October 2007
My paternal grandfather died in 1970, just prior to my fifth birthday. He was eighty years-old. My only clear memory of him is of a wide-eyed, white-haired man lying in bed, able to speak only in whispers due to cancer of the larynx and a life-long devotion to cigarettes. Even though I was a young boy, I knew he was dying; I knew he would not get out of that bed. His was my first death, and I spent most of my childhood believing that death only visited the aged; you got old, you got sick, and you died. A late-life arc of decline made sense to me, and I accepted it eagerly as it was in keeping with my orderly view of the world. A view that was forever altered when The Teacher died.
It was summertime in the mid-nineteen seventies. I was on vacation with my family during our annual week-long visit to my mom’s parents’ home on Prince Edward Island. Early one morning, while everyone was asleep, a man drove his car through a guardrail at the bottom of the hill that led to my grandparent’s house. He died there, alone, amongst a tangle of bushes, small trees, razor grass, and dirt.
On the morning of the crash, I woke up unaware of the traumatic event that had taken place just a few hours before sunrise. As I entered the kitchen, my mom and grandmother were speaking in hushed tones at the head of the breakfast table. My grandfather sat silently playing solitaire at the other end, his portable radio tuned to a news station. The rest of the family was scattered about the house in various stages of revival.
"He was a school teacher," my mom said, "he was speeding and had been drinking."
"What are you talking about?" I said, blurry-eyed and hungry for breakfast.
"There was an accident last night," my mom said, "A man was killed at the bottom of the hill."
I ate some toast , but my mind was elsewhere. Somebody had died less than a hundred yards from where I was sleeping.
A few minutes later, my cousins, Brian and Vicki, who lived next door, came through the door out of breath.
"Wanna go down to where the accident was?" Brian said.
"Yes," I said.
I swallowed my last bite of toast and followed them out the door.
My grandparent’s house sat majestically atop a hill overlooking a crossroads known locally as Coleman Corner. Route 14 ran on a downward slope by the front of the house and bisected route 2 at the bottom of the hill, forming a T intersection. There was a gas station on one corner, a cow pasture on the other, and a river on the far side. For several miles in both directions, Route 2 ran straight and true, but it dipped and curved dramatically where it met route 14 at Coleman Corner. A typical country two-lane, there was never much traffic on Route 2, and motorists took advantage of the open road by pushing the speed limit. I can remember my dad saying, "here comes another one," whenever a car sped over the rise, and then pulled hard to compensate for the dramatic shift in direction and altitude. There were several accidents over the years. Dad was not surprised by what had happened.
I followed Brian and Vicki down the hill. There were no sidewalks at our end of the island, it was farm country, and we were forced to walk single-file, the road on our right, an irrigation ditch on our left. At the bottom of the hill, we crossed the road and joined a small group of adults who had gathered on the opposite corner. I recognized most of them, and their solemn expressions, from when they dropped in on my grandparents over the years. They stood with their arms crossed, talking quietly, staring into a corner of the cow pasture unfit for grazing - the scene of the crash. It was hard to tell how, or if, they were affected by the tragedy.
We stood with the adults at the shoulder of the road and viewed the landscape as if it were an exhibit in a museum. The car had been towed away, but evidence of something terrible remained. There were two long gouges in the dirt that reminded me of the deeply tilled rows of soil in my grandfather’s garden. I followed the line of travel with my eyes over plowed-down brush and snapped twigs to the edge of the road. The guardrail looked like the torpedoed hull of a battleship, with a gaping hole big enough for three cars to fit through. The twisted metal was ripped free of the ground and sheared off where the displaced section was once welded to the next.
"Look, there’s his blood."
It was Brian. He was pointing to a flattened, grassy area to the left of where the tire tracks ended. I walked over and stood beside him. The once-green blades of grass were stained brownish-red, and the soil at the roots was damp and dark like a partially absorbed ink stain. I had never seen anything so out of place, so unnatural, so personal. To have taken the man’s body without cleaning up his blood seemed a violation of trust between the living and the dead, and I felt a larcenous chill of exhilaration for looking without his permission.
"C’mon, let’s go," Brian said.
I snapped out of my reverie, and joined Brian and Vicki on their way back up to the house. Before we entered my grandparent’s yard, I looked back down the hill. I had so many questions.
That night, before going to bed, I looked out of a second story window and down at the crash site. There was a faint light shining from the gas station across the street. It was a dark, lonely place where the man died. I crawled into bed, but could not fall asleep. I wondered if he felt any pain, or if he sensed what was happening to him. I wondered why he was drinking, where he was going, and why he was driving so fast. I needed to make sense of it.
As the days passed, the newspapers offered vague details, and I gathered information by listening to the grownups. That the man was a school teacher seemed to be the central fact, and because nobody referred to him by name, I came to think of him as, simply, The Teacher. He was in his early thirties, younger than both my mother and father. He was single and had lived in a nearby county. There were mentions of speed and alcohol, but it would still be several years before public awareness exposed the severity of that lethal combination. The Teacher’s death was ruled an accident. My questions remained unanswered.
Late in the week, the rains came, washing away the blood, leveling the ground, and offering sustenance to the damaged plant life. Soon a highway crew would arrive to repair the mangled section of guardrail. I thought about a classroom full of students in the coming fall, and wondered if The Teacher would be so easily replaced. It seemed both cruel and amazing how quickly the traces can disappear.
In the summer of 1996, I returned to Prince Edward Island. It had been fifteen years since my last visit. In the time that I’d been away from the island, I hadn’t thought too much about The Teacher. But as I drove in from the airport, and approached the junction of routes 2 and 14, I once again felt the impact of his death. It wasn’t what was familiar that spurred my consciousness, but things that I didn’t recognize. A few years prior to my return, a major construction project had been funded to raise and straighten route 2 at Coleman Corner. The transformation was stunning; it was as if a challenging, white-water rapids had been converted to a smooth-running stream. I stood in my grandparent’s front yard and remembered a time when I’d imagined that if The Teacher had been able to negotiate the bend in the road, he would have arrived safely at his destination. But as I looked down at that renovated section of roadway, I was sure that what I was seeing was The Teacher’s legacy. Had he traveled on, The Teacher would have most likely ended up dead on some other stretch of route 2, or worse, taken someone else with him. It was his fate.
Some call them rites of passage, those events that shatter the myths of youth. When I was a child, my Uncle Jim, a highly-regarded psychologist, told my mother, quite accurately, that I believed in a perfect world. The threads that supported that belief began to stretch and fray during that long ago summer when the untimely death of a stranger collided with my fantasy. I guess I should be thankful for the years of innocence before I learned that death could be sudden and violent, not always something you could see coming and plan for. The Teacher’s death taught me that there are consequences for the choices we make in life - the traces remain; It was his final lesson.
