It was either the day after Christmas or New Year’s Day, accidents always seem worse when they happen on a holiday, anyway, I can’t remember which. It defiantly had that depressive void, dead-of-winter, feel to it. There’s a feeling at the beginning of the worst part of winter. A feeling that tells you it will get worse before it gets better. It will get darker. It will get colder. It will get harder- and you try to get tough to it, and try to just endure it..and hope that not too many bad things happen at the same time. So anyway I was on my bike on my way to work even though it was a holiday. And since it was a holiday and also about twenty degrees below zero there was virtually no one out. The whole scene was strangely deserted, and strangely…silent?? Maybe it was so cold that all noises were frozen. But also it was very sunny out at the same time and this especially added to the strangeness- ‘cause it tricked you into thinking it was a normal winter day, but let me say it again it was inconceivably cold…
I was about halfway to work and I heard a couple of sirens in the distance. But I didn’t think much of it, maybe a firetruck, seems a lot of houses catch fire when its so cold. And as I turned on to one of the busier streets I was struck again by the emptiness…here was six lanes of main thoroughfare and not a single car on it…As I pedal on a couple of ambulances come into view up ahead. These must have been the sirens I heard earlier. And as I get closer I can see I’ve come across an accident that has just happened. And here again the scene is strangely deserted.? Usually there are at least a couple of spectators at any car accident, you know, folks just hanging out watching. But as I pull up I notice I’m the only one and I think to myself how there was really no traffic at all, that these were the only cars on the whole street and they crashed into each other…but the strangeness seems to be embedded in this next moment especially.
As I look at the scene, and try to figure out what happened, it occurs to me that one of the ambulances was actually involved in the accident..and a second ambulance was there to pick up the patient and the drivers of the first ambulance. Paramedics work on other paramedics?? A child who is bandaged around his head and is very bloody is taken from the back of one ambulance and put into the other. This short 'out of one, into the other' exchange is full of panic. And the interruption in the usual emergency type ride has left some of the people with the child, parents I assume, frustrated to the point of insanity. Helpless to this unusually bad turn of events, from what I can tell the uncrashed ambulance now needs a jump from the crashed ambulance. The whole scene reeked of the kind of clumsiness that is so true of reality.
And there I was, the lone audience to this terrible scene and my imagination turns to the worst. And an overwhelming sense of bleakness seemed to settle over my whole life, kind of slowly realizing just how wrong things can go, how evil nature can be. And as if things could be worse, I notice one of the 'assumed parents' hasn’t even as much as a jacket on. But you know..they didn’t even seem to notice. And then, as to suddenly awake out of a light sleep, I am aware, once again of how brutally cold it is. And this sudden noticing of my own physicalness seemed to snap me out of this downward trance. Somehow renewing my usual sense of optimism. The child is put into the uncrashed ambulance and it finally speeds off. I pedal on to work and have an otherwise unmemorable day.
A couple of days later as I tell the story to my mother she remembers reading an account of the accident in the paper. Apparently the child had gotten bit in the face and neck by a usually friendly, family dog. While being rushed to the nearest hospital an elderly couple pulls out in front of the speeding ambulance. Causing the crash I pulled up on..another ambulance is called to the scene to further transport the child and newly injured drivers and paramedics… …the child dies."
