When I was five years old my parents, my two younger brothers, and I were traveling between adjacent states to visit relatives. We were in a hilly area when the tractor-trailer we were passing drifted into our lane to (apparently) pass a smaller car in front of it. In those days, it was common to honk the horn twice before passing, so the driver of the truck either didn’t hear our horn and/or didn’t check his side mirrors before starting to pass.

Our Nash was similar, though two years older, than the 1951 model shown here.

Mother honked the horn again. When the truck driver realized we were there, he overcorrected and ran off the road to the right, rolling over and over through a rough field. Our car didn’t come into contact with the truck. We stopped. Somebody called the highway patrol, and I remember sitting for ages in our car on the road’s shoulder while the police talked to my parents and checked on the truck far across the field.

Apparently, drivers in other cars confirmed what happened, so we were finally allowed to leave. My only memory of the conversation was the officer’s comment that the kids didn’t need to be punished by having to sit in a hot car any longer. At the time, I didn’t like his use of the word “punished.”

I don’t remember my parents ever mentioning the accident in my presence after we left. At the time, of course, in this pre-seatbelt era, I had no concept of the condition of the people in the truck. By the time I seriously thought about it, my parents had died and my brothers have no memory of the incident. I have no idea why I didn’t think about the accident, say, while in high school or college, and ask my parents about it. I’m certain though that if one or more occupants in the truck were killed, my parents wouldn’t have told me. They concealed the worst of the past from us.

Online searches have yielded nothing either in public records or newspaper accounts.  And yet I wonder, decades after the accident, about what happened to the people in that truck. Perhaps it’s best not to know, though I don’t think so.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism novels including “Fate’s Arrows.”