September 19, 2004
Coming home on Sunday morning.
I left Santa Fe very early, before sunrise, and had been on the road for almost three hours. It had started raining on Saturday – the fallout from Hurricane Javier down near Baja California – and it had rained steadily all Saturday night. There were flood warnings out for Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and the sky was still gray and overcast by midmorning.
I-40 in eastern New Mexico had its share of people unaccustomed to the weather. At Santa Rosa an 18-wheeler had pulled off to the side of the road. There had been an accident of some sort and the trailer had caught fire. Further east some 40 miles, I passed a lone state police car parked on the shoulder, lights flashing. Just as I passed I saw the reason: a small car had jumped the road and lay upside down in the drainage ditch alongside the highway. The trooper was making no rescue efforts. I hoped that it meant that the driver had already been pulled out and the wrecker was on its way.
Ten miles further east, traffic began to slow and merge into the right lane.
Uh-oh. Two more state police cars had barricaded both lanes of eastbound I-40 and the officers were directing all traffic off the interstate. This is not good news.
