If you didn't know the road, one false calculation could swallow you.
All throughout town, people spoke in foreboding tones of its roller-coaster dips and turns, the absent lights and lane markings, the tangled forest hugging every bend. It was dangerous even for the stone-cold sober. Drunks were basically IEDs.
I was just about to leave after a 12-hour day when the report crackled over the scanner: Â Motor vehicle accident, two cars, possible entrapment -- on the infamous road. As if she could smell the blood, my editor asked if someone could go down there. I shot up my hand, grabbed my notebook and left.
At about 9:30 p.m, I was first to arrive. I parked at the southern mouth of the street in front of the barricades police had already set up, and proceeded down the road's steep first hill on foot. The cops made me turn around to wait by the barricades for an official statement. This meant one of two things: bad injury, or death. I edged toward the latter.
A reporter from a competing newspaper showed up next. Then, a camera guy from a local TV station. We paced and hovered like circling vulturesânot to relish the carnage, but to stalk the official confirmation. This was the job.
It stung to inhale. We chatted mindlessly in the dark. At least it passed the time and generated heat.
By 11 p.m., the other reporter bailed. Only the camera guy and I remained. At around midnight, I convinced him to push his luck and walk with me back down to the scene.
This time, no one stopped us. I found the fire chief, who relayed the official details: Two-car accident. Two men involved. One dead, the other highly intoxicated, sent to the hospital with minor injuries.
While he spoke, a mangled red car smoked in my periphery, a white sheet draped over a concave hole where the car roof used to be.
To this day, I don't know if the body had been removed at that point or not. I'd like to assume it had. Still, I'd never been that close to fresh death before. The death I recognized was enbalmed, sewn shut, dressed, dabbed with makeup and positioned properly. This time, nothing but thin, white tarp, thrown like dirty laundry, separated me from the remains of a newly snatched soul. Its wrinkled surface became a blank movie screen and my imagination the camera, playing one dismembered horror after another.
I thanked the fire chief, then left hurriedly, calling my editor on the way back to the car. As I drove off, my stomach churned. I crossed myself and said a prayer.
The next morning, I arrived at work dreading the next step.
I confirmed the name of the deceased with the police, then scanned the phone book, found the number and, swallowing hard, called the family.
A man answered. I told him I was sorry for his loss, and that I understood if he didn't want to talk to me, but I called because I wanted this man to be remembered as a bit more than just another victim of alcohol abuse.
Then, the floodgates opened. This didn't happen to often. But when it did, you knew to just listen.
I learned the deceased was a kind and generous man who just recently asked the love of his life to marry him. She'd happily said yes. His fiance had a teenaged son, with whom he'd forged a special bond. Before the accident, he'd been playing cards with the son at his fiance's house. Toward the end of their evening, he told the son out of the blue that if he were to die, he'd die happy, without regrets, because he now had everything he'd ever wanted in life.
A half hour later, death took him on the road home.
"Where is the son now?" I asked.
"I am the son," said the man. "I can't tell you how broken we are by this."
His voice carried so heavily, I would have never guessed it came from the mouth of a teenager.
I wondered if his youth might have been more recognizable the day before.
I thanked the son for his time, and wrote the follow-up story.
The next day, just like every work day, I stood in front of the reception desk at the police station with my colleagues from competing newspapers, waiting for the blotter. Another reporter with a good 15 years experience on me said, "Great story yesterday on that drunk driving death."
I thanked him, then looked downward, trying to hide my discomfort.