Grizzled Road-Warrior Story

The next two entries will be in reverse chronological order. Ideally, this would be my Christmas entry, in which I share choice mundane details from the holiday weekend, spent at my parents’ house outside Philadelphia. Instead, it will tell of events that transpired Wednesday night on my trip back to Buffalo, and the next entry will be my Christmas entry. The reason for this is that my trip-back story is much less pleasant, and I’d like to get it out of the way.

I had doubts as to whether I should blog this at all, as the events were, in a word, disturbing. Do I really want to think about it again? Should anyone else have to? The answer to both questions is no. But then again, I took my car to the carwash yesterday at lunch (for reasons that will soon become clear), and as the soap washed down over the windshield, I considered the cleansing effect a good detailed telling of this story might have for me. And, since it’s my blog, and I have rather gruesome images permanently seared into my head anyway, I might as well go ahead with it and see if this process is at all cathartic.

If you don’t want to read gross things, proceed no further. Be ye warned.

Aside from the small city of Binghamton, Southern central New York is pretty rural, and Interstate 81 in this area is not unlike the rest of the route I drive from Buffalo to Philadelphia and back again a couple times a year: an equal sampling of field and forest, set atop rolling hills, with the occasional cluster of unnaturally-tall fast-food restaurant signs and digital billboards alternating between the price of diesel fuel and that of a T-bone steak dinner. The roads, too, are easy enough; two lanes and two full shoulders in each direction, separated by a gently inward-sloping grassy median and guardrails where the falloff is steeper.

I found myself passing through around 6:00pm. Traffic was light to moderate, and it was dark, which tends to be a favorable condition for highway driving in my opinion. I was making good time, listening to William Shatner’s album “Has Been,” and seriously considering a stop for dinner.

I was on a very low-grade downhill stretch, the kind that one wouldn’t really notice as being any more angled than any other part of the road, except that it provided an improved line-of-sight in which I could see a police car pulled over to the right shoulder off in the distance. Traffic slowed accordingly, and bunched up a bit in the process; I found myself in the left lane behind a silver VW Jetta traveling almost exactly 65 miles per hour, with a tractor-trailer that I had passed earlier right behind me.

Quickly, the Jetta jerked left to the shoulder, and my eyes fell on the legs – and then body – of a horse. In my rolodex of permanently-stored mental images of the event, this is the first. I don’t know much about horses, but if I had to guess, I would say that this was a good one. It had an irregular pattern of brown and white splotches on its body, brown legs, and longer white hair just above its hooves, like built-in socks. It looked sickly, though, when illuminated by my headlamps; the whites of its coat washed-out, and its eyes reflecting back the light that blinded it as it ran down the middle of the passing lane into traffic. I don’t remember the specifics of my reaction (instinct, thankfully, took over), but I can recall, with startling realism, the sound of its hooves at it galloped past on the right, missing contact with my speeding car by no more than two inches.

Permanently-stored mental image number two captures several simultaneous physical events: the continued stopping of my car, now fully on the shoulder, the scraping of my left front fender against guardrail, and a sense of almost total paralysis – like when you’re at the top of the roller coaster, about to plunge – as I looked in the rearview mirror, knowing that that tractor trailer was right behind me, realizing that I’m nearly stopped, and seeing its headlights grow brighter. This moment lasted forever.

Then, in rapid succession: a crunch, a splatter, and a prolonged period of gentle taps on the roof of my car. The horse virtually exploded upon impact with the tractor-trailer, and my car was immediately struck, then showered, with quarter-sized pieces of its remains.

In permanently-stored mental image number three, I sit in the car, most of which is now covered in blood, pieces of skin with brown fur still attached, and other parts not so easily identifiable, trying to process what just happened. The VW is in front of me, stopped on the shoulder. There’s a guy crossing the street to talk to the VW driver. More traffic is approaching, and not slowing down very much, and there is a sickening smear of blood across the road in front of the Volkswagen, ending in a small pile of brown and red just off the shoulder in the median. I turned on my four-way flashers and sat for a moment, but my continued fear of being rear-ended by approaching traffic incited in me enough panic to decide that the best course of action was to escape as quickly as possible. The tires made a squishing sound as I pulled back out in the road, and through my blood-streaked windshield I saw the tractor-trailer (FedEx Ground), steam rising through fissures in its fiberglass hood, pulled in neatly behind the police car, its driver outside inspecting the damage.

Assuming the horse had to go one way or the other, the most favorable sequence of events possible was what actually transpired. The only vehicle that, in my estimation, could strike a horse without significant risk of injury to the driver would be a conventional tractor-trailer. A car would only have knocked the animal’s legs out from under it, leaving the body to come crashing down, most likely on the windshield or roof nearest the driver’s head. Equally dangerous would have been the truck driver acting upon his instinct to avoid striking the animal, as this surely would have meant a swerve to the shoulder and an impact with the vehicles nearly stopped there, namely my Subaru and the VW. This, too, could have had a catastrophic outcome, as even allowing for a second of braking and subtracting the speed of my car’s forward movement from the total impact speed, I estimate a collision force of, say, 50 mph.

I pulled off the highway in Binghamton to inspect the damage, and parked under a billboard for Off Track Betting that said “May the Horse Be With You.” (I take this as evidence that, if there is a God, he's kind of a dick.) The damage, aside from the obvious gore, was minimal. I’ll need to take it to a body shop to have the fender stripped down and re-painted, which will be inconvenient and potentially expensive, but all in all, things could have been much worse. On the other hand, they also could have been much better, specifically by not happening at all.