At that moment, I was sure Brian was dead.
At that moment, I did not believe that he would be telling me his name, or struggling to his feet, or staining my hands with his blood as I struggled to restrain him and convince him to not run away. At that moment, time seemed to freeze into a solid mass, and my senses all emptied, and I knew only two things in certainty; that I needed to roll to a stop, and that I needed help.
I met Brian in the early morning hours at the bottom of the entrance ramp where the busy Rt. 30 flows onto the equally overworked southbound lanes of I-95 as they nick the northwest corner of the Boston bedroom city of Newton, MA. For most of the day and night, this interchange buzzes with activity, a motorized hive, where local commuters and long distance travelers reroute themselves along and across the Charles River east on their way into Boston, or west toward the outlying regions.
For most who use it, in it’s busiest hours, this intersection of stone and steel and water is nothing extraordinary, just another piece of roadway where risks are abstracts that only briefly cross one’s mind, and only then in the most challenging moments of traffic and weather and time: Inconsequential moments of everyday living that come and go, appear and dissolve; forgotten almost as quickly as they arrive.
But that wasn’t how it worked out for Brian.
Brian’s moment came in the quiet hours.
And my moments came shortly after, when I turned to accelerate down an entrance ramp, a common ordinary place, where suddenly and immediately, everything I was looking at, looked wrong. Instead of seeing what should have been empty roadways, the lanes before me were clogged with chaotic red smears of brake lights and reflections and sheet metal and slowly moving cars.
More confusing than the volume, were the patterns of the traffic itself. Arrhythmic bursts of motion, with cars cutting left and cutting right, braking and accelerating with no discernible common purpose. And underscoring all of it, the night air groaned oddly with haunting sounds of deceleration.
I wanted to believe I’d blundered into a construction delay, one of those miserable public works projects that, by design, appear in the middle of the night seemingly to mock the travelers they serve. But as I landed at the bottom of the ramp, I could see that the road ahead of me was clear. It was then that I began to hear the crunching noises of tires rolling over debris, and the awareness grew inside me that I was somewhere in middle of a terrible event.
To my left I watched as a car picked it’s way through a carpet of small pieces of glass and plastic and steel. I remember wondering how it was involved and if it was looking for a safe place to stop. Then it picked up speed and accelerated out my view. And as it passed, it revealed in it’s wake (to my astonishment) a human figure sprawled face down, alone and still, lying in the middle of the road.
With caution I rolled well forward, pulled onto the shoulder, and stepped from my car so I could get back to the being left lying there on the highway. I was hoping at that moment that things would not get any worse. But they did.
Because there, just fifteen feet away, lying in a shadowy patch of the pavement immediately before me, was yet another body.
I’m not sure to this day if I ever have, or ever will, see anything as lonely as the sight of that second figure lying by itself in the road like a thrown away toy. Behind us, lit by the glow of sodium vapor, cars were stopping and Samaritans were gathering and a commotion of assistance was building where the original motionless form still lay flat. But here, thirty yards forward into the darkness, another figure lay with a frightening stillness...out of sight, unnoticed, and, I believed, ...most likely dead.
Dread is an oppressively heavy sensation when you carry it towards it’s source, and as I carried it toward the figure on the ground I strained against what I knew I might be seeing when I got there. I leaned over, and reached out.
The figure moved and moaned, and to my surprise, began turning itself over until it reached an upright seated position. Propped up with legs crossed casually underneath like a child, I could see that it was a young man. Head down but aimed back up the road where the other victim lay, he continued to groan and mutter unintelligible words, and it was clear he was injured and in shock.
I began to speak to him, reciting long strings of horribly dumb cliches of which I cannot recall a single one. I know only that I wanted him to hear a voice and stay awake and stay calm and know that someone was with him, and that he was not alone.
He seemed to want to stand and I kept telling him not to, urging him to stay still and seated until proper help could arrive. But the more he regained consciousness, the more he persisted, until finally, with one adrenalized movement, he prevailed, and staggered to his feet.
For the first time, we were face to face.
He had lost an eye. That was certain. Or so I thought. The area where his left eye socket should have been was a huge mass of purple shredded flesh that was extending down from his forehead to his cheek. Eventually though, I could see that his eye was still in place, and that force trauma had only blocked my view of it with sections of rippled and torn forehead tissue that had swollen forward over his brow.
His mouth hung open and his jaw was slack, and I could see that most of his teeth had been broken off. Every patch of exposed skin was peppered with abrasions. Blood seemed to be coming from everywhere. I continued to talk to him, hoping that I could engage him and calm him and convince him to sit back down. I just wanted him to sit back down. He was starting to panic, and I just wanted him to sit back down. I asked him his name.
