Driving Past a Car Accident

Returning home from a friend’s cottage this Thanksgiving weekend, we passed a car accident. It must have only happened moments before we came upon the scene, as people were still jogging toward the toppled vehicle. The car was on its side and a woman’s head was just emerging through the window she was trying to squeeze out of. At least a half- dozen cars had already pulled over, and given the volume of traffic on the highway, there would probably be three times that number in one more minute. I imagined some people seized by instinct, and others like doctors and nurses, called by their training, running to help, while a greater portion were most likely curious, desiring to be part of grander narrative. Those people, the latter, approached cautiously, scared of what they might discover and what might be asked of them. They held their cell phones like magic wands, the devices through which all their contribution was to be transmitted.

I wanted to stop, too, just to see more than help I think, but obviously we’d only be getting in the way, and so we proceeded slowly past, reverently bearing witness. The tone in the car was suddenly very different, the music playing now all wrong, an insult. We drove by the other vehicle involved in the accident (the mathematics of the crash mysterious and vast) and saw a young man, just as white as the moon, wide-eyed and breathing hard. The blanket wrapped around his shoulders gave him an oddly spectral appearance, and his friends stood around him as if surrounding a miracle– frightened to either be present or to step outside of the moment.

They were all so young.

This accident was just an arbitrary swoosh, something that could have happened to anybody or nobody with equal measure. And the day itself was so vivid and beautiful— surrounding us like an indifferent God, emitting an inexhaustible palette of autumn colour and sun that so clearly, so urgently required our attention and investment. It was such an odd transit that all we could do was give quiet thanks as we passed through, grateful and lucky to have home still waiting.