Emerging from the wreckage

A week that began in a car wreck ends with Hope.

I have been steadily working up an article that is going to be “My Anti-Bucket List,” a cataloguing – with notes – of the various things I have not done in life and yet have no great desire to achieve in the years left. Unfortunately, I can now scratch “getting in a major car accident” off that list.

It happened last Saturday (August 17), on the drive to Burlington, VT, with my partner Paula, to spend three nights with my older son Campbell. He’s been living there over a decade and I’ve been going to the city regularly since 2009, so it’s safe to say it’s a drive I’ve done dozens of times before. Particularly coming back south, I’ve done it in all kinds of adverse conditions, including after a long day’s skiing way up in Jay Peak, and at the end of a Father’s Day of climbing and hiking; I’ve done it in snowstorms, rainstorms, at night and sometimes all three. Over the course of 40  years  of driving in multiple countries across several continents, including long road trips in RVs, tour vans and just a few weeks back, a shorter day in an unwieldy U-Haul truck, I figure I have logged over a million miles.

As such, to come off a familiar road in normal conditions, in the middle of the day, at the going speed, having already made two stops in two hours to hydrate, caffeinate, urinate and buy those wonderful gluten free vegan cookies that Campbell loves so much, seems utterly perverse, nonsensical - indeed, thoroughly illogical - but there is a reason they are called “accidents,” and barely a mile before the Vermont Welcome Center, which I had planned as our next stop, come off the road I did.

Fortunately, I came off to our side, so no other cars were involved. Unfortunately, it was far from a smooth derailment, and we ended up in a ditch, mercifully coming to a crashing, crushing, tire-busting halt before either flipping or hitting an especially large inanimate object such as a major tree trunk or lamp post. I was able to clamber out of my side, but the ditch angled down to the right and Paula was immobilized both by the car’s leaning position and the impact. Though I was in shock, it’s absolutely fair to presume all my immediate thoughts were with her.

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As a writer, I like to tell stories. Sometimes in doing so, I can make mine sound more dramatic than they other people’s similar tales. So to be clear, I have driven past far worse scenes than ours, and stopping back at the tow center a few days later to collect all the possessions from my totaled Toyota, confirmed as much. The Prius was a state – and it stank inside from the explosion of our brand new cooler’s contents, mainly leftovers from the previous weekend’s housewarming gathering – but none so bad as some other wrecks on the lot. With over 42,000 deaths on the US roads last year, chances are you know - you knew - someone who did not survive their own accident or crash. Us, we were “only” hospitalized one night, “only” got one fracture apiece. Mine is a fractured sternum, hers is a lower back compress fracture, and though it’s been a hell of a physically painful week, much more so for Paula I believe than myself, our wounds, we are assured, should self-heal.¹

So, in some ways this is just me writing another story, in part because that’s what I do, and also perhaps for therapy. I now know that until you’ve been in the midst of those few seconds during which you are seemingly helpless to a vehicle’s forward momentum and motion; until you climb from a wreck or are pulled from it; and until you have that trauma of revisiting your car, collecting its contents and stripping the plates from it because it won’t be driven again, you don’t know that those few seconds are so much more frightening than any movie ever emulates. If you’ve been there you now have my empathy as well as my sympathy; if you have not been there, I hope you never do.

On his last morning with me before returning to mom’s for the end of summer, my younger son Noel watched the long-form interview between Stephen Colbert and Nick Cave, in which the singer talked about losing one son to a (non-vehicular) accident at the age of 15, and losing another, aged 31, to undisclosed causes in 2022. In this interview (above, at around 15 minutes in), Cave explains how he has come out the other side seeing the world

“not as a cruel place but as an extraordinarily, systemically beautiful place to live in.”

Similarly, I saw much of the goodness that exists even as the incident was unfolding. By the time I was out of the car, other vehicles had stopped, calls to 911 had been made, and we were quickly being monitored by a husband-and-wife doctor duo who just happened to be driving by, a process that included gently pulling Paula across the seats as seemed necessary to check her vitals. I never got to thank them; I am sure they saw it as part of their civic duty. I don’t know if the Fire Department were volunteers, but their aid in getting us safely to hospital was thoroughly appreciated. That hospital, Rutland (VT) Regional General Hospital, was excellent, the staff running us separately through CT scans, determining our injuries, and keeping us in overnight and long enough into the next day to ensure there were no further complications beyond our fractures.²

I had been especially excited about this particular trip to Burlington as Campbell has a new female partner; we got to meet Teagan when they kindly undertook the two-hour drive on Saturday to offer us some collective TLC (and bring me vegan snacks), and I felt true joy even in that hospital bed seeing my older son show so much love to and affection for and with his new partner. We got to witness it again when they came and collected us the next day, this time bringing us clothes to change into, and ensuring we had the most comfortable time we could in Burlington before I could gingerly undertake the journey back home (in a replacement vehicle courtesy of the insurance).

I also got to truly witness the love my older son has for his father. He’s been out of the house eleven years now, and as such, he has followed my other recent mishaps from a distance; this was the first time he was called on as some kind of primary support and he delivered in every way capable and possible. I was truly rejuvenated by his presence around me. His wonderful landlords, a couple barely his age who keep a guest room for people like ourselves, were their usual happy-go-lucky supportive team, and fully understanding that on this occasion we were spending more time in their house than out and about.

I love Vermont in general, Burlington in particular. It’s a fantastically pretty city set on a lovely Lake (Champlain), a city built for the outdoor lifestyle. That is why I’ve run the marathon there three times, trail races nearby also, done the Race to the Roof of Vermont a couple of times, and rate its ski slopes as the best in the East. The marathon I was signed up for next weekend, by Lake Ontario, will have to wait a year, as will any hopes of making the Boston Marathon once more. My love for running will not, and another post reflecting that love will go up in 24 hours.