“Brian.” he said. And then he loudly announced, “I have to go home.”
He turned and started to move away, trying to run. I grabbed his sleeve. He pulled even harder to escape. “I have to go! I have to go!” he insisted, pressing his intention to run himself across the median and straight into the oncoming traffic which, in the midst of all this madness, had yet to slow down. “C’mon Brian”, I argued. “You can’t leave. You’ve got to stay. You’ve got to stay here. You need help.”. By now both of my hands were clutching the front of his jacket which was soaked with blood. We pulled and shuffled and pushed to our own intents, stepping through a twitchy almost comically macabre dance, like drunks on a rolling pebbled floor.
For what felt like hours, nobody seemed to realize that we were there. And then mercifully, came the sound of sirens and footsteps.
From behind me someone approached. It was a stranger, a civilian, someone I never got the chance to look at or engage, but a being who’s added presence and confident voice at that moment helped to calm and convince Brian to settle down. He began to comply. The danger lessened, but I never let go, and I never broke eye contact with Brian until the eternity ended and a State Trooper walked up to us, and to my great relief I was able to deliver Brian to the safety of a professional.
“This is Brian.” I said to the Trooper. “He needs your help.” He shined a flashlight into Brian’s face. “Can you walk” he asked, and Brian nodded. Taking Brian’s arm, they were gone, off to the ambulance that had just then arrived.
In the confusion the stranger too, disappeared before I could ever identify and thank him for the good that he had done. His help had made all the difference, and I will always be grateful.
Only after I’d handed Brian over did I realized that I still had no clear idea of what had happened. It wasn’t until I’d wandered back to the crash site that I was able to put things together.
A car had lost control, struck the center median, and had gone tumbling airborne. It had eventually launched itself high enough in the air that it struck the I-90 overpass, flipping itself back down into a postage stamp sized space stuffed between a guardrail and the concrete bridge support in the center of the highway. By the time it landed, on the other side of the abutment and facing backwards, it had been flattened lengthwise, as if a giant had picked it up and clapped it patty-cake style between it’s hands. It seemed certain that anybody strapped into that car could not have survived. The two injured men had avoided being crushed only by being ejected as the car tumbled through the air.
The last I saw of Brian he was being treated in the back of an ambulance. He was alert and conscious. I never saw, or heard of him again.
The next day I searched the newspaper for any story reporting the accident, but could find no mention. It’s possible I missed it, but more likely the story was simply not reported, which in it’s own way, was a good thing. A fatal car accident would certainly have been noted, but a non-fatal single car accident with two injured, no photos, and minimal traffic disruption at 3am on a Sunday morning could easily have slipped through the cracks in local journalism. These were still the infancy days of the Internet, long before the rise of citizen journalism the instant information luxury of Twitter.
Then again, perhaps selfishly, perhaps too easily, I embraced the absence of reporting as an emotional opportunity, and moved on.
But these days, many years removed from that night, I still find myself thinking about it. The moments frozen, the event, and my unexpected, unwanted role within it. In part, that is because when facing it directly, it’s easy to imagine oneself a victim; the body in the road, injured and alone and needing the most basic of human needs. Then too, it is because, simply, I am as flawed as I am fixated, and I flatter myself at times with a deceit of conceit that when the time came, I was caring enough to at least try to respond to the crisis before me with some level of action, with some level of compassion.
Which of course, is only slightly true. I was acting out of instinct. I wasn’t making value judgements. I was faking it.
And so what is instead perhaps the more significant self-perception here, is the humbling, sometimes overwhelming sense of irony that has forever framed my memories of that night, and the images that have stuck in my head. Irony that has since ever-tainted any silly self-notions that I’m a person of empathy and compassion and caring.
Irony, because the truth is, that night, before I had stumbled upon that terrible scene, I had spent eight hours wishing that it would appear before me. I had just worked a full but uneventful work shift, riding along with a New Hampshire State Trooper, sitting in the passenger seat, working as a cameraman assigned to photograph and document the duties of that trooper for a reality television series that portrayed the daily routines of working street cops. Routines that sometimes included risk, or ridiculousness, or violence, or human tragedies. Tragedies such as those that come from awful car wrecks on empty roads in the middle of the lonely nights.
Irony because my goal had been to capture a lasting image, but instead, with my work day done and my camera put away, a lasting image had captured me.
Irony because I hadn’t wished for a tragedy to occur. I’d wished to be there if one did. And now,
...I was.
And irony, finally, because when the moment arrived, and my wish had come true,
...I wished it never had.
