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A friend called me last night and he seemed somewhat distressed. I'll call him Joe. He started by asking about something that we experienced a long time ago. I guess we were about 14 or 15. He's 37 and I'm 38 now.
One day we were hanging out at his place. It was in the summer. His dad came home and said that there was a bad accident down at a train crossing that had just happened. It was about a mile away. Joe and I decided we wanted to see it. Joe's mother asked us not to go, but we hopped on our bikes anyway to go check it out.
We got down to the accident and the cops and an ambulance were there. They had taped off the scene. A small crowd of neighborhood people had gathered around. There was a smashed up car and the driver's door was hanging open. We could see some cops and the rescue squad working a little further down from the crossing. What it looked like had happened was that the driver of the car decided to race the train and beat it at the crossing. The train collided with the front end of the car and threw the driver out of the driver side door and under the train.
Joe and I watched as the authorities worked further down the crossing. The medics came back to the ambulance and got a stretcher and wheeled it down to where the body was. They then picked up what was still intact from the man and put him on the stretcher. He had been severed from between his neck and left shoulder down to the right side of his waist. As they picked him up, gore was hanging out of his body from where the upper half of him had been. Then we watched as they put the rest of him in several small, plastic bags. They piled everything up on the stretcher, threw a sheet over it and wheeled him into the ambulance. They took him right by us and one of his feet was poking out from under the sheet. He was wearing hiking boots. I don't know why, but another detail that I'll always remember is that he had been wearing a baseball hat. It was sitting in the middle of the street and the cops had drawn a chalk circle around it.
It was later determined that he was drunk at the time of the accident.
So, back to last night. Joe asked me how that experience had affected me. I told him that it was something that I'll never forget, and it made a big impression on me at the time, but it didn't really bother me now days. He couldn't help but think that the experience had traumatized him and had further repercussions later in life. Then he related to me that if he were to die he wanted me to be sure that he was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Ohio River near a spot where we had done a lot of camping and fishing when we were kids. He looked back on those times as the best times of his life.
Joe sounded like he was talking like his life was already over. There were no more good times to be had. He was just putting in his time until death called. I have to do something for him. He's definitely depressed and it sounds like he's doing some soul searching. I lived in the place where Joe is right now for a long time and I think I know how he feels. We live 50 miles apart now, but I think it's time to make a trip back to my old stomping grounds and pay Joe a visit. Maybe take him on a fishing trip down on the Ohio river.
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