The roadside memorial always takes me back to that day. It was a Monday, four years ago, a very hot day. The dew point that afternoon was 81 degrees. Anything above 70 is thought to be — and my experience confirms it — uncomfortable. The air was saturated. Just walking to the mailbox and back left me soaked in sweat.
You could smell the thunderstorm long before it started to build, and the one on July 25, 2005, was going to be impressive.
At least, I thought, it will cool things off.
It was my first real Ohio thunderstorm, and it was impressive. The electricity failed early on. Limbs came down. Rain obscured things even a few feet outside the window, and it seemed to be falling parallel to the ground.
It passed fairly quickly, as thunderstorms do; afterwards, the surprise was not the debris, or the search for my garbage can, but the fact that most of the trees were still standing, I still had a roof, and nothing had fallen on my car.
A quick inventory confirmed that I had none of the things I would need for any period of time without power. I would need to go to town for batteries, ice, food that required not much preparation. And to satisfy my curiosity. Having been raised as a reporter, I needed to see how the area had fared.
In the car, I discovered that local radio was useless. One station, which had come to be my favorite, was off the air. The local station was playing oldies through the continuous static crackle, and when the news came on the lead was some canned wire story about a survey of teenage smokers — they didn’t seem to have noticed the storm. AM radio used to be our friend in the storm, our first stop for information, but this seems to have slipped away.
Far before I got there I could see that the wreck was a bad one. A huge orange semi was sideways, blocking all the eastbound lanes on the main four-lane highway through the county. Near a substantial intersection was a car that had been hit, hard. Traffic was backed up as far as the eye could see, something common in cities, but pretty rare around here.
It didn’t affect my westbound drive to town, where I discovered electricity was out all over the place. Was this something that commonly happened? No, I was told.
The storm hadn’t really made things any cooler or less humid; it hadn’t marked the arrival of a cold front or anything like that. During the next day I would be increasingly happy that former owners Leonard and June had built this house well, insulated it thoroughly. Though the temperature rose to 90 or so and the air conditioner was off, it was comfortable until late afternoon.
Local radio finally had some information, in the form of discussion of who was without electricity: the storm had apparently made the newswire.
There is something in our makeup that causes us to project our circumstance onto the rest of the world. When the electricity is out, or there is extensive storm damage, it is hard to imagine that elsewhere, even very close by, things are operating perfectly normally.
For two families, things were very much not operating normally. Two young men had been in the car that was struck by the semi. They had been killed.
I speculated as to how the accident had happened. Had they been pulling onto Route 50-32 from 690? That seemed likely. Had it been in the height of the rain, when there was almost no visibility? No idea.
I thought back, too, to the time when I was young and immortal and invulnerable, of chances I took, somehow getting away with it. I had no way of knowing, of course, and don’t now, whether the driver of the car took some unreasonable chance. Sometimes bad things happen without it being anyone’s fault.
After 36 hours or so the electricity came back on; I got up to turn off the television and other appliances that had been operating when the storm hit. The whole thing was over, as if it had never happened.
Except for the two young men and their friends and families.
The storm ceased to be a topic of conversation, but the accident and the two fellows were on everyone’s mind and in everyone’s discussions hereabouts for quite some time. I overheard people talking about them at the post office, and even at the monthly Final Friday festivity in Nelsonville, 15 miles away, at the end of the week.
The memorial in the median at that intersection quickly appeared, flowers at first, growing and changing in the four years since, now two white crosses. I don’t know when the tradition of placing such markers began, but it seems to me to be a good thing. I never pass one without wondering as to the story behind it, as to who had begun the day with all kinds of plans, only to have them brought unexpectedly and violently to an end.
The two teenagers who died two years ago this Wednesday are remembered.
By people who knew them and, whenever I drive past, by someone who didn’t.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.