Haunted by a 1949 auto accident

I was born in the San Francisco Bay area where we had countless relatives and lived there until the family moved to Eugene, Oregon. We drove back and forth between the two places in our bulky 1949 Nash similar to the one in the picture.

On one of these trips, we were almost hit by a flatbed truck while passing on a two-lane road in Oregon. My brothers and I were in the backseat, though both of them were too young to remember the near miss that might have proved fatal to the truck driver. At the time, I didn’t understand the potential consequences to the truck driver.  Years later, I searched news reports and accident listings without finding anything about the wreck

Mother honked the horn twice, typical in those days, as we pulled out into the other lane and began passing. We were halfway around the truck when it suddenly began pulling over to pass a smaller car in front of it. I thought the truck was going to hit us, but Mother honked the horn again, the truck driver pulled away, over-correcting so that the truck ran off the right-hand side of the road so sharply that it rolled over multiple times before coming to a stop.

I remember sitting in the hot car for ages on the roadside. Police came and went. My folks talked to them outside the car. I don’t remember if there were witnesses. Probably. Finally, an officer leaned inside and said, “There’s no reason to punish the children by sitting here any longer.” And so we were allowed to leave.

Our house on Alder Street in Eugene before the porch was built.

Afterward, my parents never spoke about the accident in my presence, though I’m sure they called people from elsewhere in the house. At the time, I was too young to understand why the truck rolled or to imagine the consequences to the occupants of the cab in a pre-seatbelt era. So I didn’t ask. The matter was too far outside my realm of understanding. However, the memory of that truck rolling endlessly across a field has never left me.

On Alder Street, I saw my first snowstorm and built a snow fort in the front yard. Life went on without nightmares or answers. We soon moved to Florida as Dad’s university job positions kept changing. We drove to Florida in the Nash. En route, I never liked passing trucks. I still don’t.

I’m still looking for closure.

–Malcolm