Feeling No Pain

The family reunion was great, the gathering of the McFarlin/Adams clan is always a pleasure.  Seeing all the aunts, 1st, 2nd, & 3rd cousins, my brother and his family and Mom and Tommy, it doesn't get much better.  But after 1,100 miles of driving alone and four nights in a hotel I was anxious to get home to Cyndee.  I spontaneously woke up in the wee hours of my departure day and found myself in the car and getting on down the road just a few minutes after 4:00 AM.

I had just put the first fifty miles behind me, driving on the two lane Texas State Highway 152.  Pampa was long out of sight behind me and the lights of Wheeler not yet visible ahead of me.  It was moonless and pitch black, the lights of my dinky rent car forming a bubble of light hurdling down the deserted road.  Having the road to myself I had that rent car wound up pretty tight and making good time.  Then I saw something move in my peripheral vision.

It came from my left, first just a shadow, then quickly taking shape as a well-racked buck.  As the deer entered the bubble of light from my headlights it switched from a dead run to a stiff-legged skid and I started a hard pull to the right.  The adrenaline must have kicked in because everything started moving in slow motion.  I could see the see the path I was going to take on the shoulder of the road (Texas has shoulders that are better than some state's roads) and the buck was pulling his head up and his eyes were beginning to bulge in anticipation of a collision despite his four-hoof skid.  Then I heard it, thump!  The sound was right beside my left ear and very localized, not the sound of crumpling metal and breaking bones that I was expecting.

Between the deer locking up his breaks and my evasive maneuver we had somehow managed to avoid a catastrophe, but not contact.  There was that thump.  I looked in the mirror and the buck was once again just barely a shadow in the glow of the brake lights of the car.  He was standing in the middle of the road, seemingly stunned, shaking his head.  I think I knew how he felt, my heart was racing, I was shaking and my head was quickly becoming drenched with sweat.  The deer trotted off into the darkness and I slowly got moving towards Wheeler.

Somewhere between Wheeler and Elk City, Oklahoma the sun came up.  At one point I looked out the driver side door window to take in the sprawling scenery of wind-swept cattle ranches and farms.  That's when I saw it, a long streak running from front to back of the window, about two inches wide.  So that's what the thump was!  That buck's snout had hit the window as I went by and he left a snot streak!

Knowing that I was not going to have to deal with the car rental company over collision damage was a relief.  I could continue my return home with no worries.  Or could I?

Having started so early and with light traffic I was making some serious progress towards my destination.  The place I would have normally pulled in for the one-night layover came and went early in the afternoon.  The GPS was calculating an arrival time to the park of before the park's gate closes at 10:00 PM.  I was going to go for it and do the whole 1,100 miles in one day.

The rest of the day was uneventful with the hard-bottomed seats of the rent car making sure I didn't get comfortable enough to get sleepy.  The miles just ticked by.  Wind swept plains turned to Mississippi valley and scrub mesquite and yucca were replaced with lush vegetation and tall pines.  But that was the day, the night was about to get a little more eventful.

It was the home stretch, less than ten miles to go and my hips and rear end could be free of what had become the car seat from hell.  The road had stepped down from interstate to state highway to county road.  The county road leading to the park was the narrow, shoulderless, stripeless kind, common in the deep south.

I was on the last couple of miles of the county road that leads to the state park entrance.  It had gotten even narrower, or at least if felt that way because of the dense clump of trees lining the road.  I was driving slow because this neck of the woods is thick with deer.  Just as I rounded a bend the road disappeared, I could not see pavement, only pine straw and dirt.  I stabbed the brakes and came to a sliding stop.

It was pitch black and with my lights on bright they barely illuminated a car in the road ahead of me.  But everything was all wrong.  It was turned 90 degrees to the road, straddling the center.  I looked harder to see if someone was in the car or standing somewhere around it on the outside but saw no one.  As my eyes adjusted to the dark I started seeing that the car was heavily damaged, steam rising out of what was once the engine compartment and dust settling between me and the car.

If you squint just right you can see the wrecked hulk just ahead and between my rent car and the fire department vehicle.

That’s when I saw him.  Laying midway between me and the mangled car was a man on his side.  His back was to me, I could see his shoulders, back and legs but not his head.  He was lifeless.

I grabbed my phone and started fumbling with getting out of the door of my car while dialing 911 thinking I was calling in a road fatality.  I was moving quickly, dreading what I thought was going to be a grisly scene.  But just as I got to him his legs started moving.  By that time the 911 operator had answered I was trying to talk to her and keep the guy from moving at the same time.  But the guy was combative and would not stay down.  I smelled booze on his breath as he was saying something about swerving because of a deer.  About that time another guy from one of the nearby houses came up.  He had heard what we later figured out was a collision with a tree.  I let him work with the drunk while I talked to 911.

In the photo above that’s my little rent car in the bottom left corner.  The headlights are shining on the wound of the tree where the car first impacted.  This collision started the car to spin, scattering debris, completely covering the road as it pirouetted around the fire hydrant.  The G-forces of the spin must have been something else.  Both the front and rear bumper fascia were near the tree and various drive train components as well as the driver were all ejected from the vehicle and left laying in a trail leading to the car.  The guy was laying in the road mid-way between me and his car.  It looks as if he was squirted out the driver side window on the first spin.  He was barely visible because he was covered in pine straw and dirt.  I don’t think he was driving slowly, this much damage does not happen at low speeds.

By the time fire fighters and paramedics arrived the drunk was up and walking, well, stumbling around.  He was very concerned that he was late getting his mamma's car back to her.  He was going to get in and drive that thing home to her.  He was refusing to follow the paramedic's instructions to lay down to be examined.  It was pretty comical to see them out there wobbling around with him trying to get his BP and check his eye dilation.  At one point a fire fighter brought out a backboard, stood it up behind him while paramedics mummy-strapped him to it to hold him still.

In the lower-left corner of the frame below you can see a blurry black thing in the road.  That’s the car’s battery.  This is the place that it and the driver of the car were laying in the road after both were ejected on impact.

 Below is a closer look at the battery.  It was split wide open on the end opposite from me and leaking all its contents.  I guess the guy was lucky he came to rest on the uphill side of the battery.

All the white stuff in the upper left-hand corner are bandage packaging that they used to patch him up enough for the ambulance ride to the hospital.  They did not have to administer anything for pain, he was “pre-medicated” and feeling fine.

I finished my first-on-the-scene interview with the local sheriff and state trooper and was on my way to put an end to a very long day.