We the Living

A SMALL NOTE: I wrote this the same night of the accident described below, Ginny and I still high with the cool fact of our survival.  4 days later we are still high with it - even though Ginny has since discovered her $40,000 truck was not insured. Ehem. Still, she's been greeting every morning with "hey baby, we're a walking miracle!" And maybe that's the lesson therein, something to remind myself of every day.

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I had my first car accident today. The car out of control, spinning spinning everywhere then, all of sudden, flipping all the way over just like in the movies, kind of accident. Crushed windshield glass like candy and Ginny and I just dangling there by our seatbelts. Our thank-you-God, lifesaving seatbelts.

Ginny’s voice sounds close and calm, but I can’t turn my head around to see her. “Karen, turn off the engine,” she says, it feels like over and over. Yes we had just stopped to fill the tank in Loncupue. I understand what she means but I can’t find the keys, barely know where the steering wheel is at. I also cannot believe we are alive, and Ginny sounds so normal like she’s asking me to roll up the window because the breeze is bothering her. I am shaking and trying to find the keys to turn the engine off, but the space around me is too small to maneuver so I focus on trying to get out of the car instead. Figure that way I can turn around get the keys out, come back around get Ginny out too.

Crawling out is hard, barely manage it through the window because it’s gotten much smaller. But I do, it’s amazing, I’m pulling my body through and nothing even hurts. How is this possible? How is this happening? And I have I killed Ginny?! I’ve definitely fucked up her car. The sun is shiny bright same as it was before we flipped like in the movies. I feel the loose gravel on my palms. The gravel that did this, made the car swerve then swerve again. It’s a long, long gravely road from Loncupue to El Huecu where we were headed to spend Easter weekend at Ginny’s chacra there. I was enjoying the scenery, the vast open Patagonia space, the late afternoon sun on the left side of my face. It was just beginning to set, casting the distant high desert mountains in shades of blue.

I was also focusing really hard on my driving because I’d just learned to drive Ginny’s S10 Chevie truck that morning. Things were going pretty well: I was driving stick! I’d made it this far, driven about an hour from Hotel Oriplata to Loncupue for money and gas, aware the whole time of the Patagonia wind. Now we were close, just another ½ hour or so away. But then the car veered suddenly off the road, and I tried to set it right, then I hit the brakes. Big mistake.

By the time I come around to Ginny’s side of the car, I am weeping. With disbelief, with regret, with shock - though not it seems with pain. Nothing appears to hurt. My sunglasses even appear to still be on my head. And Ginny is there too, by her side of the car, on her back, cell phone in hand. Is she texting someone?! Holy shit. Does this mean she is okay? I think she is laughing. Yes she is laughing. My new 61-year old friend with MS who uses a walker and sometimes a wheelchair and decided to wear her back brace right before we got in the car “just in case” has managed to pull herself out of her window and is lying on her back by the side of the gravel road and she is laughing.

There are any number of reactions one could have when the person they just met and entrusted with their car, totals it and almost kills them both in the process. Ginny’s immediate reaction is gratitude. “Thank god we are okay, can you believe we are okay?? This is the most important thing!!” she keeps asking me, hugging me. Her second reaction is laughter. And triumph. Within just a few moments of our car rolling over and nearly killing us, a few people stop along the side of the road to help us. Together, we collect our things from the car, our backpacks, our groceries. Ginny’s mate set. I’ve found my camera and am taking pictures of the car with it from all angles for the insurance company. For posterity.

Then Ginny wants me to take a picture of her. With arms raised in front of her truck like the champion in a boxing ring. Then standing by the passenger side of the car, beaming face poised over the dangling rearview mirror. Then we take one together. By now, I am smiling too.

One of the last things we pull out of Ginny’s crushed truck is a small book she had in the back seat, We The Living by Ayn Rand. The irony is far from lost on us and we decide we must each take a picture with it. We realize we could have died today but we didn’t. Our seatbelts saved us, or the roll bar on Ginny’s very well made truck saved us, or maybe God (?!) saved us.

I am still considering the significance of this, because I do believe every moment, especially the hardest, offers up something for me to learn. That's how we make sense of things. Feeling that truck spin uncontrollably then flip, and not knowing how this story would end, will go down as one of the scariest moments I’ve ever had. There wasn’t even any time for flashbacks! I know the story could have ended very differently. Thankfully, it ended up like this.

~11 pm, Saturday, April 2, 2010

We the Living.