© 2013 J. Mark Rast
At that moment, I did not believe that he would be telling me his name, or struggling to his feet, or staining my hands with his blood as I struggled to restrain him and convince him to not run away. At that moment, time seemed to freeze into a solid mass, and my senses all emptied, and I knew only two things in certainty; that I needed to roll to a stop, and that I needed help.
I met Brian in the early morning hours at the bottom of the entrance ramp where the busy Rt. 30 flows onto the equally overworked southbound lanes of I-95 as they nick the northwest corner of the Boston bedroom city of Newton, MA. For most of the day and night, this interchange buzzes with activity, a motorized hive, where local commuters and long distance travelers reroute themselves along and across the Charles River east on their way into Boston, or west toward the outlying regions.
For most who use it, in it’s busiest hours, this intersection of stone and steel and water is nothing extraordinary, just another piece of roadway where risks are abstracts that only briefly cross one’s mind, and only then in the most challenging moments of traffic and weather and time: Inconsequential moments of everyday living that come and go, appear and dissolve; forgotten almost as quickly as they arrive.
But that wasn’t how it worked out for Brian.
Brian’s moment came in the quiet hours.
And my moments came shortly after, when I turned to accelerate down an entrance ramp, a common ordinary place, where suddenly and immediately, everything I was looking at, looked wrong. Instead of seeing what should have been empty roadways, the lanes before me were clogged with chaotic red smears of brake lights and reflections and sheet metal and slowly moving cars.
More confusing than the volume, were the patterns of the traffic itself. Arrhythmic bursts of motion, with cars cutting left and cutting right, braking and accelerating with no discernible common purpose. And underscoring all of it, the night air groaned oddly with haunting sounds of deceleration.
I wanted to believe I’d blundered into a construction delay, one of those miserable public works projects that, by design, appear in the middle of the night seemingly to mock the travelers they serve. But as I landed at the bottom of the ramp, I could see that the road ahead of me was clear. It was then that I began to hear the crunching noises of tires rolling over debris, and the awareness grew inside me that I was somewhere in middle of a terrible event.
To my left I watched as a car picked it’s way through a carpet of small pieces of glass and plastic and steel. I remember wondering how it was involved and if it was looking for a safe place to stop. Then it picked up speed and accelerated out my view. And as it passed, it revealed in it’s wake (to my astonishment) a human figure sprawled face down, alone and still, lying in the middle of the road.
With caution I rolled well forward, pulled onto the shoulder, and stepped from my car so I could get back to the being left lying there on the highway. I was hoping at that moment that things would not get any worse. But they did.
Because there, just fifteen feet away, lying in a shadowy patch of the pavement immediately before me, was yet another body.
I’m not sure to this day if I ever have, or ever will, see anything as lonely as the sight of that second figure lying by itself in the road like a thrown away toy. Behind us, lit by the glow of sodium vapor, cars were stopping and Samaritans were gathering and a commotion of assistance was building where the original motionless form still lay flat. But here, thirty yards forward into the darkness, another figure lay with a frightening stillness...out of sight, unnoticed, and, I believed, ...most likely dead.
Dread is an oppressively heavy sensation when you carry it towards it’s source, and as I carried it toward the figure on the ground I strained against what I knew I might be seeing when I got there. I leaned over, and reached out.
The figure moved and moaned, and to my surprise, began turning itself over until it reached an upright seated position. Propped up with legs crossed casually underneath like a child, I could see that it was a young man. Head down but aimed back up the road where the other victim lay, he continued to groan and mutter unintelligible words, and it was clear he was injured and in shock.
I began to speak to him, reciting long strings of horribly dumb cliches of which I cannot recall a single one. I know only that I wanted him to hear a voice and stay awake and stay calm and know that someone was with him, and that he was not alone.
He seemed to want to stand and I kept telling him not to, urging him to stay still and seated until proper help could arrive. But the more he regained consciousness, the more he persisted, until finally, with one adrenalized movement, he prevailed, and staggered to his feet.
For the first time, we were face to face.
He had lost an eye. That was certain. Or so I thought. The area where his left eye socket should have been was a huge mass of purple shredded flesh that was extending down from his forehead to his cheek. Eventually though, I could see that his eye was still in place, and that force trauma had only blocked my view of it with sections of rippled and torn forehead tissue that had swollen forward over his brow.
His mouth hung open and his jaw was slack, and I could see that most of his teeth had been broken off. Every patch of exposed skin was peppered with abrasions. Blood seemed to be coming from everywhere. I continued to talk to him, hoping that I could engage him and calm him and convince him to sit back down. I just wanted him to sit back down. He was starting to panic, and I just wanted him to sit back down. I asked him his name.
