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Rob Azevedo was chilling on his drive to work, listening to some Stern, when an accident across the highway jolted him into reality.
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It was just before nine on a recently morning when I was doing my run down the 101 out of Manchester, heading to Maine for the day, prospecting.
The cab of my truck was chill, mood wise. Warm, loaded with entertainment, I paid no mind to the beast that raged outside my truck windows.
Master Winter, the biggest bully of them all.
Stern was on the satellite, my coffee was half hot, slacks well pressed and my hair was well coiffed, the alleys and peeks, greased to near perfection.
Rounding Exit 3 into Exit 4, I marveled at Sterns ability to entertain us all. Hanging onto his every word as he interrogated talk show host Chelsea Handler, I readied myself to take on every gatekeeper in the Pine Tree State.
Rejection denied!
Two more miles into my trek, just past Exit 4, I suddenly saw a big puff of white snow funneling high into the morning sky from the other side of the highway.
I tried to dial my brain back into Stern Nation, but I couldn’t deny what I knew I saw. That plume of white smoke and snow came from a wreck on the highway, a bad one. I knew it.
Mother of God! There it was dead in my sights, across the highway laying on its side, a white SUV, destroyed, steaming, hollowed out by the guardrail. Black ice.
This kind of scene is not my forte. It’s the maddest of all nightmares to me, the one that keeps me awake each night. The kind of nightmare that comes true.
It was either cut and run and pretend like I didn’t see what I surely saw, or get out of my truck. Then what?
So I pulled over onto the crushed snow and ice, hit the hazards and got out of my truck. Breathing heavy, I plan my dash across the highway. Less fit than in years past, I decide to hike my heavenly pressed gray slacks above my calves, hoping for as little splash as possible.
With that in mind, I hadn’t factored in the 17-degree temperatures or what that frosty air feels like rushing past the thinnest of fabrics as you run face-first into ones greatest fear.
Death.
I bound down the dividing embankment, “Wipe Out” style, never not staring at the wreck. It was a royal mess. And just so fresh. No one but the devil in sight.
Then I saw another guy that pulled over hustling to help out. We reach the ruins together and there we saw a blonde woman in her 40’s twisted up in the back of the truck, where the groceries usually go.
I gave a quick ten-legged mantra: “No punctures wounds, please! No punctures wounds, please!”
She was alive and trying to get out.
All I could think to say was, “Any children in there?” Say, no, please. “No” she says. “Just me.”
The other guy was down on his knees — his denim protected knees — reaching into the wreckage to help the woman out. I could only stand there and peer deep into torn up vehicle, locked into a morbid trance.
The engine of the truck was hissing hot water. Everything bent into fragments, nothing was where it’s suppose to be.
“Hey, buddy, you gonna help or what?” the guys shouted at me.
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry” I said, finally kneeling down into the snow, avoiding bits of broken glass.
Both of us grabbed an arm pit and together we jimmied that lucky lady out of the jagged iron. Lucky in a sense, I thought, that she was alive. Not so lucky that the knot above her right eye was rapidly swelling.
Soon others came, five, six strangers, all jammed up on each other, each person taking on a role. One young woman took over and demand passionately to the woman from the wreck that she, “Lie down! You will paralyze yourself for life if you move!”
Brisk approach, I thought, as I slowly stepped away from the crowd after laying the woman down on a foot mat. No one seemed to be considering the smoke coming from the trucks engine.
Looking over at the man who worked with me to free the woman from the wreckage, I was figuring on a bro moment, a wink or something that labeled us brothers in arms, forever.
Instead he looked at me, my slacks and my now wind blown bouffant hairdo with disgust in my reaction time. I understood.
With that, I headed back cross the highway and into my den of Stern. By Epping my heart was still wobbling but it evened out by the time I hit Portsmouth, then started humming again as I crossed the Piscataqua River Bridge into Maine.
Here I come gatekeepers of the Pine Tree State. Rejection denied? Nope.
Death denied!
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Photo: akasped / flickr
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