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News and Articles

08/20/2006
A PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS

The Toronto Star

Brian Moore on the sudden and lasting impact of witnessing a head-on collision.

It happened last summer with teribble suddenness: a head on highway crash a fewmeters ahead of us that killed four people.

You move on, but you don't forget.

Until that night, it has been another good day in el Dorado, a.k.a. california.

It was Wednesday, June 22 - day 12 of 14-day, 1,400-kilometre counter-clockwise swing through central California that had started just south of San Fransisco. We were driving a merlot--red Ford freestyle sport wagon test car.

The day's big destination for my wife Marianne and me: yosemite national Park, where we spent hours strolling, majestic trails. back in the state's central valley aroudn 8:45 pm., we swung west on Highway 108/120.

Then ithappened. brake lights suddenly flashed in the twilight and the two vehicles in front of us - an SUV and a van - suddenly swerved to the right. Then metallic thunder erupted - a searing, frightening explosion of sound.

It was all that nighmare you pray you will never face: a high-speed head-on collision.

The SUV lifted into the air, rear end jacked up, as if a land mine had gone off under it. The van clipped it and swerved onto the shoulder.

For a teribble second or two, it was an open question whether we would be a part of the destruction. but the Freestyle's four big disc brakes let me me stop in time.

marianne leaped out and ran forward for help. i backed the wagon along the shoulder and put the flashers on.

The I ran ahead to a scene from hell. Blackened, twisted wreckage was burning on the eastbound shoulder. I learned later it was a 1998 Chevrolet pickup. Fingers of flame were shooting up the dry hillside behind the truck.

"That's my brother in there!" screamed a young South Asian man, pointing at the driver's seat of the SUV, its front end crushed. "Help me! Help me!"

We pulled furiously at the doors, but it was as if they has been welded shut. Through the window I could see an unconscious man in his 30s slumped down in the seat, an airbag partly over him. I was thankful his head was crancked to the right, away frmo me. i didn't try to see more.

"Does anybody have any tools?" The injured driver's brother frantically asked the five or six of us now milling around. Nobody did. The flames grew more intense.

Suddenly a white-haired manwith a hammer appeared and began smashing the glass of the SUV's tailgate. Like a ghost, a girl of maybe 10 or 12 climbed through the opening and without a word ran to join the half dozen sobbing women and children from the van.

It turned out that a family from Chicago had been visiting relatives in Sunnyvale after seeing Yosemite. "He came right over the line at us!" a woman kept screaming.

two firefighters were the first of any army of rescue workers to arrive. One ran to the left rear door of the SUV and tried to pry it open with metal cutters. he made little progress and threw his helmet on the ground in frustration.

Finally, with police wanting to clear the scene and the highway ahead blocked, we turned aroudn and drove to nearby Sonora, and old gold-rush town. We checked into a motel and immediately poured out our crash story to the desk clerk, a woman in her late 20s.

"it happens all the time," she calmly told us. In fact, she said, her father had been killed in an accident along that stretch of road when she was a child.

The carnage had gotten so bad, the clerk added, that authorities had built a helicopter pad to fly victims to hospitals.

I woke up the next morning with a headache that was to last a week. Despite the brilliant sunshine, death was on our minds. We waited for Sonora's daily, The Union Democrat, to hit the street at 2 p.m.

The big front-page headline, above the photograph you see here, extinguished any lingering hopes of a miracle: "Four killed in 108 wreck."

The pickup's driver, a 47-year-old construction worker, and three people ni the SUV - a man, 32; his mother 54; and his grandmother, 75 - were dead. A seriously injured 19-year-old woman in the SUV had been helicoptered to hospital but was later released.

I couldn't stop staring at the photo. With a tiny shift in time, it would have been us.

"One world at a time" is a wise philosophy, but who really grasps how quickly a world can end? And then what?

W headed west on Highway 108, passing the crash scene; the only sign of what happened was the charred hillside.

The pickup had been coming around a curve when it crossed the two solid yellow lines. Tests on the driver's body showed he was impaired.

but the dying on 108 that week wasn't over. We soon came upon a black-and-white police cruiser blocking the highway and channelling traffic onto a side road.

We found out later than a woman, 44, had been driving cast when she drifted on to the shoulder. She overcorrected, crossed the centre line and hit an oncoming pickup driven by a 37-year-old woman.

The womne, both locals, were killed, and three children were choppered to hospital.

We flew hope the next day, our California dreaming different from what it had been.

Witnessing a crash teaches you things. I vowed to:
-Carry some glash-smashing, door prying tools.
-Work harder on cultivating at the wheel that karate calls "a mind like the moon." Just as moonlight falls on all things aroudn you, so should your awareness.
-Savour life, because you never know what's coming at you around the curve.