The Thanksgiving of '06

This one will definitely be one for the books. It's certainly the most memorable I've had. Here's Der Scoopen:

So me and my lovely bride, were driving down to the Heart of Dixie to give some serious thanks. We drive 10 hours because gas is free when you kick as much ass as the Yorks kick. Also we both have a masochistic streak a mile wide.

Anyway, we had just gotten off the interstate and were on the 'home stretch' which represents the last hour or so of driving. It was a lovely day, 70 degrees, cloudless sky. The kind of day that makes you look out the window at the driving snow and reevaluate why you live in the frozen tundra and not with good down home civil folk where snow is little more than a folk tale. So we're driving down this picturesque country highway and there's a truck coming from the other direction, as traffic in the other lane is wont to do. Like many highways that cut through hilly countryside, the road often plowed straight through. A hillside that had been lovingly shifted with the careful use of dynamite to make it more amenable. This truck is now roughly 200 feet in front of us. Suddenly it swerves hard to its right and off the road. Mind you, we're in a cleft hill so the sides of the highway are giant fucking rock walls. The truck smashes nearly head on (as best I could tell) into the rock wall and then proceeded to roll over two or three times.

Rebecca had been on the phone with a friend and shrieked, "We have to call 911," and hung up on the poor bastard. I felt a twinge of guilt in the moment thinking that he probably was afraid we were in some sort of trouble. I had little time to dwell on it though. We pulled over straight away and I ran to the truck. It was on it's side. My deeply embedded dorkmind assessed that this is probably tantamount to what an attack from a dinosaur or werewolf might look like. It was a mass of torn metal, bent and twisted from the rolls. When I got to the scene I could see a man's arms and one leg hanging from the driver side window that had been shattered. When I first saw him, I thought for sure he was dead. For a moment, I just stood there gawking, luckily there were others on the scene that immediately began turning the truck back upright. It took three of us to flip it over and I remember the hands and legs flopping in a sickening way when the truck settled into place. This only cemented in my mind that we were about to pull a corpse out of this truck. The other men and myself pried open the mangled door and pulled the man, in his mid to late fifties, out of the car and laid him on the grass several feet away from the smoking car.

It's a good thing I'm not an EMT because no sooner did we set him down than it was obvious the man was breathing. I remember feeling a rush of relief for this complete stranger who, for all I know, might have been a child molesting nazi teddy bear rapist ¹. Seemingly moments after we cleared him from the car a woman walked up with a calm demeanor about her that spoke of familiarity with this sort of crisis. She named herself a nurse and I dutifully got the fuck out of the way. From the other direction came a man carrying a small orange case. He too had a purposeful but unhurried stride of someone who knew how to handle these situations. I never got his name or his job but I suspect he was an off-duty EMT.

It was about this time that I got a chance to survey the scene around the car. I remember being struck at how much garbage was strewn around the wreck. I don't know if the man kept an overwhelmingly messy car or if that's just normal in car wrecks this bad, like plane crashes. Rebecca was doing much the same, taking in the whole scenario.

Suddenly, she looked me in the eyes and said in a certain tone, "there's a dog, we have to find it." She had noticed a ripped bag of dog food in the truck and come to the conclusion immediately. She looked down the road and started running (an activity that I've witnessed less times than I have fingers on one hand). She ran down the road and I looked ahead of her and noticed a dog about a quarter mile down the road heading away from the site of the wreck. How she spotted this dog from so far away I have no idea. I took off running in the same direction and caught up with the dog and a guy who'd stopped to keep the dog off the highway. The dog was unhurt but visibly very shaken so we walked him back to our car and got him some water. I could tell he was just happy to have a person there that he could count on to take care of him. While we were waiting for any kind of word from the rescue workers he kept burying his head into my chest the same way a child does. Needless to say my latent paternal instincts engaged and I would have kneecapped anyone who actively threatened this puppy on my watch.

As the EMTs were loading the injured man into the ambulance, we started asking questions about what would become of the dog. Strangely they had no idea what would happen. The animal shelter was closed for the holiday and would not reopen until Monday morning. With nowhere to take the dog we volunteered to watch the dog for the weekend.

To keep from this getting to be too lengthy the man's injuries turned out to be none too serious which is quite different from my diagnosis which was Stone Cold Dead. We were able to return the dog to the proper authorities that following Monday morning. Though I have to admit, there was a part of me that had really hoped we could keep him a little longer.

So now the whole house is Jonesing for a dog.