Every Friday night we head to a neighboring burg to play Dungeons & Dragons with our friends. Normally, we wrap up our sessions at around ten thirty PM or so, and last night was no different. In fact, after dispatching some rather high hit point dopplegangers, we called it a night at ten.
The hubs and I then hopped into our little blue car and proceeded home. The ten mile drive home along Highway 54 (the shortest highway in Idaho) is almost always a serene one, for living in the country has it's perks, including mostly deserted stretches of tree-lined highway. Other than the occasional silly moose or deer trying to parkour off of one's hood, the drive home every Friday night is most often without incident or excitement.
Leave it to April Fools Day to wreck that streak.
When you leave my friend's house and wander out of the small town she lives in, there is a hill to climb before the highway stretches out along a flat straight stretch, until it ends, for eight miles.
The hubs and I were recounting how it was pretty great that one of our party members Nat 20'd on an attack roll when we were all getting our butts handed to us in combat, when I spied a dark mass right in the middle of the road at the crest of the hill.
"CAR!" I shouted, "CAR CAR CAR!"
The hubs slammed on the breaks and we skidded to a stop a few feet from an absolutely destroyed coupe. As soon as he put the car into park, the hubs was out the door, I turned on the hazard lights and I had dialed 911.
The next 25 minutes were intense
As my phone rang I watched my husband scoop up a young woman with magenta hair out of the center of the highway and place her off to the side of the road. It was then that my eyes lit on the baby car seat.
Time slowed down as the dispatcher's impassionate voice flitted into my ear. Seeing a baby seat surrounded by an explosion of plastic in the middle of a dark highway does something to you.
I rattled off the situation and location to the dispatcher, she knew exactly where we were, so we both hung up and I dove out of the car. The hubs and a tall kid were coming towards me. I recognized the fire red mullet from all my years at the library, I know many of the young people around our area.
Mullet's face was a patina of shock, and as he tossed his keys, sweatshirt, and phone onto the hood of my car, I got to work assessing him.
Side note: Why do a lot of men remove their shirts in an intense situation? Is there some sort of dominance reason for this? Does flexing your pecs in thirty degree weather during a crisis give one a modicum of feeling of control? Sorry, I digress...
Anyway, Mullet gave me the rundown of what had occurred, the driver in front of them was turning off of the road and then last minute turned into them. He was a bit hysterical, but once I ascertained he wasn't visibly injured, I left him with the hubs.
The only other relevant information that stuck in my mind was the other driver was...drunk.
"He reeks of ALCOHOL!" Mullet shouted before taking off running and screaming down the highway.
I was making a beeline for the baby seat though, and the magenta hair girl who was propped against the tire of Mullet's ruined car.
"I want my baby!" a different girl was screeching. My stomach felt like it had been mule kicked.
"She's right here," another girl called, coming around the side of the car with a very young infant in her arms. The little babe's eyes were wide open, but right away I could see there were no external injuries on the tyke and she was breathing, so I turned my attentions to the girl on the ground.
She was in obvious shock and slightly hyperventailating. I wrapped her in some of the blankets from the baby carrier, and told her help was on the way.
It was then that the jackwagon clusterfarts showed up.
While I was tending to the people, the hubs was dealing with the traffic. Thanks to an influx of people, our highway is a bit busier than it used to be. A guy behind our car in a full-sized pickup offered to pull the drunk guy's disabled car off of the highway so traffic could begin moving again, and the drunk guy, who had been loudly moaning that, "his life was over" gave him the go ahead.
As the car was pulled out of the center of the highway, I became away of two strapping young mulleted lads jumping out of an old Ford Ranger that had hurtled down the ditch to our location. Mullet Boy One stomped right up to drunk guy and launched into a very unhelpful diatribe recounting the guy's obvious sins and how horrid of a person he was.
This was not helpful.
I could feel the tension building in that situation a couple feet to my left. Why do humans have to make everything about themselves? I grumbled as I stood up and strode right into the middle of the drunk and the mulleted mad man.
"Hey," I said, using my best trauma soothing tone, "I know you love your friend, but you are not helping the situation doing this, It's okay." I crooned to the testosterone-laden giant.
Then drunk guy decided to open his inebriated mouth and all the soothing I achieved evaporated. As the situation escalated, I made note of my hubs a few feet away, directing traffic but keeping an eye on me. I knew he would intervene if those two jackwagons got out of hand, but we both knew that I have a disarming presence and it was best for a giant Hawaiian to not get in the middle of two lack of reasoning capability incited men.
The problem was, we needed help. We were in the middle of a massively traumatic, high adrenaline, panic-driven situation. No one was in their right mind, and there were just three of us who weren't in shock, and/or drunk, or capable of making a rational decision.
