It was raining, but traffic was good until my exit where it backed up about a hundred meters from the offramp. I was behind a semi with its hazard lights blinking. I turned mine on to reduce the probability of the next person piling into me – my wife’s car was crushed by a Mercedes that way once.
Traffic was moving at a crawl, but a steady crawl, and in a couple minutes it became clear what the problem was – a car, a four-door-plus-hatchback sort of car, had creamed the guardrail on the right side, then bounced off and creamed the guardrail on the left side and was now turned to face oncoming traffic in the fast lane. Hard to tell to what degree other vehicles had been involved, as none were parked anywhere in sight.
The driver’s door was open and empty, and the front driver’s-side tire appeared to be flat, and the rear one was missing entirely. The car was tilted that way, so perhaps the tires on the passenger side were still okay: every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. The car looked to be the color of the pavement, closer to asphalt than macadam, which is the color a car takes on after such a wreck, I suppose. It was now shaped like the steel box frame around the passenger compartment, and the frame around the engine compartment, all wrapped in crumpled metal.
There were parts of the car and parts of the guardrail, including a gigantic bracket of galvanized steel that must have weighed at least fifty pounds strewn about the surface of the freeway. Off to the right side, in the grass on the outside of the guardrail, at the top of a steep slope down to a creek or something, paced a dejected-looking man. The car-owner, I surmised. He was probably thinking, here I am, just had a life-changing experience, and none of these people give a shit.
Well, car-owner, you were wrong. I, for example, was totally worried I was going to drive over a piece of sharp debris and get a flat tire and you know, flat tire in the rain, what a pain in the ass. But luckily, no flat tire. I assumed the man or someone else had already called police. Assumed.
I planned to tell the big wreck story to the rest of the family when I got home, but by the time I got home I’d forgotten about it. I remembered again when I drove past the spot on my way to work the next day, and thought I would write about it here, but by the time I’d arrived at work, it had slipped my mind again. Also our Internet connection was down.
Driving home that evening, I had my kid in the car and when we passed the spot I told her about the wreck. Of which all evidence had been removed. Not a single shard of glass, not an inch of rubber. “Right there,” I pointed. “Right there by that shiny new strip of guardrail,” I said to her.
