Friday, June 22, 2007

On Being Hit by a Vehicle

It’s not a person’s fault that most of his thoughts are about himself. So, it wasn’t my fault that when I heard about the Russell kid’s being hit by a car on his bicycle I first thought of the only time I’d been hit by a car. I was skating down a hill on Lexington Ave. in Manhattan. A nice looking grey car came too far into the intersection on a red, and there I was lying on the hood looking at the driver. He and I, both respectively scared that we were at fault. I stood up slowly. He backed up his grey Lexus slowly. I picked up my skateboard, which had stuck a passerby’s ankle. He took off in his automobile, which had stuck a passerby’s body. Nobody got hurt in my crash. We both probably profited from the collision. He had a story about hitting somebody, and I one of being hit by some car. The Russell kid got hurt badly. When I heard about it, he was still in the E.R., and the next day I heard that he had died there.

The night of his death I had spent around the city of Rochester in Olmsted County, Minnesota. A friend who had lived here with me during high school had moved away during college but he was back here for this week of the summer. We’d met other high school friends and had all gone to the McDonald’s closest to my house.

In Rochester, most of the Mayo Clinic is downtown, and most of downtown Rochester is the Mayo Clinic. By following Second St. west out of Downtown Mayo Clinic ten blocks there are: a Caribou Coffee, two of hotels both owned by Marriott, the McDonald’s already mentioned, and Saint Marys Hospital of the Mayo Clinic. There are at least fourteen other Saint Mary’s Hospitals in the States, but this one is the only one with over a thousand beds, over fifty operating rooms, a helipad, and this nation’s largest intensive care unit. Saint Marys Hospital is the only hospital with the name of the mother of our savior that omits her possessive apostrophe. Saint Marys Hospital is the largest hospital campus in the world. Saint Marys Hospital is one block diagonally from the McDonald’s. Which meant that when Keith Russell was dying in the largest intensive care unit in the world I was one block away diagonally hearing about his crash, but not of his death, in the McDonald’s Drive Thru. I didn’t find out about his death until the next day.

Rochester, despite its hospital, functions as a small town for better or worse. Nobody in Rochester is more than two degrees of acquaintance from any other resident. So every body in Rochester at least knew somebody who knew Keith, if not then knew him directly. The next day, then, the residents of Olmsted County who knew early on of Keith’s death set the necessary mechanics into motion to be sure all degrees of the county would know of the previous night’s death. I had attended high school along with Keith, though he was a year my junior. That day after his death I heard many times that he died. My mother was the first to ask me if I’d “heard about the Russell Boy?” My girlfriend asked me in the same way only she didn’t say, “Russell boy,” she said, “Keith Russell.” She was also a year below me and she had taken high school band with Keith for all four years. She played the oboe. He played clarinet. My friend who had been with me at the McDonald’s Drive Thru the night before asked me, “You heard that Keith died last night, right?” He had played Dungeons & Dragons with him at a Russian immigrant’s house many times before moving out of Olmsted County. “You know I used to hang out with him at Anton’s?” He swore and sighed and swore again. “We played D&D together. I mean, he wasn’t my best friend, but I knew him, you know? I mean, Keith was definitely a friend.”

When the World Trade Center buildings started falling down in ninth grade, we were all arriving at our second period classes. Most of us watched it on T.V. all that school day. I was in history for second period, and our teacher, Mr. Glaser, who later said the Taliban was to the Middle East as the American Revolutionaries were to British America, let us watch the first tower smoke like a chimney until the second one got hit. Two buildings made into chimneys stacks by passenger aircraft on T.V. with short breaks to see the Pentagon all smashed up from another aircraft. Then Mr. Glaser, Dallas Glaser, a Green Party Ralph Nader supporter, put a video in the VCR that was planned for the day’s lesson. It was an educational video about American Indians narrated by the actor Kevin Costner. Class periods in high school were 45 minutes, so I was out in the halls soon enough. The halls of Mayo High School on September 11, 2001 were louder, but not loud like a football game. They were loud the way a classroom might get loud if the teacher all of a sudden slammed her fist through the glass window and screamed and whaled in front of the whole class and then ran out the door slamming it behind her. Everybody was talking in regular voices, but since we were all talking about the same thing it felt loud.

