it well enough to take off her helmet and put it under her head to keep it out of the water. She kept screaming “Where's Peter? Where's Peter?” and none of us had the heart to tell her the truth. We told her that he was being taken care of.

This whole exchange took no more than about 5 minutes, though it seemed interminable at the time, and as we were trying to offer help we could hear the all-call siren sound from the fire station just a couple of miles away. It wasn't long before the sirens of the fire/rescue equipment got louder as they arrived on the scene, and a brief time later the thwak/thwak/thwak of helicopter blades could be heard.
As Jim and I stood by and assisted the people who were helping the girl down in the ravine, I saw a pickup truck with volunteer firefighter plates on it pull over and a man jump out and run to the kid. He immediately took off the kid's helmet and started administering mouth-to-mouth and doing chest compressions. I started to head over to talk to him when the cavalry arrived, fire/rescue equipment everywhere and the local sheriffs blocked off the road, so I backed off and let them do their jobs.

Since Jim and I had not only seen the accident but had been the first on the scene, that meant we were the last to leave. The occupants of the truck went into the farmhouse, the woman who had hit her head was tended to by the EMTs but refused to be transported. The helicopter took the girl away to shock/trauma and the sheriffs draped the kid's body in a sheet, photographers began the long work of documenting the accident for the investigation. Throughout this activity Jim and I milled about, trying to stay out of the way or help as best we could, waiting to be interviewed by the sheriff. The entire time, I could feel the eyes of the man who tried to do CPR on the kid burning holes in Jim's and my chests, Jim now shirtless and me suddenly feeling self-conscious in my bikini top.

The sheriff finally took the time to ask us questions about what we saw in regards to the crash, whether or not the turn signals were working on the truck that the bike hit, how fast it all happened. We told him very frankly that the kid on the bike was at fault – he was traveling at an insane speed, he passed us on the wrong side of the double yellow, and the road was wide with full shoulders on each side – he easily could have avoided it and gone around the truck if he'd been going slower. The sheriff asked us to keep our voices down, because the man who was waiting around, the man who had done CPR on the kid, the man who kept staring at Jim's and my chests, the man who was the first on the scene from the opposite direction from us, was the boy's father.

I later learned that the boy had been a volunteer firefighter at the same station his father was, the same station that was first-due to the accident. He was 19, his girlfriend 18, and they had so much promise and life ahead of them. At the time it was such a surreal experience: the only ones badly hurt were the ones being irresponsible, the biggest miracle of all being that the little girls in the back of that truck weren't hurt, though certainly traumatized. The accident didn't need to happen, and the boy certainly knew better, knew the effects of driving like that; he probably ran on accidents similar to his own.

It's not often that anyone who isn't in the medical or rescue field sees anyone die, and then not in such a traumatic fashion as this was for Jim and me. I learned how to talk when my family lived in Charleston, SC and in Norfolk, VA (quick contest – what did my dad do for a living back then? Prize for the winner, and sorry Agincourtdb, you can't answer) and I had a thick southern drawl. We moved to the DC area for good when I was 5, and I lost the accent quickly enough, but in times of stress – if I'm super tired, drunk, or emotionally upset – the accent comes back, and I have no idea that I do it unless it's brought to my attention. As Jim and I drove back that afternoon we discussed all that had happened, and he kept looking at me oddly, more oddly than I expected under the circumstances, and finally I asked him what was up. He responded with “Why are you talking like that?” to which I responded “Lahk whaut?” I had no idea. It was his first experience with it. But it's odd how witnessing such an experience will change a person. It really helps a person consider their priorities and what they want out of life.

Jim, who is now my husband of 15 years, and I still think about that day, that kid, the surreal nature of it all. I think we'd wonder if we had some strange dual dream if I didn't still have the newspaper clippings about the accident and with the kid's obituary. It was probably instrumental in us deciding to get married the following year. I think about how there is so much of life that is just a matter of being lucky, and think of all the times that I did something stupid and managed to slip away without such dire consequences happening. Now that I'm a parent myself I understand some of the terror that father must have been feeling as he either happened on the scene or, more likely, heard the call go out on the scanner and then felt the panic rising in his throat when he realized the call was for his own son. It's the same terror I felt when my older son was born and went to the NICU for tests. When my husband went to get him to bring him to our room, he came back with a book, not a baby, and I knew the news wasn't good. We do the best we can for our kids, bring them up with what we believe are good values and we teach them how to exercise good judgment, but in the end, we can only hope and pray that they get as lucky as we did.

*names changed

Comments

[Hilary]

Wow, this is incredible. What a horrifying experience to endure, how completely haunting. This story gave me real pause this morning. Thank you, Mary.

[jodifur]

great story!