Potholes and Stains on Memory Lane.

This place is full of memories.
The cherry tree my cousin and I used to sit in for hours, poised like gibbons to chatter and eat cherries until we were sick to groaning with stained lips and fingers.
My childhood dirtpile.
Imagination games with imaginary rabbits and talking critters in the tall trees where now only rotting stumps remain.

Plastic and silk flowers dustily honor ancestors in a lacquered shrine. 

Wood taps gong and fills the silence until that tiny moment it is gone. 

Memories of a child trying to summon a dead grandfather, quickly spinning around to see him before the tiny moment ended and the spell was gone.

Ghosts of root cellar and gardens grown over crumbled talcum powder dirt.

Sometimes the memories drive by you on the street but sometimes the other way around. 

Ivanohoe Road is a place I have driven by for 27 years.

I say “driven by” because I have not driven down it since 1984 and only this spring did I ride down it, later I drove it by myself and it wasn’t so bad.

Tonight was the first time I have driven that road at night since 1984 the night before my prom of my Junior year.

The night of the Junior Senior Banquet.

I was a different person then.

Of course, we are always different in our youth but what made me different then was not about age, the passing of time or fashion it was what happened on this night.

There have been two moments in my life that the universe somehow decided to teach me massive life lessons on a multitude of levels in a very short span of time. This is the second of those moments.

Lesson One: There are no guarantees.

The morning of that day, a very sweet friend experienced a teen tragedy, her boyfriend, her first real boyfriend had dumped her the day before prom and was taking some other girl with similar hair but apparently less scruples and friend was weeping.

We girls huddled around our friend like good friends do and like good friends do, worked on a solution.

Two of us skipped class (a hobby) and went to the house of a cute OLDER guy with a HOT CAR and explained the situation, within about 15 minutes went back to school with a date for our friend.

She was over the moon.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen minutes.

Happy days are here again.

After the Junior Senior Banquet, we were all heading out to Cow Hollow (yes really) for a big boozy blow out bash of epic proportions. I had switched cars with some boys since there were four of them, including THE DUMPER and three of us girls so we were driving another boy's pick up truck. We had been across the border to Idaho where the drinking age was 19 and the oldest looking of us had bought our usual starter kit for three teen girls in a small town: A bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 for each of us (I personally preferred the white grape) and a case of beer to split, to start off the night.

Booze is a hobby in ruralopolis, it goes so nicely with the other hobbies of fist fights and remorseful intercourse.

We had had some of the booze and were driving along having a fine time when our newly TRIUMPHANT friend whizzes by our little convoy with some of our other friends hooting and hollering and we cheer back because we know she is going to pass THE DUMPER with the boys ahead of us. We honked and waved.

Tragedy-to-triumph. Fifteen seconds.

It was all over.

Life as an after-school special.

She swerved in front of the boys, and her truck went off the road into a field, a common accident in a rural area, we all get out of our cars, laughing and running in the dust, ready to find a farmer with a tractor to help us just like our own dads help people out of our fields.

Still life with nightmare.

The dust is everywhere and our laughter is silent when we see the flotsam of wreckage all over the road and the bodies strewn everywhere. We hear moans and cries and a cold  hand grips my heart as the dust clears and we see..hell.

Or something hellish. Maybe it is just the hell in my head but there it stays.

In a city a call would be made and help would come in a few minutes but we were on a dark country road far, far from a town or hospital. Before cell phones and people still had party-lines. The time it took you to read that was much longer than the fraction of time before action occurred and lesson two began.

Lesson Two: You cannot predict who will freak out in an emergency.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor? Freaked out and became hysterical and screaming and drove off with my car like a maniac, my car with blankets, a pillow, a jacket. Things I resented not having later.

The big blonde football hero? The guy who went on to be a doctor?

THE DUMPER.

The rest of us bee-lined to people, I cannot explain why who went to who but we were each pulled in different directions, there was no discussion. One friend went for help at a farmhouse. There were six people in the truck. No seat belts.

The Prom Queen: Broken femur and a strip of skin the size of a large band-aid was missing from the middle of her beautiful forehead. She was the magically movie star beautiful daughter of a migrant worker family and had been a surprise victory election.

