Traffic

1/25/05

We were driving to have dinner with friends, and about halfway down the hill to Cheshire was an overturned truck — it had gotten on the wrong side of the guardrail in the snow and rolled over, belly towards the road, clearly within just the last few minutes: the engine was still running and the headlights on. Another car had stopped just in front of us, and two people were trying to reach up to the drivers side window to see if there was anyone still inside, but even standing on the guardrail you couldn’t quite reach to see. After a moment I decided it’d be much easier to just walk around to the other side of the truck and look in from below, so I took the lady’s flashlight and started wading through the snow and it wasn’t until I got halfway around the hood that what I was doing really sank in. I very nearly turned back around.

But the windshield on the drivers side was intact, so I kept going, and as I got further around I could see that the passenger window was open and I was pretty sure I could see footprints from there in the snow back to the road. And the snow was white.