“Brian.” he said. And then he loudly announced, “I have to go home.”
He turned and started to move away, trying to run. I grabbed his sleeve. He pulled even harder to escape. “I have to go! I have to go!” he insisted, pressing his intention to run himself across the median and straight into the oncoming traffic which, in the midst of all this madness, had yet to slow down. “C’mon Brian”, I argued. “You can’t leave. You’ve got to stay. You’ve got to stay here. You need help.”. By now both of my hands were clutching the front of his jacket which was soaked with blood. We pulled and shuffled and pushed to our own intents, stepping through a twitchy almost comically macabre dance, like drunks on a rolling pebbled floor.
For what felt like hours, nobody seemed to realize that we were there. And then mercifully, came the sound of sirens and footsteps.
From behind me someone approached. It was a stranger, a civilian, someone I never got the chance to look at or engage, but a being who’s added presence and confident voice at that moment helped to calm and convince Brian to settle down. He began to comply. The danger lessened, but I never let go, and I never broke eye contact with Brian until the eternity ended and a State Trooper walked up to us, and to my great relief I was able to deliver Brian to the safety of a professional.
“This is Brian.” I said to the Trooper. “He needs your help.” He shined a flashlight into Brian’s face. “Can you walk” he asked, and Brian nodded. Taking Brian’s arm, they were gone, off to the ambulance that had just then arrived.
In the confusion the stranger too, disappeared before I could ever identify and thank him for the good that he had done. His help had made all the difference, and I will always be grateful.
Only after I’d handed Brian over did I realized that I still had no clear idea of what had happened. It wasn’t until I’d wandered back to the crash site that I was able to put things together.
A car had lost control, struck the center median, and had gone tumbling airborne. It had eventually launched itself high enough in the air that it struck the I-90 overpass, flipping itself back down into a postage stamp sized space stuffed between a guardrail and the concrete bridge support in the center of the highway. By the time it landed, on the other side of the abutment and facing backwards, it had been flattened lengthwise, as if a giant had picked it up and clapped it patty-cake style between it’s hands. It seemed certain that anybody strapped into that car could not have survived. The two injured men had avoided being crushed only by being ejected as the car tumbled through the air.
The last I saw of Brian he was being treated in the back of an ambulance. He was alert and conscious. I never saw, or heard of him again.
The next day I searched the newspaper for any story reporting the accident, but could find no mention. It’s possible I missed it, but more likely the story was simply not reported, which in it’s own way, was a good thing. A fatal car accident would certainly have been noted, but a non-fatal single car accident with two injured, no photos, and minimal traffic disruption at 3am on a Sunday morning could easily have slipped through the cracks in local journalism. These were still the infancy days of the Internet, long before the rise of citizen journalism the instant information luxury of Twitter.
Then again, perhaps selfishly, perhaps too easily, I embraced the absence of reporting as an emotional opportunity, and moved on.
But these days, many years removed from that night, I still find myself thinking about it. The moments frozen, the event, and my unexpected, unwanted role within it. In part, that is because when facing it directly, it’s easy to imagine oneself a victim; the body in the road, injured and alone and needing the most basic of human needs. Then too, it is because, simply, I am as flawed as I am fixated, and I flatter myself at times with a deceit of conceit that when the time came, I was caring enough to at least try to respond to the crisis before me with some level of action, with some level of compassion.
Which of course, is only slightly true. I was acting out of instinct. I wasn’t making value judgements. I was faking it.
And so what is instead perhaps the more significant self-perception here, is the humbling, sometimes overwhelming sense of irony that has forever framed my memories of that night, and the images that have stuck in my head. Irony that has since ever-tainted any silly self-notions that I’m a person of empathy and compassion and caring.
Irony, because the truth is, that night, before I had stumbled upon that terrible scene, I had spent eight hours wishing that it would appear before me. I had just worked a full but uneventful work shift, riding along with a New Hampshire State Trooper, sitting in the passenger seat, working as a cameraman assigned to photograph and document the duties of that trooper for a reality television series that portrayed the daily routines of working street cops. Routines that sometimes included risk, or ridiculousness, or violence, or human tragedies. Tragedies such as those that come from awful car wrecks on empty roads in the middle of the lonely nights.
Irony because my goal had been to capture a lasting image, but instead, with my work day done and my camera put away, a lasting image had captured me.
Irony because I hadn’t wished for a tragedy to occur. I’d wished to be there if one did. And now,
...I was.
And irony, finally, because when the moment arrived, and my wish had come true,
...I wished it never had.
© 2013 J. Mark Rast
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