Crossing the Street

Here is something you should know. If you kill a rattlesnake and fry it up and eat it, you need to make sure to bury the head. Because, according to some, if you don’t, yellow jackets may happen upon the head and eat it, including its venom. And if you think a normal yellow jacket sting is bad, just wait until you get one that’s just eaten a rattlesnake head!

I don’t know if this is true, but some not altogether unreputable sources seem to think it is.

And a couple weeks ago, I saw a woman almost get hit by a car. She was crossing Wooster on the way out of town. The middle two lanes were stopped, waiting at the light to go across the bridge. The far left lane, which becomes a turn lane at 3^rd, was empty, except for a white car driving at a decent speed toward the intersection. The woman, who was wearing a red sweater, didn’t look as she began to walk across that last lane. I saw the white car coming, and I saw the woman about to walk, and I thought—here, a woman may be hit by a car. And, simultaneously, surely she will look. And, surely the car will stop. And, I wonder what it would be like if it actually happened. And then, oh crap, it really is going to happen.

The car stopped, its brakes squealing, smoke everywhere. It skidded a little, its tires not quite knowing what to do, and it stopped so close to the woman that she put her left hand on the car’s hood before rushing to the sidewalk, unharmed. It wasn’t an angry gesture, her hand on the hood. It was, this is the car that almost took my life, but somehow I am not dead, so now let me touch it. Why do we want to touch the things that nearly kill us?

And why couldn’t I think to blow my horn to alert the woman that something was coming? It seems a fairly easy solution to come up with. But there I sat, my hands over my mouth, my eyes wide, and the only thing I thought I might do was roll down my window and wave at her and point to the car. What good would that do? All the time, I was sitting at a steering wheel with a perfectly good and working horn.

We called 9-1-1 the other night as we were driving home. We saw a white car in a ditch off Gordon Road, its hood pointing up. There were plenty of cars on the road, so we thought, surely someone else has called. But then, what if they were all thinking the same thing and no one called? So, we called. Turns out plenty of other people had done the same thing.

So, there’s that. And the woman made it across the street and the driver of the white car might have lost a few years of life because of the stress of almost killing someone. And I didn’t even know yellow jackets ate rattlesnake heads. But that seems to be what life is like, really, even when we want to pretend it isn’t. There’s no way to know all the things we think we know, until proven wrong, like what tomorrow will be like and what will happen as we cross the street.