The Class Clown: Extreme shock, wandering the area with a dazed smile and about half of her head was scalped, the blood running in horrific rivers wending a macabre border around her large smile.

The Class Flirt: Extreme shock, walking about with a small hand injury, generally a person talking constantly is silenced and dazed.

The Best Athlete: Broken pelvis and internal injuries indicated by rapidly distended abdomen.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor: Broken pelvis, extreme traumatic head injury, coma, permanent brain damage of a massive nature, leaving him with the mental age of a 9 year old and a completely different personality.

The Triumphant Friend: Massive contusions, abrasions, broken bones and near complete detachment of mandible, snapped spine from being propelled through sun-roof. Died instantly.

I was taking care of our Best Athlete, I had to hold her down, I could tell she had internal injuries because her flat trim stomach was swelling to the point I had to unzip her pants. She was in incredible pain and wanted to stand, wanted to find out about the others.  The lower half of her body was angled in an odd way. Something was very wrong. I spent the hour and more convincing her it was the pain clouding her perception, only a few minutes had passed, the ambulance was almost here, almost here, almost here.

Why were they not here?

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Some facts.

The first, the truck had run off into the field but our friend had panicked and spun the wheel to drive back on the road, her bumper hit the irrigation ditch and the truck rolled end over end, flinging people and property in all directions.

The second, we had no idea our friend Triumphant was dead, we had each taken turns going over to her and spending time talking to her so she wasn’t alone. 
We all swore later we saw her breathing but they told us later she died instantly. Which is a mercy since half of her face, her beautiful sweet face with it’s kind smile and small dimple was gone and she lay in a large pool of blood, so large it ran across the spanch of country asphalt. When I spent my time with her, I tried so hard not to let it show that I wanted to scream, I kept my voice calm and soothing and told her the ambulance was coming


almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here. 


I sat with my friend under the starry sky and told her a story while unbeknownst to me I was telling myself a fiction as well.

We all swore later we could see her breathing.

The third, we only thought there were five people in the car.

The Assistant Yearbook Editor was in the back of the truck and we didn’t see him as the truck hollered by. We all ran to someone but no one ran to him until at least an hour had passed and one of us heard snorting. An animal? What makes a noise like that, we wondered aloud to each other. The noise grew louder and more pronounced, and he was found face down in the dirt way back in the field. He had been thrown from the truck when it went into the field, he hit a telephone pole and landed far away from the rest of the group, who were all on the road farther down.

We were waiting and waiting and no sign of an ambulance, someone went back to the farmhouse, they had thought it was a drunken joke and hadn’t called. They looked out the window and finally picked up the phone.

THE DUMPER came squealing back demanding to know where SHE was and why no one was here, the guy who had gone with him to handle his crazed self continued to handle him and calmed him down.

An ambulance finally came, an EMT asked me what was wrong with The Best Athlete and I told him, emphasizing her internal injuries and rapid swelling. When the ambulance left without her, taking the two who had been walking around and The Assistant Yearbook Editor but leaving my friend Triumphant on the asphalt, I grew angry but told my charge that the other ambulance was on it’s way.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

A boy I once loved but who no longer spoke to me in that way that teen dramas unfold was in this group of teen triage givers. He spoke to me that night for the first time in three years, softly with kinds eyes he mouthed to me over our injured friend so she would not hear “She’s gone.”

I looked at him and he helped me not to cry and I took a breath and turned back to my friend on the ground, we had found a blanket in my returned car and put it over her.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Then people began to arrive, curious onlookers and with them arrived my next lesson.

Lesson Three: You never really know people until you do and then you can’t un-know them.

More people arrived on the scene as we waited with our friends, keeping them calm and warm as we shivered, coats and extra layers of clothing went to cover the ones in need.

A girl I knew well, a nice girl, a popular girl, a girl who went to church piously and later married in the temple, a virtuous girl, from pillars of community who would aspire to pillar-hood herself,  with perfect 80’s feathered hair perfection tapped me on the shoulder and blinked her big blue innocent eyes at me and I noticed a sparkle that looked hungry and I heard her say in her loud clear varsity cheerleading voice “Is anyone else dead?”