The day after Keith got run over by a Lincoln Town Car this place felt loud. The entire county seemed to be talking in regular voices doing their regular tasks, but it was all about Keith, all over, all day.

On September 11, 2001, after Mr. Glaser’s class I saw Andrew Murphy in the hall looking around at everyone. He asked me what was going on. I asked him, “Didn’t you hear?”

“Didn’t you hear about Keith?”

“Did you hear it was an old lady that hit him?”

“Did you hear that he was biking on the highway where there aren’t any street lights?”

“Did you hear he was biking all day going from door to door for some politician?”

When most people in the county heard about as much as they could hear, those who hadn’t heard anything looked around at everyone and asked what was going on. They received, “Didn’t you hear about Keith?”

By the afternoon of that day, people closer to Keith started asking each other about funeral attendance. Kids who had played in marching band with him wanted their conductor to arrange for them to play at the funeral. My friend who was only supposed to be in town for only a week arranged to stay longer because the more he spoke about whether or not he should to go to the funeral the more he considered Keith his friend.

I’d only been to two funerals. The first was for an old man I’d known all my life through church. He died while sitting on the toilet. He was old. I was surprised to go to a funeral and see most people laughing and smiling. His wife cried during the service, but there was cake and coffee afterward.

The second funeral was for a Sudanese immigrant I’d met in Phy. Ed. in ninth grade. I’d tutored him after school in tenth grade, and he was in my twelfth grade government class the year he died. He died leaning against a concrete slab behind K-mart. He was young. His friends had left him to walk home drunk in the winter, and he froze to death leaning against the concrete platform for the K-mart garbage dumpsters. At his funeral most of the young people there cried. The teachers who came from school for the most part held themselves together, but when his coffin came in carried by black dressed Sudanese men, the whole crowd seemed to shiver together. His mother and siblings followed his body into the sanctuary screaming and whaling. Afterward, I threw up in the bathroom and followed the procession to the cemetery, where we stepped through the snow to cast a rocks on his coffin before the bulldozers plowed the frozen dirt back in its place.

Keith’s funeral, I’ve heard, was somewhere in between the two I’d attended. Not halfway between, probably closer to Alier’s, the Sudanese immigrants. Keith was young. His family cried softly during the service. There were many people at Keith’s like there were at the old man’s, just less old people. There were teachers from high school like at Alier’s, but nobody screamed and whaled or pounded on the coffin lid cursing Heaven and God and Jesus. It was summer, so when they put Keith’s body in the ground there was no snow. The politician for whom Keith had been campaigning came to the funeral and spoke.

Back when Minnesotan U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone died, the Democratic Party threw a political rally disguised as a memorial service at Williams Arena, the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers basketball stadium. The governor at the time, former pro-wrestler Jesse “The Body” Venture, left early calling it a disgrace and spited the Democrats by appointing an independent replacement to the Senate.

The politician who spoke at Keith’s funeral spoke kindly of the city of Rochester and of Keith and said nothing about politics more than that Keith was a big help to his campaign and that he’d be missed.

In the city paper months later, letters to the editor appeared citing Keith’s and others’ deaths as evidence that bicyclists should be committed to the sidewalks. One wrote, “Why’d we spend so much on the bike paths if they’re going to be allowed to bike all over the streets? They’re asking for it.”

The only bike paths in Rochester were scenic paths for exercise and family time. There were zero bike lanes in all of Olmsted County, and according to local laws it was illegal to ride on the sidewalks. Keith was hit by a car on the highway, where he wasn’t allowed. A seven-year-old girl was killed instantly crossing a street not at an intersection in Rochester a month before. A Rochester city bus ran down a mentally retarded woman crossing at a crosswalk with lights in her favor in the same year.

In Manhattan, people got hit all the time. A lot of them were bike messengers and a lot of them died. When three people died in three consecutive months on the streets of Olmsted County, the people of the small community had funerals and memorial services and hung white crosses with flowers to street signs and eventually wrote letters to the newspaper telling bicyclists to get out of the cars’ way. Three down and how many more to go? Sort of a “Who else wants to see what we can do to you if you cross our streets?” kind of crowd in Olmsted County. They dared you to find out.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home