A close call in the San Juans of Colorado

We spent a couple of hours or so stuck yesterday on the winding road in the San Juan Mountains – often known as the “Million Dollar Highway” because of the expense of its construction – going down from Silverton to Ouray, Colorado. The place where we were stuck was beautiful, with forest all around us and a small river running through the gorge below us to our right.

We were stuck because, perhaps less than a minute before we arrived at the scene, a camper truck had been going downhill, pulling a trailer with two all-terrain vehicles aboard, when it collided with an older model four-door sedan that was coming up the mountain.

Both vehicles were damaged beyond repair. The left front tire and part of the axle of the truck were sheered off and lying in the middle of the road. The front left of the car was destroyed and smoking.

Remarkably, nobody was hurt. The truck would certainly have gone off into the gorge below, and the man and the woman in it would almost certainly have been killed, had their path not been blocked by the only tree for at least a hundred yards that was both sufficiently close to the road and substantial enough to stop them.

I spoke with several people who had seen the driver of the car as he passed them on the way up. He had, they told me, been traveling at a very high rate of speed, passing them on curves, driving much of the time on the opposite side of the road. Perhaps understandably, they were eager to give statements to the Colorado State Patrol, and several vocally speculated that he had been driving under the influence of either alcohol or cannabis. (One man told me that he had commented to his wife, as the fellow flashed by, “He’s not going to make it to Silverton.”) Some had already begun gathering statements, addresses, and phone numbers before law enforcement arrived; they wanted him punished. I watched the car’s driver a bit; he didn’t interact with anybody, but spent his time drinking a Pepsi and fiddling with things in his back seat and his trunk. He seemed very calm. Perhaps too much so. Oddly disconnected.

The driver of a car just ahead of mine actually saw the accident occur. He said that the camper truck had saved the life of the car’s driver. He described the latter as coming much too fast, on the left hand side of the road – for those of you from Ye Olde Country, that’s the wrong side – and said that it was evident that he was not going to negotiate the curve where the accident occurred. Had the camper truck not been in the way, this witness said, car and driver would have just launched off into space, landing at the bottom of the gorge alongside the road, easily at least a hundred feet deep.

When we first arrived, my son and I went up to see if we could help. I fully expected from the looks of things that there might be somebody dead in the truck, and I knew, unfortunately, that this was one of those many real-life situations in which my being “Dr. Peterson” would be of no practical value whatever. Fortunately, such help wasn’t needed. (The couple in the truck had been wearing seatbelts.) There was intermittent rain, though, sometimes fairly heavy, and somebody gave coats to the man and woman from the camper truck and offered them shelter in his own recreational vehicle. (The car’s driver was sitting in his car at that time, I think.)

We reflected a bit, while we were waiting, on the fact that, had our timing been only a few seconds different, the oncoming car might have hit us. And we might very well have missed that saving tree. We would, in other words, be dead right now.

End of blogging.

So uncertain is life. A woman who was a passenger in the car immediately after the camper truck that was hit suffered a panic attack for a while, when the magnitude of what had just almost happened to her sank in. She certainly hadn’t set out on that beautiful drive thinking that it might be her last.

As we were finally able to move on, I noticed a small white truck pulled off to the side of the road about seventy-five feet beyond the accident scene. On its door was the word, in red, Halliburton. That’s the name, of course, of the multinational corporation that, in some minds, seems to be the focus of evil in the modern world.

To illustrate the firm’s wickedness, one need look no further than the fact that Dick Cheney, to some vocal types on the political left Earth’s most evil villain, served as chairman and CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000. I have little doubt that it was the driver of that vehicle – probably Dick Cheney himself – who orchestrated the accident.