On Saturday, I saw a Golden Gopher nearly ruin my afternoon by racing down the field for a touchdown to open the second half. It took 21 seconds.
On Sunday morning, I missed a photo opportunity with Carol Marin because my digital camera didn’t reset in time. That lasted about ten seconds.
On Sunday evening, I saw a semi-truck collide with another in the next lane of traffic and speed off the road into a 50-foot embankment. It took three seconds to watch. It could easily have taken the rest of my life.
We departed northside Chicago about four in the afternoon, concluding the annual trip to the Windy City for the marathon. With Amy driving us out of town and back home to Indiana, my job was straightforward although seldom simple: make the ride as pleasant as possible for a little baby boy strapped into place behind the driver. With the assistance of a ladybug puppet and an active weekend of train-hopping, I completed my task in short order. It wasn’t long before I nodded off myself.
Carter activated his little alarm some time later, an indication he was threatening to wake up from his rare car-seat nap. I awoke to his cries just in time to rub his head and settle the boy back into unconsciousness. Groggy, I spent a little time getting my bearings on the trip in progress.
Somewhere near Purdue. Sunlight fading into dusk. Amy commenting on making great time. Up ahead, traffic crawling into a construction zone (apparently a built-in feature for this stretch of Indiana roadway). In the right lane next to us, a Tombstone Pizza trailer truck inched forward behind what I assumed to be a long clog of vehicles.
I looked at the back of that semi about two or three car lengths ahead of us. I gazed past it into a rolling meadow. Amy made a comment about someone coming in awfully fast, adjusting my attention to her for a moment. I looked back toward the pizza truck and watched a second semi run full-speed toward the trailer doors, veering off onto the shoulder after dislodging a steel strut from the slow-moving vehicle.
I blink.
Same slow line of moving cars ahead of us. The same slow-moving pizza truck up ahead to our right. Save for a few hundred frozen pizzas and chunks of steel, nothing seemed to have changed in the last three seconds.
Of course, everything has changed. Out of sight, a truck driver from Cicero has been flung from his cab just far enough to avoid being crushed by it. His six-year-old son, napping near his father just moments before, now lay hidden from view beneath the wreckage. Slumped over in his cab, the pizza truck driver tries to clear his mind and assess injuries to his neck and back. And in my mind, a haunting image of a red Honda CRV sandwiched in between two semis. Out of sight, not out of mind.
As I type, I think of Ross of NBC-TV’s “Friends” who thought the backfiring of a car was a gunshot aimed at him. Maybe it is an exaggeration to classify our I-65 close encounter as a “near-death experience.” No one has died from the crash; both the father and son are in critical condition but alive in a Lafayette hospital. Like Ross, I find myself dwelling on the potential disaster rather than the reality that got us home, together and all in one piece.
I don’t like driving as a general rule. I’m not sure when that happened — sometime between college and Louisiana, I think. I find it inefficient, no longer bringing me the adrenaline rush it once did when my windows were rolled down and my radio blared Doobie Brothers tunes. When I do drive, though, I gravitate toward the right lane in heavy traffic. Let the more aggressive drivers try to claw their way further up the pack. For me, it’s the safety of the lane nearest the exit.
The right lane. Not the correct lane. Not on Sunday night just north of Lafayette, Indiana southbound on I-65. Had I been driving, one of my little voices is all too anxious to point out, I would have been mixed in with the frozen pizza on the interstate. Not just me, that voice adds. My mother-in-law. My wife. And probably — despite the best innovations in child safety — my 8-month-old son.
Questions abound. Will the truck driver survive and drive his son around in his big rig some future fall? Is the Cicero driver at fault? Did his breaks fail? What was he thinking as his semi twisted into that ravine? Do the paramedics who happened to be driving in the vicinity of the accident see this kind of thing all of the time? Does it affect them? Did the drivers just up ahead even notice? Did the numerous drivers who also witnessed this disaster feel lucky or impatient or angry or indifferent as they weaved their cars through the obstacles and out of reach? Does anyone else think to himself, “That could have been me. That REALLY could have been me?”
It all happened just 24 hours ago, so I don’t know the ending. It almost feels like a beginning. Of what, only time will tell.