I looked at her and resisted the urge to slap that hungry sparkle off of her face because my friend was screaming below me, she heard and wanted to know who was dead. I lied for the millionth time that night so she would lie still and not claw and struggle to stand, her strangely bent body straining painfully gave in to my fiction an I added another since I was already in to this reality I had painted.

Almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here, almost here.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

She was relatively calm until the ambulance took her away with the remaining injured.

Once we were off the clock, we unraveled and the hours of keeping it together melted and we shook and screamed and clung to whoever was there, clung to them like life-rafts.

The rest was a blur of tears and shock as all of us were forced to attend the prom in some idea of us needing to be together, a dans macabre of an extreme nature as people in formalwear wept under streamers. I found my prom picture from that night, I look like a zombie, with a blank dis-associative stare and my date looks sweaty and uncomfortable, like he wanted to run. The prom queen was in intensive care, the prom court dance was a circle of people sobbing. I remember hating anyone I saw having any sort of fun and I hated each anew months later when the yearbook came out and I saw pictures of anyone kissing or smiling.

The last time I saw the Best Athlete was at the yearbook signing, she had been in the hospital all summer, we weren’t told how to see her in fact we had been told she didn’t get visitors, neither did our Assistant Yearbook Editor, he was in a coma for along time and then had rehab. He was in my class and Senior year for us was strange and sad, he wasn’t the same and he knew it and was sometimes angry. He went from being bookish and nerdy to being a cholo and wearing a bandanna on his head and talking slang and his eyes were not the same intelligent eyes but dull and angry and so sad.

The saddest shade blue I have ever seen.

 He was able to sign my yearbook but it didn’t make a lot of sense and his handwriting was shaky but it was the closest to how he used to be and never will be again. His other self.

She signed my yearbook just her senior picture with “Love, _______” her name. I never saw her again. I think about her often, I wonder what happened to her, I knew she had lost her athletic scholarship. A reminder of the first lesson about guarantees and their fickleness, I suppose.

There were lawsuits and surgeries and a funeral. I learned things about friends and greed I can never un-know. It still makes me sad.

There was a brief rural legend that THE DUMPER ran to my friend TRIUMPHANT and held her in his arms as she died, which made a lot of us who knew the truth rather angry, I recall.

Some people stopped drinking and driving. Some for a month or two, I might be the only one who has never done it since. Ever. I will take someone’s keys in a heartbeat because I know that is all the time it takes to stop theirs or someone else’s.

My valley is filled with memories and memories of many others who died this way before and after and yet nothing seems to change.

I walked with an old friend tonight in the dusky hours down a hill and around a bend and she pointed and said “Cow Hollow just isn’t the same, the grass is long and no one takes care of it.” 

I realized I never made it there that night of hard lessons and I had never been there since, it looked small. Barely a park.

I never spoke to the nice pillar of the community girl with the hungry sparkle again, which is hard to do in a small high school of less than 300 but I knew I had nothing to say that was nice to nice girl so I said nothing. 

Tonight my friend told me a tale and part of the tale told of nice girl’s compassion in recent years and tonight I chose to forgive her words and her hungry sparkle.

Tonight I drove down Ivanhoe Road at night for the first time in 27 years, I wasn’t sure if I would know the spot until the strong sense of panic washed over me and my breath came faster and I gripped the wheel even though I had slowed down to maybe 20 miles per hour. Then it was gone. 
The dread about that road. 
The anger toward hungry sparkle. 
The fear of driving at night left about ten years ago. 
The nightmares are only every few years now.  


I see now I will have my life to learn all the lessons from that night, a new one washed over me as I went on a walk later with my dog to try and wrap my head around finally writing this story.

Lesson Four: Time does not heal all wounds but the scars are almost invisible except in certain light.

Tonight I said hello to an old friend and goodbye to some old feelings that I no longer need and the stars in the sky look especially bright for some reason and I think this story is done, finally and the book can close it’s tattered cover and rest. 


I hope others will share this story with anyone they thinks needs to hear it. If this story stops one person from driving drunk or getting in a car with someone or gives them the courage to take those keys, well it is still not worth living the story but it will feel a little less wasteful.
Peace.