The Start of It
A friend of D’s wife G says there’s been a bad accident. “That’s all I know,” she says, “except that it happened on Rte. 15 and Laurel Road.” She lowers her voice as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. “D is in surgery right now as I’m telling you this. G is at the hospital. Their kids are on their way.”
A Bit of It
Hours later, a posted photo of the accident site on Facebook shows one car destroyed, the front end crushed, the rest damaged by fire. D’s car is farther down the four-lane highway, twisted sideways and pressed against a guardrail. “Whoever was driving the less damaged car,” the poster writes, “is the one who was seriously injured.”
A Glimpse of It
In the comments that scroll below, a familiar name says she’s so sorry she didn’t recognize D’s car as she was slowly passing by in the one open lane. “All I thought was how awful it must have been by the look of the car that hit him, how fast it must have been flying down that hill to have its engine explode like that.”
Some of It
The following day, an electronic newspaper article reports that it’s still undetermined how it happened, but the elderly driver of the car that was struck while attempting to cross Rte. 15 was entrapped for two hours, that after being extracted, he was life-flighted to the hospital. “After extensive surgery, he is listed in critical condition. The other driver, nineteen, escaped serious injury even though his car was demolished and caught fire.”
More of It
The detailed police report, when released a week later, is one short paragraph. In three sentences, it declares that there is no evidence that the uninjured driver was speeding. That he was not impaired by drugs or alcohol. It concludes by saying that the retired professor, who has died despite two major surgeries, pulled from a side road and attempted to cross two lanes of highway with “insufficient clearance.”
The Rest of It
Because the retired professor was more than forty years a close friend, the report’s absence of detail magnifies the immediacy of his sudden absence. There is nothing revealed about what was surely, mid-afternoon, on D’s car radio—an NPR showcase of classical music. No reassurance that his seat belt lay snug around his waist and against his chest where his heart kept its reliable pace. No mention that his vision was recently recorded as 20/20 after being restored to perfection by cataract surgery. That his trained, historian’s mind, supplemented by extensive research, was mid-way through producing another commissioned book. Not a word about the why of his choosing Laurel Road, the most unlikely route for haste or convenience or mileage saved. Not a phrase about his retiree’s love of finding an unusual rather than a shortest route to anywhere he had to drive for the errands that were within thirty miles of his home. No investigation into October’s temptation of leaves, D’s annual self-guided motor tour where ash, sycamore, maple, and beech synchronize into Pennsylvania’s spectrum upon one particular, brilliant hillside for a few hours, receiving the slanted light so perfectly that whatever errand D had could wait patiently in a neighboring town eight miles north of Laurel Road. No speculation about how, each autumn, one farmer sells cider by that roadside until October’s end, closing his stand’s produce season with something that might have held an old, faithful customer for conversation while he sampled a preview of the gallon discovered intact behind the driver’s-side seat. How that highly likely give-and-take affected timing to the smidgeon of a second when fate exclaimed “Now” as D accelerated across those two downhill lanes, the high-speed rural-area traffic light and intermittent, even what could be called “spotty” just after three p.m., NPR’s “Here and Now” begun, the sun behind him, the sky clear of clouds.
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Gary Fincke’s essay collection The Darkness Call won the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose (Pleaides Press 2018). Other collections have been published by Michigan State, Stephen F. Austin, and Madhat Press. Individual essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays 2020 and The Pushcart Prize XXV. In October, Madville Press will publish After Arson: New and Selected Essays.
Artwork by Dinty W. Moore