She did not respect the inertia. It happens often enough. All of us, each day, forgetting about mass and vectors. A foam mattress left over from a highway-side homeless encampment got caught in the wind and blew across my lane. I was in a Toyota Prius - a car I was very pleased to own, having chosen all the features myself and made all the negotiations myself and la dee dah. It was red with Moonstone interior, and it didn't have the sunroof or the heated seats or satellite radio, but it did have a built-in emergency response service. I picked up that car from the dealer on the LAST day of freedom before the state of Washington locked us all into our houses for two years. That car was "pre-Covid normal world" in a beautiful package.
She was driving some heavy duty new model truck. A Chevrolet Fauque, or some such conquer-a-small-village style monster they sell these days. These trucks don't hit things. They crush them. Large moguls, road barriers, other cars. Pedestrians.
...
My eldest son had been hit by a truck one night, but by... luck?... it was an old truck so he bounced off rather than getting pulled under. Those beasts on the road these days have no room for mercies like luck. She should have known that, and stayed back a long distance.
Fortunately, what survives a truck skidding into you at near-full-highway-18 speeds in a Prius. The back end exploded and crushed like a soda-can. It sent plastic and glass across two lanes. The only thing between that and my son was a drum-kit. Each drum head and stand and symbol was comfortably tucked into a fur-lined, heavy-canvas gig-bag of its own, all of those packed like a Tetris game into the hatchback.
By the time the impact hit the front of the car, there wasn't even enough ripple left to deploy the airbags. Even the drums only got a bit warped and now they play with a byoing sound. After the initial hit sent the car forward across the debris field, we drifted a bit on the remaining inertia of my shock.
In an unrelated way, we left Duvall not much long after. I had already been packing our things for several weeks by then. We were disentangling the roots of fifteen years driven deeper than I had ever really imagined or intended. Things have mass, of course - the house, the garden, the music studio in the garage.; the collections of knick-knacks and books, the treadmill, paintings, and furniture. Memories, friendships, easy walks, the strange quiet of the fog-filled springs, the floods, the forest, shared celebrations and deep grief. All the Things that mingle together and form a life of its own, pulsing its heartbeat through shared time. The inertia of these Things cannot be measured in pounds per square inch.
None of us were hurt in the crash. I still drive like I'm going to die at any moment. I can't even sit in the passenger side while Joe drives without hiding in a podcast. Everything is impending doom. My belly turns into a tight steel barrel. I stay at least five car lengths away from everyone. I look in the rear-view mirrors far more often than I should. The accident has its own inertia that's yet to spend itself. The only friction is remembering something vitally important: highways are not arenas of competition - they are a coordination of intention. We get along to move along. Accidents are avoidable but ultimately, they are non-definitive of the broader experience. That broader experience being that everything moves in a direction according to its inertia until it is acted upon by an outside force. Whether that inertia is to be in motion or to be at rest, to change that state requires a greater expenditure of force than encapsulated by all of that mass. E=mcx2. It took months to pack up the boxes of our lives and discard the greater part of ourselves. It took less than a second of impact to alter the options of an entire family. Nuclear bombs don't have anything on highway 18 on a summer evening.
What impact can someone have on your life? Do you know in which direction you are headed? Do you know your speed? What are the things that hold you down - hold you still - when you want to be moving? The ramifications can be frightening if you let them be - until you remember that we are here to move with you, we get along to move along, until our paths diverge and we're both left changed for the better. May you be be happy, may you be well, may you be loved and know peace.
-Mercenary Muse
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