But back to Vermont. With a substantial Nepalese population, Burlington is the best place I know of in the US for Nepali food, and Paula has now been introduced to the joys of thukpas and momos. Vermont is also the best State in the Union for microbrews – that’s barely a subjective opinion – and on Monday afternoon, as Paula rested, I shuffled out in the rain half a mile onto Church Street to watch the Premier League match between Leicester and Tottenham at a bar there with a Cone Head IPA and some curried chips/fries in front of me. It felt like a guilty pleasure, but on reflection, it’s nothing to feel guilty about at all, because man, those beers and fries tasted sweet! Nor do I feel bad that over the course of this week, between a lack of usual exercise and a surfeit of such comfort food, I put on a few pounds/couple of kilos. There are plenty who would say that’s probably a good thing!

As well as being a talented artist, Campbell is an encyclopedia of information about natural history, and especially animals of all shapes and sizes (the combination of which might explain why he is working on a successor to Spore, entitled Critterarium) and evenings were accordingly spent watching Ze Frank videos, and David Attenborough documentaries. It doesn’t take long for any such nature footage to remind us that for those who are not on top of the food chain, the world is indeed cruel, and whatever life that exists within this universe we still know so little about, all too short-lived.

(I have, however, chosen a more light-hearted example for the clip below. Nature never ceases to astound me.)

I have never fully understood why that universe supplied me with an everlasting Energizer battery and a positive mentality, but it’s all I know and I am grateful for it. I understand how fortunate we were to emerge from the wreckage, to have minimal injuries in the scheme of things, and I’m aware that we got immediate access to health care that is not easily available in many other countries where I have driven – or more worryingly, been driven (crazy) by people whose hands I did not feel safe entrusting my life in. Though I’m wary of tempting fate, at this point both the NY No-Fault medical insurance and my car insurance seem to be doing what they are meant to be doing, and while I was not exactly in the market for a replacement car at this point, and will have to dip into retirement-intended savings to get back on the road, it looks like I may at least receive fair market value for the old one. I will miss my Toyota Prius 2010 Hybrid; it was a fine car and it did its job.

And yes, we were wearing seatbelts. The EKG technician at the hospital admitted to me that he does not; I fail to understand his reasoning.

As a driver, a cyclist, a runner, and a keen pedestrian, I fully understand the dangers of the road from all perspectives. Our home city of Kingston lost two high school seniors to a vehicular accident this winter, one of whom my high school teaching Paula knew very well from the classroom; the students’ car just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an unspeakable tragedy that cast a pall over the entire school year and the community at large, and a perilous reminder of our fragility. Similarly, Kingston had three cyclists killed by motor cars within a year recently, and as a result, I only ride for recreation, and carefully so when I do. The first months of this calendar year saw several pedestrians killed in the Hudson Valley in hit-and-run incidents; one of the victims was a Rock Academy alumni, whose killer was ultimately caught and, by coincidence, sentenced this very week: not only did she flee the scene of the crime, leaving the poor young girl dying by the roadside, but she faked a subsequent accident as a cover-up, to which her husband was also a party. Their sentences seem woefully inadequate to me, a terrible reflection of how little the law truly values and protects pedestrians.

An American Journey indeed. Retrieved from my new neighborhood Little Library. Being devoured nightly as part of My Summer Reading List.

Such cases test one’s faith in humanity, but I refuse to concede that ground. The alternative – to view humanity as inherently selfish, to see life as a battleground for which we need to come fully armed with aggression – not only flies against the actual evidence, but it flies against the qualities that take us forward as a human race. (I speak as someone who backpacked the world with wife and kid in 2016, and almost universally witnessed only kindness and friendship.) Most of us have an innate sense of right and wrong and act accordingly. We show generosity and kindness. We welcome diversity and inclusion. We believe in the power of positive thinking, we believe in the concept of hope.

As such, it was additionally reassuring that our dramatic week should coincide with the Democratic National Convention, where the Obamas renewed that “Hope” buzzword from 2008 in their speeches, and Tim Walz went one better, having named his daughter Hope for fertility reasons, as he explained from the stage. Those who witnessed the tearful pride and love his teenage son Gus demonstrated from the audience during said speech, assuming they don’t have veins made of ice, and certainly if they have been parents themselves, surely cried along. But I think that in shedding my own tears, they are also in relief that the USA’s potential descent into fascism may yet be forestalled, that the crisis of Joe Biden’s age did indeed present an opportunity, that that opportunity has been seized, and that a newly reinvigorated Left is rallying behind a Presidential ticket of Walz supporting Kamala Harris, one that better reflects the better aspects of a diverse and caring United States that wants to get better.

I’ll get better soon. And I am sure Paula will get better soon enough. (As Tim Walz said on Wednesday night, “Never underestimate a public school teacher.”) Collectively, as communities and countries alike, I truly believe we can all get better together. Personally, I have just started a new life in a new house with a new partner, and this world… well, as Nick Cave says, it’s a systemically beautiful place to live in. Expect further missives to reflect as much.

Your truly, in his son’s clothes, Burlington VT, August 2024.

1. Interestingly, my tinnitus has been raging all week, where I had previously come to live with it as a manageable background noise. There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that equates tinnitus level with stress, and as I noted from my own research of scientific research, ibuprofen seems to be one thing that can exacerbate it. Choosing not to be discharged with heavy duty prescription pills (Paula similarly), I was encouraged instead to pound the ibu and aceto as much I needed for a week or two.

2. I watched the first Crystal Palace match of the season from my hospital bed; fortunately it was on a universal channel. Equally fortunately, they came prodding me and analyzing me during the second half, so a first defeat of the season was a little easier to be distracted from.