The full force of what happened hit magenta hair girl and she exploded off of the ground and threw herself at drunk driver guy screaming like a sense-deprived banshee. At that particular moment I was trying to redirect yet another bro who showed up in a pickup truck and who tried to assert his diesel-tinged will over the situation.
Thankfully, magenta girl's friend grabbed her and held on to her like a soon to lunch anaconda.
At that point I started shaking. Not out of fear or shock, I shake in intense situations with other people because I can feel their collective emotions, and when I start resembling a Richter scale on the San Andreas fault, that means things are about to blow.
The hub's voice flitted through my ear as I grabbed another blanket and speed walked over to where magenta girl's friend had deposited her on the ground after her outburst.
"Hey, we need some help here. Where are you guys? This situation is very volatile." The hubs relayed to dispatch
Where were the first responders indeed?
Part of living in rural America is the reality of help takes awhile to get to you in an emergency. What was a touch frustrating is that we were literally a mile from town. I could see the lights of the firehouse down the hill. I didn't even need a cop, I just needed more trained bodies to help diffuse things.
But, that was beyond my control in that moment, so I looked down at magenta hair girl and my heart broke a bit. Her little outburst had not helped her at all, her respiratory rate was mooning and I crooned to her like she was a exstinguishing horse. She was gasping and crying as I wrapped her in a fleece baby blanket and pulled her close.
"It's okay, help's on the way. Let's just breathe together, shall we." I said, breathing in and out as I held her close and smoothed her hair.
"I want my mom." she wailed over and over again.
"Okay, sweetie, let's get ahold of your mom. Is her number in your phone?" She was clutching a hot pink cased phone in her pale hand.
"She's in jail." she wailed in fresh anguish and started puffing worse.
Shicaca.
It was then that I heard raised voices behind me again. To the left of me was the other girl from the car who had wrestled her maniacal magenta haired friend away from drunk driver guy.
"Are you okay?" I asked her. I didn't like the vibe that was rolling off of her hunched form. She was building to blow.
"No, that guy is an ahole! He deserves to die in prison!* she spat vehemently.
"Well, they are on their way, they will deal with him, can you come help me keep your friend warm? She's freezing." I reppleid in my calmest, most pleading tone.
After getting her to come bear hug her freezing, in shock friend, I strolled with purpose over to the Mullet brigade and saw that once again they were trying to pick a fight with the drunk driver. Then driver Mullet Boy, the kid I knew, snatched the drunk guy's phone out of his hand, smashed it on the highway, and broke into a screaming, shock caused speech about how the guy was the worst piece of garbage in the world.
He looked at the lady that had arrived while I was dealing with magenta hair and was standing next to drunk driver guy.
"Is this your husband?" he yelled at her.
"Yes." she said, her voice held a tone of defeat that wrecked my gut even more.
"Well, I feel sorry for you! You married the dumbest mother trucker alive!" Mullet Boy 1 screamed before being dragged away by his friends.
Was I on the Jerry Springer show? I wondered to myself as I thought for the 35th time where in the two hades the first responders were, it had been over twenty minutes since I had first called in to 911, and we arrived right after impact. How was it that so many other people had arrived, all a bunch of emotional reactors, but there was not one, trained professional to help us out.
It was like holding together a bunch of beserking cats that had overdosed on hormones. And I was doing it alone because the hubs and the one nice older lady were dealing with traffic. In that moment I felt a twinge of helplessness, because I really, really just wanted to diffuse the situation and for no one else to get hurt.
"They are here." my hubs called.
A sigh of relief escaped me.
A firefighter strolled up to the car, and I called to him, "Hey, she needs you!"
As I left magenta hair girl in the capable hands of the firefighter, a state trooper strolled up. The hubs and I let him know that we were first on the scene, not a part of the accident, pointed out who was who, and told him we were getting out of the way.
The thing is, I am not a professional first responder, and I do appreciate what they do. It's got to be a bit hard on the soul to deal with situations like the one we slid into on a daily basis. I'm thankful to the diffusing difficult situations and hostile people training I've had over the years, because it came in real handy last night.
What I am most sad about, is how freaking hard is it to not drink and drive? The decision of one man radiated pain out like a ripple in the existential pond and caused harm to no small amount of people, including himself. I know situations like this happen all the time, all over the world, and I am truly thankful that no one was visibly hurt beyond the trauma of it all.
The thing that is really bothering me most, is that there is such a need for reason training in the world. Shock is a very hard thing to navigate, but there were a lot of people in that situation who could have diffused and made a bad situation a lot less bad if they engaged in some mind-training.
Of course, me wishing for that to be a thing is probably an April Fool's joke on myself. Humans are going to keep humaning.
But I have hope. We all have the ability to make reasoned choices, so I am going to keep on learning and trying to make a difference, and maybe I am foolish to be optimistic about it, but sometimes, some fools might be the wise ones in disguise. At least when it comes to having faith that humanity can choose to act in righteous, reasoned way.