The Highway

by Donna Schoenkopf

Highway 177 runs north and south, mostly. It’s a quarter mile drive from my house, down the gravel county road, to its two lanes.

I live in hilly country, so that skinny road moves up and down over the landscape. Mostly the highway is straight forward, but here and there it curves to the right or left, usually at the top of a hill, making it impossible to see oncoming cars if you want to make a left turn across oncoming lanes.

Every time I make that left turn, coming back from town, I hold my breath. When someone is following me, I pull over to the shoulder of the road and wait until they pass me by so I can make that turn “safely.”

I didn’t always do that. But one day, as I was stopped, left turn signal blinking, I realized that a daydreaming driver or a driver swatting a bee or a driver using a cell phone could, in a split moment, smack into the rear of my car and blow me to smithereens.

So I wait on the shoulder till there’s no one behind me and, exhaling, make that left.

I’ve now done that approximately 500 times. And it doesn’t get any easier.

red line: Highway 177

There isn’t much traffic on the highway. And, contrary to my earlier beliefs, this contributes to horrible accidents. Only when I was affected personally did I realize that lonely roads produce a daydreaming state. You’re rolling along, no one in sight, the road going up and over hills, radio playing, and you become lulled into a reverie. Very pleasant.

But there have been times (too many) where I have been startled into awareness of what was happening around me. A car just over the hill, going 40 mph. Someone unaware that they’ve edged over the middle line into your oncoming lane. A pickup with loaded trailer hitched on the back being blown crazily by the wind. A sudden blast of hail smacking your windshield.

You just never know.

I have come upon an exploded truck tire, huge and sharp pieces of rubber spread out over both lanes, with a large, unidentifiable squashed animal in the midst of everything.

I have driven the road, icy with rain that’s been frozen onto its surface, wondering if I would be able to get up a hill or not. (I did.)

I have driven the road, going 65 or 70 mph, with someone RIGHT ON MY BUMPER for miles. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I really hate that. It’s my most intense pet peeve. No, “pet peeve” does not capture the emotion I feel. Rage is more like it.

(A side note to explain: About ten years ago I was driving on the freeway in California in my little Geo Metro, three hulking teenage boys in the car with me, following the regulation distance of one car length for every ten miles per hour of speed, going 65 on a busy road, when the GMC Jimmy in front of me completely and utterly stopped with no warning whatsoever, having crashed into the car in front of it, which had crashed into the car in front of IT, etc. for FIVE cars. And, having lightning quick reflexes ... no, REALLY, I’m a fast reactor ... I still found there was no way in HELL for me to stop.

I smacked into that giant vehicle at 65 miles an hour.

No injuries. Seat belts, folks. And from this lesson I have learned to NEVER tailgate.)

But I digress.

I am writing about the highway because the most horrible thing happened a couple of weeks ago.

I was driving north on the highway. As I’ve said, it’s pretty straight except for those curves over the tops of hills, so I could see something happening up the road as I crested a hill.

It was a two car accident. One car was in the middle of the road, front end smashed in, glass and metal scattered across the road. The other vehicle was off the road and down a grassy incline, overturned.

They were both SUVs. I was the fifth car on my side of the road to stop.

A couple of guys, a tall, lanky one and a shorter, stockier fellow, had gotten out of their cars. Tall Guy went to the car on the road. He looked through the driver’s window and did nothing. Just walked away.

Stocky Guy went down the incline to the overturned car. He looked through the window on the driver’s side. Then through a back window. Then walked around to the other side of the car and looked in.

Neither man made a move to open a door or to pull anyone out of the car. They did not move with any haste.

That made my blood run cold.

I knew everyone was dead.

Several times the two men went back to look into the cars, but they made no moves other than to peer inside.

By now there were cars and trucks behind me, stretching back down the road and around the curve of the hill. The other side of the road was filling up, too.

Some cars began pulling out and crossing over the road to bypass the wreckage on the shoulder.

I heard sirens of an ambulance and feared it couldn’t get past all the cars which were blocking the road in both directions. It did some fancy maneuvering and got through. I stayed riveted to my spot, watching. The EMTs got out of the ambulance and rushed to the cars, looked in, and ... did nothing.

I felt queasy and incredibly sad.

Next the sirens of the fire engine. Same procedure. Blocked road, maneuvering, jumping off of firemen, looking in cars. Doing nothing.

Jason Smith / Shawnee News-Star

I stayed for some time until I finally began feeling like I had to let it go and leave. By now a patrol car was waving us around the car in the middle of the road and I carefully proceeded past that wreck and craned my neck to see the person or people in the car.

And this is what I saw.

I saw the auburn hair, the top of a woman’s head, laid against the driver’s window. She wasn’t moving at all. And even in that brief second or two of watching her, I could tell that there was no more life in her body.

Just the top of her head. The crown of her auburn hair.

I went home shaken to my core.

The next day I read about it in the paper.

Four people had died. The auburn haired woman had crossed into the other lane and had hit another car, carrying a husband, his wife and their eight month old granddaughter.

The baby was in a car seat, but no one else was wearing a seat belt.

This all happened a few days after another accident I had read about in the paper. That accident that time had killed three passengers—a sheriff, his pregnant wife, and a toddler.

No one was wearing seat belts.

A SHERIFF! His PREGNANT wife! No seat belts.

It happens a lot. It is always about not wearing seat belts.

Always.

I am filled with sadness and ANGER!

And I feel that way every time I drive down the highway toward my house and see the three white crosses, a papa cross, a mama cross, and a baby cross, standing in the green grass, down that incline, off the shoulder of the road.

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