|
At about four in the morning, on Friday, March 28, 1969, a 1929 Model A Ford pickup truck on California State Highway 99, approached the City of Fresno from the north, traveling in the slow lane in light traffic at nearly full throttle, which was probably not quite as much as fifty miles per hour. The vehicle did not have a working speedometer, so we can only guess. I was driving, and it was my Ford A, purchased only five months earlier, essentially complete, all orig and in working order, but showing its forty years of service. Beside me in the cab was my roommate Keith Giebelman; in the truck bed with our luggage were Rich Rentner and Paul Stewart. We were, all four of us, sophomores at a little Lutheran college in Oakland. Keith, Rich, and I would be turning twenty later in the year; Paul was older, he was going to turn twenty-one on April 11, precisely two weeks away.
I could tell you a whole lot more, about how we had persuaded our dean of students to let us take our mid-term exams early so we could start Easter break sooner than scheduled and try to see a man in Bakersfield on that Friday and I’d maybe buy from him a rebuilt engine for a hundred-and-fifty bucks. I could tell you about the five-gallon can of bulk oil and three sets of seat belts that were part of our cargo that day. I could explain about the one little dim tail lamp that a 1929 truck was equipped with, and the black numerals on reflectorized yellow Wisconsin tags that insufficiently supplemented that tail lamp in 1969. I could try to tell you why all four of us—Bud, Keith, Rich, and Paul—owned Model A Ford automobiles and loved them. But I’m just going to tell you what happened next, there at the edge of Fresno, and show you a few photos of us guys and three of our vehicles, and say one little thing philosophical or theological. The rest of the things I could tell you can wait for another year, perhaps another late-March Words of the Week.
So there we were, coming into Fresno, when a double-trailer semi, also traveling southbound, approached at a far greater rate of speed than ours, a speed estimated later by CHP investigators who drew inferences from the times the driver wrote in his big truck’s log book.
“He’s going to hit us!” Paul shouted, but only Rich heard him, and Paul leaped to his feet and grabbed the truck cab’s roof and tried to shout a warning into Keith’s open window, tried to tell me to hit the ditch. (There was no glass on that door, do you remember I said my truck was “essentially complete”?)
But Paul was too late. The double-trailer semi struck us from behind, at a slight angle as if maybe in the last moment the driver saw us and tried to swerve around. The impact threw Paul to his death in a traffic lane and propelled the Model A through a dense crop of oleanders in the highway median, across all the northbound lanes without encountering any oncoming vehicles, and wrong-way into a northbound on-ramp, where I brought it to a rest, damaged but upright. The three of us who were not thrown from the vehicle went to the hospital that morning, which reminds me now of another thing or more that I shall keep for another day. That afternoon we three continued our southbound journey by Greyhound. The enormous semi, I should add, jackknifed, skidded on its side, blocked two of the road’s three lanes, but the driver was not injured.
Now, here’s the contemplative thing I want to mention. People try to make sense of tragedies. How often do you think they succeed? For a lot of years I would include, as part of this story, the idea that Paul, at the time of his death, seemed the one of the four of us guys with by far the most “promise,” the greatest likelihood of sharing his humor and talent, his faith and good-heartedness, with the world, and I sometimes wondered, Why Paul and why not me? I asked my Gramma Grossmann that question once, and, if I am recalling correctly, she had a short answer: “It wasn’t Paul’s time.”
Well, I am writing this tale on March the 28th, at just about three in the morning, finishing it up, I hope, and I’m thinking of Gramma’s seemingly easy faith, and I’m thinking, too, of the evidently vast accomplishments of Keith and of Rich, which, perhaps someday I will describe for you. I am recalling fondly late night bull sessions in the men’s dorm in Oakland, and other such sessions in a dormitory in Fort Wayne, and I am thinking, Three a.m., four a.m., it’s time to say Good night.
|
