When Waters Part
Drizzle-wet pavement glistened from headlights. On a quick trip to the vet’s for prescription dog food, I took a short drive south from Iowa City to Hills on 218, a highway with two lanes heading in each direction. It was early February, above freezing with hazy dusk settling on dormant fields that reside on either side of the road.
Long and steely, a big rig suddenly slipped from behind and passed to my left, then pulled in front, heavy wheels pressing on the smooth black surface. It signaled to turn right. I wondered why, because no exit was near. Then with a jerk the cab pulled to the shoulder.
But the trailer didn’t follow. It had jack-knifed instead and remained in my right-hand lane. As I approached it, now stationary and blocking my passage, the left silver back corner grew taller, and the trucking firm’s black phone number became more clear.
Slowing down from seventy, I began to pull my red Impala to the left, but another bulky eighteen-wheeler barreled into the spot where I needed to be.
It had been a routine day: fifty-six pages read in Crazy Brave and 354 words laced together into the beginning of an essay for my MFA program; bills paid, dog walked, ingredients for chili placed into the Crockpot.
The vet’s office would soon close. My left windshield wiper, due for replacement, left a swath of water droplets mixed with gray road sludge smeared across my window. I was tired, in my typical late afternoon slump.
Yet, as if steering a large ruddy swan, parting water as it moved forward, I must have sailed through the thin space between the two hulking trucks on the line meant to separate lanes. Then I continued to the next exit and made two turns before parking at the vet’s.
Years before when my young son Steve fell under a bus as we began to board it in Switzerland, I kept pushing the button to keep the side door at the back open and the bus from driving over him. We were heading to the pediatrician’s for his third-year check-up. Racing to stay on schedule, bus drivers there were known to drive off without checking to see that all passengers were safely aboard.
Before reaching down for Steve with a baby strapped to my chest in a light blue carrier, as he lay on the road next to a large black tire, I desperately wanted to call to the driver to wait. But French words wouldn’t come to my longing mouth quickly enough. No passengers were there to see my plight.
I sat on the curb and with a prayer and speed I grabbed his arms and pulled him to the sidewalk without the baby falling out of the Snugli. Adrenalin raced throughout my body then. Once inside and seated, my arms and hands quivered when I clung to Steve. As the bus pulled away on wheels like millstones, I fully realized that he had come close to being run over.
No fight, no flight. No adrenalin seemed to flow when I nearly struck the semi and was almost hit by another.
Perhaps nearly forty years of driving trained me to handle the dilemma without panic. Quick decisions. Fancy maneuvers. Everyday scenes: a child runs into the street; a skateboarder sails off a sidewalk into an intersection; another car abruptly moves into one’s lane.
Maybe I was so tired that I reacted with little conscious thought. It had been a stressful season of responding to one emergency after another, averaging one intense challenge per week.
I drove on normally afterwards, and my hand did not shake as I wrote the check for my dog’s formula of Hills Science Diet.
It was on the way home that I realized that I’d almost been in a serious wreck. Later I imagined how it could have happened. A newspaper account might have read;
An Impala hit the corner of a stationary semi trailer backed into the right southbound lane of Route 218 north of Hills. Another eighteen wheeler hit the car on the left side. The driver was killed instantly.
And car parts flew like startled red metallic birds across the highway and bordering fields.
Near misses. Unsettling events demand our attention. Do they usher us towards pausing and reflecting on our beliefs and what our lives hold and are meant to be? Is that their design?
When I was thirteen I asked my dad if he believed in God. He responded, “As I lay on the sand on Normandy Beach [during World War II] first the guy on my right was shot and killed. Then the guy on my left. I survived. How could I not believe in God?”
Through the essay “The Riddle of the Ordinary” by Cynthia Ozick, she discusses how we are affected by the reliable, everyday occurrences and objects that she refers to as the Ordinary.
She writes
The Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary, tends to make us ignorant or neglectful; when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
And what is expected is not often thought of as a gift.
Having moved to the Midwest from the East Coast where we would annually drive just a few hours to the shore and experience the Atlantic, I find that when I travel to someplace near an ocean, which now takes much longer by air or car, I experience it with a renewed sense of wonder.
Yet on a vacation to Mexico where my husband and I stayed for a week at a resort adjoining a beach on the Pacific Ocean, I felt the sense of wonder seeping from me as time passed. I realized after just a few days that the ocean had become mundane, an ordinary scene. I was growing disappointed and began chiding myself for letting that happen. So, I decided to intentionally study it, and each day I wrote down my impressions into a small notebook. In doing so, I saw something new each time I sat on the beach or our balcony and watched the vibrant water. One day I saw the swirling froth of a wave develop into a sudden paisley pattern that quickly disappeared. Another day I was surprised by a school of flat, fluttery creatures, perhaps stingrays or skates. Sounds I heard: rumbling, splashing, crashing, growling, grumbling, thundering, swooshing.
The close call occurred during a difficult period in my life. After numerous phone calls, online searches, and trips out East from Iowa to help family members a thousand miles away, I began to wonder why I was alive. Life had become exhausting and harsh. One brother had been injured in a car accident. Because another family member living nearby had experienced a grievous crisis (which I was also assisting with), I was left in charge of caring for my injured brother, as well as clearing out and selling the family house we had grown up in.
Following my near crash it seemed as if I had been sent an angel like Clarence in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Clarence intercepts George Bailey’s attempted suicide and demonstrates to him his significance through a Christmas Eve journey that positively transforms George’s perception of his life.
I didn’t travel with an angel, and I wasn’t thinking about harming myself, but a small sunlit ember cast a warming glow throughout my being when I realized that I had been spared. I fully knew that I matter, and I felt profoundly and personally that God loves me and that my life must have a good purpose.
I began to consider the gift of life and the joys contained in each day. My refreshed understanding has propelled me towards savoring and more greatly appreciating everyday things: long meals with family, walking in fresh snow, compassionate breezes caressing my cheeks. I’ve become more grateful for the times when family members and I travel from the store or to Africa and make it safely. These are gifts that fill my days.
My hope is that I will continue to recognize them for what they are throughout the lulling cadence of common days and when blinded by pain or weariness.
Janet Skiff has been crafting poems since childhood and holds an MFA in writing with a focus on creative nonfiction. She delights in blending the two genres. For decades she taught language arts in a variety of settings and led a writing workshop for formerly incarcerated people. She devotes much of her time now to writing and travel. Several of her poems have been chosen for Iowa City’s Poetry in Public program. Other work has appeared in Lyrical Iowa, The Daily Palette, and The Corona Silver Linings Anthology. Janet lives in Iowa City, IA with her husband Fred.
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