A simple twist of fate

I saw a horrendous head-on collision on my highway on the way home tonight.

I didn’t witness the moment of impact, but I saw it happening in the darkness in the distance ahead of me.

The traffic slowed, and the headlights of the on-coming cars started to stack up behind one another, behind something blocking the road, like loose diamonds on a string.  Red tail lights began to drift to the right and stop – on the shoulder.

Now traffic soon stopped. Dead.

When the line started to crawl again, many minutes later, I could see the bleak wreckage looming in the blackness. It was horrific.  Bystanders had pulled over to help, cell phones jammed into faces, calling 911 I presume.

There was a mass and I mean a mass of debris in the west-bound lane, I thought at first it was garbage or dirt from the box of the crumpled half ton truck in the middle of the road. But I think it was the point of impact.

There were no emergency vehicles to be seen and in fact it wasn’t till a good 7 or 8 minutes later when I was well past the accident scene, that they flew by me from the east but I knew where they were headed.

I was thinking the whole time “I hope it’s no one I know…”

But then I thought why should that matter – it is someone somebody knows. And I hoped that everyone had been able to walk away, in a pre-Christmas miracle of sorts.

And then I thought, if my leaving the city hadn’t been delayed by an illegally parked car  that forced me to to change my route and detour onto the jam packed traffic mess that is Broadway at 4:45 pm…

A simple twist of fate.  Makes every day a great day.

(No, no photos.)