Well, this will certainly bring you back down to earth.

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

Bad day today, for a lot of reasons. Less than two hours ago, I was complaining about various things.

And then I heard a horrible sound coming from the highway, the kind of sound you hear when someone traveling at too high a rate of speed blows a tire: the slewing and sliding and skidding back and forth across the road, preparatory to what you know is coming next.

And I did know. And just as I was ducking out the door in, I don't know, some futile idea of stopping it simply by seeing it, I heard that even more unmistakable, sickening sound. The one that signals a vehicle's impact with something immovable.

Wings was already running toward me, yelling at me to grab his phone. He had the call in within 60 seconds of the impact. I took Ice back into the pen, shut Griffin inside, grabbed the leashes to corral the other two dogs, and raced after him to the north fence.

It was bad.

It was probably less, but it seemed like 20 minutes before a single emergency vehicle got there. In the meantime, post-schoolday traffic was everywhere, with people stopping —some to try to help, others simply to gawk.

A white minivan lay on its top, upward on the berm, end a mere foot or so from the barbed wire of our fence. All the weight was resting on the roof of the driver's cab. We had no idea how many people might be in it — heartbreakingly, children's grade-school papers and construction-paper artwork had flown out the windows — or what their condition might be, and with tinted windows and thoroughly jammed up doors, there was no way to tell.

Raven came almost immediately when called. She-Wolf refused at first to budge: She knew someone in the van was hurt, and she sat right at the fence, peering intently between the strands of barbed wire, worry furrowing her beautiful furry face. Eventually, she came, too, and I leashed them up and took them back to the house. I would find out later that the reason Wings was already headed my way when the crash occurred was that his blood sugar had just dropped and he needed to eat. Instead, he raced past me back to the hay barn, loaded up crowbars onto the ATV, and headed back, with me following on foot.

Other men who had stopped helped him attach the ATV winch cable to the van's back doors, and after four tries, he popped it open. He didn't even hesitate. The man is a former paramedic, thoroughly trained, but gives little thought to his own safety when someone else is at risk. He climbed in through the back, determined that the driver was alone and conscious, got him to say his name, got him to determine that he could feel his toes, and then assured him that he was not alone, that people who cared about him were all waiting there, that first responders were already on the way, and that he'd wait with him until the emergency crew arrived. And he did.

And arrive they did. By the time it was done, I counted at least 18 emergency vehicles, including the chopper, and I think a couple more might have been out of my line of vision. This was undoubtedly the most excitement in the county all day. It's a shame it had to be something like this. 

The EMS folks had a small crowbar with them, useless on the jammed doors. I passed Wings's large ones through the fence to him, and they used those to jack the passenger door open to see what kind of condition the driver was in and what it would take to get him out safely.

They told Wings they needed to bring a chopper in to airlift him down to Santa Fe. Clearly a very, very bad head injury, at a minimum; no way to tell what else there might have been. The local hospital isn't equipped to deal with this kind of trauma. Of course, there was no question about it.

We went back to wait until the chopper arrived. In the meantime, as I was fixing Wings something to eat, the medics apparently got the driver out. The scream was something I hope I never hear again as long as I live.

It took probably twenty minutes. Police blocked off the highway on both ends while we waited. The helicopter pilot clearly had been briefed well, and just as clearly knew what s/he was doing, taking the shortest route overhead and landing perfectly in the north field. It sent the horses into a frenzy, of course, and I spent a couple of minutes calming them before heading back up to see what was happening.

Another fifteen or twenty minutes, and they had the driver loaded and took off smoothly. They re-opened the highway, and the emergency vehicles began K-turns and U-turns, heading back toward town. A few minutes ago, I took the ATV back up there to see whether they had rescued the school papers that presumably belonged to the driver's children; at times like this, such seemingly little things hold enormous (in every sense of that word) importance for family members. If they were still scattered, I was going to pick them up, dry them out, and hold them for safekeeping until someone claimed them. Instead, I found that the EMS crews had done a truly outstanding clean-up job in a matter of minutes, packing up and taking everything, no matter how small.

All that remains to show that anything happened are the scars in the mud left from last night's storms, deep gouges where the van overturned and came to rest. In a few days, the sun will have dried them, too, and there'll be no visible sign to anyone who didn't see it.

That spot is cursed. No one knows anymore what might once have happened in that place (although, given the history, it's easy to speculate). But it's a site of accidents every single year.

It's time to have Wings cedar me, as he's doing for himself. And time once again to thank the man I love. He's my hero, for this and for so many other reasons.

It's also time to send up a few more prayers for the driver, and for his family, that he'll make it, and without lasting ill effects. We've been doing that for the last hour. If you wanted to do likewise, it couldn't hurt.

Postscript:  Later, Wings told me that one of the EMS crew told him why their arrival was delayed. It was a bad day for them too: a jumper at the Gorge.