Once, in a rented car, driving through TN or KY, whole family in the car, on a two lane during a blizzard complete with fog, some idiot in a black car, no headlights, came ripping up at 90 and cut in on the car ahead of us. This car was forced to swerve left, toward the concrete barrier. The driver then over-corrected and hit ice. Slid across the road and ended up UNDER a semi’s trailer. The trailer’s tandem rear tires bounced up and down a dozen times on the wedged car as everyone started to react, and then the car popped out from under the trailer, mostly crushed, and slid across in front of us again, this time to smack into the barrier and came to a grinding halt, steaming and shattered.
During it my wife was dodging a car door, chrome trim, and various other bits that flew off the crushed car. Time telescoped for us, everything seeming to be in slow motion. My wife pulled over behind the wrecked car and, being an Air Force officer, got out to go see if she could help anyone. She admitted later she was afraid she’d find a dead kid in the back seat; that car’s roof was flattened except for some of where the driver sat.
She found a college student in shock; she’d been driving back to school after having visited her parents over Yule.
My wife, fearing the car might burst into flame, asked the girl if she could move, then led her on wobbly knees back to our car. She sat in our driver’s seat with the heat blasting, shivering, with bits of glass and metal embedded in her upper chest and face. Poor girl. We gave her a blanket.
Another aspect of this: When my wife first stepped out of the car she found the truck driver outside his truck, across three two busy lanes, yelling that we should bring the stricken girl over to his cab. He was semi-coherent, an older guy, completely freaked and not thinking clearly. Well, my wife knew trying to cross a busy highway in good conditions is stupid, let alone that night, so she yelled at him to radio for help. (This was before cell phones.) He had never thought of that. She finally convinced him to get into his cab and call the cops on his CB radio, then went to investigate the wreck.
Turned out the poor man collapsed once the State Troopers were there. He had to be taken in an ambulance, too.
The police were calm, professional, and competent. They arrived to find my wife, in uniform, in charge of the scene, with a cup of coffee in her hand. When they found out she was an officer in the USAF, they laughed and said, “Yeah, it figures; only an officer would have hot coffee on a night like this, at a scene like this.”
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