Dead in the Park

I just finished checking on my friend’s cats while she was away, and as the bus drove over the expansive bridge, the driver and a passenger began remarking on what was going on below.

“Someone must’ve died. The police have been there so long now, ” said the driver. I seen them there three hours ago.” The driver and passenger speculated on the nature of the wreck that I couldn’t see from my vantage point. Alcohol. Drugs.

“I can’t say nothing,”replied the passenger. “I lost my  license going  180 in a 70 mile per hour zone. Just the other day , the cops got a woman going down wrong side of this road.”

The truth of the matter is once you leave the mainland and are on the island, alcoholics are as plentiful as the ocean surrounding the island, or at least it feels like it.

I’m going to see what there is to see, I think. I am obsessed with the morbid in case you might have missed that about me. For the first time in my life, I walked over the bridge instead of riding over it, and it’s scary. It’s about 100 feet to the unfriendly water below, the area where the river meets the sea, swirling and dark. I clung to the railing, afraid I’d be seized by vertigo and fall back into the traffic whizzing by. What a vulture will do to spot death. There it was in the park by the river. An SUV hit a tree by a sharp curve in the road.  The SUV’s  whole front end up to the cab was crushed in by the tree, and the remains of the vehicle were charred from having been on fire. Police were milling around the taped off area,  cop cars and fire trucks blocked the road nearby.

Wow.

Later, I found out it was a mother and her young children. Miraculously, the mother and one child were saved from the fire by a good Samaritan, who ended up being burned badly himself. The youngest child, a 1 year-old, was killed. The district attorney is treating it as a criminal matter.  What a terrible  world where such bad things happen. I hope the baby didn’t suffer, and that the district attorney is merciful.