A well flung man
The call was for a traffic fatality on a twisty two-lane road to nowhere. This area is remote and I was glad to finally see it in daylight. Not like last time. As we drove to the site we speculated on the cause and what we would find. Our best guess was a car sliding off the road into a deep little valley of which there are many in this area. What we found was straight flat road just past a sharp turn. We saw the requisite skid marks indicating a the truck drifted into the oncoming lane just putting the left hand wheels into the dirt then over correcting onto the right shoulder then spinning back across both lanes and finally rolling about 250 feet through a fence and plenty of cactus and rocks.
The truck was in really bad shape and the tow truck driver was struggling to get the wheels pointed straight so he could get it on the tow truck. It turns out he is my neighbor and as he was busy with the wreck he didn’t see me approach. I said hi and he looked at me standing in this huge field of cactus and rocks holding a body bag and a fold out stretcher. I could see he was struggling to figure out why his neighbor who he knows as a Realtor was suddenly standing here in the middle of no where looking for a body.
“Can you direct me to the body?” I asked. “What in the hell are you doing here?” I explained that his was my night job. He made a face like a guy unexpectedly tasting shit on his pancakes and pointed further out in the field. “About 200 feet more” he said.
At this point I should explain that when people are ejected from a vehicle, they rarely travel more than 50 or 100 feet. When I finally found him on a pile of rocks and cactus I looked back to where his truck had stopped and calculated that he had flown at least 200 feet. Now I say “flown” because the ground there was thick with rocks, cactus and thick little bushes with thorns. If he had tried to skip along the ground he would not have made it very far. Clearly this guy had been going for some kind of record.
Looking in the cab of his truck I saw that he had buckled his seatbelt behind him to turn off the little alarm that tells you to buckle up. In spite of the great speed at which he seemed to have exited the driver’s window opening and the great distance he covered, he was mostly intact. His legs had several extra joints and his head had a good size hole in the back and his shirt was streched out on a cactus, nearly pulled off his body and pointing the way from which he had come in such a hurry.
I noticed the local sheriffs had painted a white spot on a rock near where he ended up. I don’t know what the mark was for, but the chances of anybody finding that rock again are pretty slim.
