The Accident
The accident occurred at 7:45 AM in
heavy fog on the remote and sinuous stretch of interstate that runs between
Capon and Norristown.
The truck, eastbound with a load of strawberries, swerved out of its lane to
avoid a stalled car, jack-knifed across the road and came to rest on its side,
Three dozen other vehicles following behind were involved in the subsequent
chain reaction. The relative inaccessibility of the spot, in a valley deeply
shadowed by towering hills on either side (you are familiar with the
area?), and the sheer complexity of the accident itself severely hampered
rescue and removal operations so that, by eleven, when the sun had burned away
the last traces of obscuring fog, upwards of fifteen hundred vehicles, their
engines off, their whistling tires silenced, immobile, stretched back toward
Capon in a solid mass, as if frozen in a dream.
At first the stranded motorists were
angry and restive. They could not be blamed for this. After all, appointments
were being missed, delivery schedules disrupted, business meetings unkept,
vacations delayed and all without a word of explanation to those waiting beyond
the wreck, for, owing to the high surrounding hills, there was no cell service,
no easy means of communication, no way of rescheduling the meetings or saving
the business deals or extending the hotel reservations or reassuring the
worried relatives. So there were shouts and curses and the broken roar of horns
washing over the great line of cars like some gigantic wave smashing itself to
pieces on a line of breakers, furious and frustrated at the impenetrable
solidity of the obstacle in its path. The cars closest to the huge tangle of
wreckage did not behave in this fashion, of course, as the drivers of these
could see how serious was the matter, were aware that there were most probably
dead and injured and that the mess itself, the massive interlocked metallic
tangle, would take some considerable time to clear even after the human effects
of the tragedy had been dealt with. These drivers, then, left their cars and
did what little they could to give first aid until, an hour or so after the
crash, the first medical units arrived by helicopter. The honking and the
shouting and the cursing, then, came from farther back along the line, from those
cars whose drivers, lacking insight, a clear vantage point, could know nothing
except that they seemed irrevocably delayed.
In time this too stopped. Someone up
front retained enough presence of mind to start a message on its way back
down the line: a terrible accident, some serious injuries, road blocked, a long
delay. Each driver left his car and walked back to inform the motorist behind
him and so on, relay fashion, all the way down, so that within two hours
everyone had at least this rough sketch of the event that had immobilized them.
This seemed to quiet their anger and had the additional benefit of starting a
flurry of conversations so that the motorists, accepting their impotence to
dissolve this frustrating blockage, turned their attention instead to ways of
occupying their time.
Some slept, reclining in the seats of
their autos or searching out some shaded piece of grass along the roadway.
Others, more active by temperament, organized impromptu football games or
played a kind of lazy catch with bright plastic saucers. Lovers, some young,
some not so young, walked hand in hand in the warm spring air, many of them
barefoot, shirts off, pants rolled up to take the benefit of the sun. Older
women gathered in small groups to gossip, commiserating with the poor wretches
whose bodies lay trapped in the unseen wreckage ahead or exchanging stories
about their intended destinations and their spoiled plans or worrying about
their grandchildren, who must certainly by now be somewhat alarmed. Card games
sprang up. Here and there someone lugged out a guitar or a portable radio and
there were little knots of music up and down the line. People read books or
magazines or newspapers and chatted and argued (for by mid-day the sun overhead
had become quite hot). Some, who had been on their way to one of the picnic
spots upstate when the accident stopped them, brought out their hampers and
their coolers of beer and soft drinks and had their lunches beside the road or
up on one of the small hillocks. Many simply idled about, irritable and
disaffected. One old man died of a stroke and another, younger, of a knife
wound, perhaps after a trivial argument or something of the sort. In this way
the time passed.
By seven that evening the wreck had
been cleared away, the road opened and people returned to their vehicles. The
long line began to move, like some slumbering animal waking from a hibernation,
and within an hour all conditions were normal again. Any impartial observer who
had taken note of the day's events and who strolled now among the detritus of
papers and scraps of food and discarded bottles and forgotten blankets or
shirts or shoes might have been moved to conclude that this multitude of souls,
these pilgrims stranded by an inexplicable caprice, had constructed in some
dumb, instinctive fashion, a grotesque parody of what might be called a
culture, a civilization.
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