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.
At roughly 9:15 am I followed the line of traffic onto the ramp, over the bridge and onto a service road on the left side of the interstate. Something had happened, obviously, and they were routing traffic around some obstacle up ahead.
About a mile after we were routed off the interstate, I started seeing vehicles stopped in the eastbound lanes People were out of their cars and trucks, standing in the highway, looking ahead to see what had happened. Almost two miles of cars, trucks, RVs, families on vacation, truckers with freight that needed to be somewhere east of New Mexico, all just parked and waiting, puzzled, impatient.
On the frontage road, we moved along steadily if not swiftly. This was my view:
Then we started seeing flashing lights on the interstate. State police. Ambulances. A fire engine company from Tucumcari. One 18-wheeler sideways in the highway. From where I was, at a lower elevation and across the main road, I couldn’t see much. Bad news, whatever it was.
We moved along for a while, and then traffic on the service road ground to a stop. Uh oh. Now we really got bad news.
Creep forward and stop again.
The third time, I got out to see what was ahead – nothin’ but traffic as far as I could see.
The driver of the truck in front of me got down to stretch his legs and we talked for a minute. The wreck on the highway was a bad one… they were waiting for the coroner to show up.
“Coroner? It was a fatality, then?”
“Three of ‘em.”
It seems that just around sunrise, when the rain was still falling pretty heavily, two of the big trucks had been buzzing along eastbound. The one in the lefthand lane had been passing the slower one in the righthand lane. Something had happened to a car traveling westbound — did the driver fall asleep? Lose control on the unaccustomed wet road? — nobody knew, but the westbound car had jumped the median and headed straight for the two oncoming trucks. Nobody had anywhere to go. And now one truck lay upside down along the road, its driver and the two people in the car that hit it dead and the other driver injured.
Oh yikes.
Traffic begins to creep forward again on our little road, so we get back in and move with it.
Stop. Creep. Stop. Creep.
The guy in the Dodge Ram pickup behind me, towing an RV, is impatient and beginning to get crabby. He keeps pulling into the other lane as though he is going to go around everyone and get where he is going, by God, but then seems to think better of it.
Stop. Creep.
To our left is a railroad, the main Santa Fe/Burlington Northern line. No trains this morning — just one lone cuervo who seems to hold no great opinion of the noisy, smelly monsters on the little road in front of him.
He watches.
Creep. Stop. Creep again.
Two more miles. We’ve gone about five miles now since leaving the interstate, and it’s now 9:52 am. I hear a siren, and a state police car roars down the other lane of the little road. Oh, jeez, have we got a wreck on this road too?
Stop. Creep.
After another mile or so, I see a sign on the right-hand side of the little road.
Hm. Well, I don’t think anyone is going to be cited for speeding.
Then I start to see the trucks pulling out wide to the left.
Creep forward, and I see what’s happening. The trucks are having to go through a tunnel under the interstate.
I am glad I’m not driving one of those!
All I can think is, if he gets stuck, we are all screwed.
And he makes it, with more room to spare than I thought there would be.
I follow him through the tunnel, he turns left onto the service road on the other side, and I’m sure he took a deep breath as he let the clutch in and shifted out of first gear.
10:10 am and we are back on the interstate at exit 321 — ten miles in just under an hour, but safe and sound.
