I was headed north on Rte 28 along a little stretch of about a mile between two stoplights. It was clear, just shy of 8 AM. The road is four lanes, two south bound and two north, undivided. On my left there is a neighborhood with an entrance about halfway between the two lights. The right is divided between an area of just demolished homes awaiting a new cluster of condos and an extended set of medical offices built around an extension of "Children's Hospital". A CVS pharmacy anchors the farthest end.
I'd just left the light and crested a hill approaching the entrance to the medical offices. I was the only vehicle in the northbound lanes while a handful of cars were heading toward me on my left in the southbound lanes. I noticed the black sports car come to the entrance of the subdivision casually at first. He came to a rolling stop and then started inching out. I thought, that's odd, and then suddenly he launched through a gap that only he could perceive in the oncoming southbound traffic.
Now here's where things slowed down/sped up, a gazillion jumbled thoughts all blasting into the ecstatic creases of my mind. Is he planning on merging next to me heading north? This isn't happening! He's going straight across to the offices! Oh my God, what's he doing? What's he doing! What's he doing!?!!
Within the space of an eternal second his car was directly in front of me. The last thing I saw before impact was his face sharply turned in my direction, extreme with shock and horror, the penny on the tracks in the grasp of the force of the northbound Acela Commuter Express about to be flattened.
My airbag deployed. And though I held onto the steering wheel, it clearing moved with a force not in my control. I felt the bounce of the curb and then a swift bone-rattling dropping to a walloping jolt as the downward pointing end of my truck slammed into the top of a concrete battlement framing a storm water culvert which launched it still forward with an abruptly altered momentum over a bed of large stones and then halfway up the inner side of the wide storm run. Full stop.
Take a breath. Listen. Airbag. Windshield cracked. Leg hurts. Wrists work. Ankles work. Door won't open. Take a breath. Did I just kill a man?
Seatbelt needs to be unbuckled first, try the door again. Lock broken. Okay. Try handle again and push. Door snaps open part way, enough room, and I get out. A man is running down the embankment. He has a cell phone.
"I'm Stanton," He says, "I'm a doctor. Are you okay?"
My leg is throbbing, but I can stand on it with no acute pain. I don't see any blood stain on my pants. My head is full of pressure--Blood Pressure, I think. I don't know what to say, so I said, "I think so."
He's on the cell phone and saying things about what happened. I hear "Air bags deployed...ambulatory...I'm a doctor...yes, EMS...." There are dsitant sirens, looming sirens, sirens out of nowhere, everywhere. Where am I? What just happened....
I now see a bit of the extent of the damage to my truck, and Stanton takes my arm gently and says that we have to get away from it. Little streams of smoke are rising up from within the crushed engine compartment.
"Can I walk to the top of the embankment? " he asks. I do just that with his help.
At the top, in the parking lot, I see the man I hit. He's lucid and walking and comes over to me and touches my hand with his briefly. I notice how wrinkled his fingers are I look into his eyes, he's so afraid. I almost cry, but I don't. We don't say anything. I want to think that my eyes soften toward him (my heart did), and I don't know what he's thinking, but I am thinking how good it is that he is alive. He limps a short distance away and sits, his right elbow cradled in his left hand. I never see him again.
The Fire truck and EMS ambulance arrive. It's a swarm of activity, everybody is calm and helpful, and then I'm on a stretcher and in the back of the ambulance. A policeman asks for my driver's license, and I give it to him. The BP cuff is on my upper arm; the medical "clothespin" is on my finger. Another EMT shows up in the doorway of the ambulance and hands me my glasses (OMG--I can't read without them and I never even realized I was no longer wearing them!), my brand new lunch bag (a gift received the previous evening at a Holiday Party. What an inaugural journey!), and a letter (A Christmas card actually that I thought I had mailed back in November, but must have fallen out of my bag and the force of the crash dislodged it from it's hiding place.)
Looking at it, I thought, "Better late than never."
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