Rituals. Life.
Rituals. Life.
This is about a bad accident on the highway. About intuition and honoring life. Please consider whether reading it will do you more harm than good.
On my last morning house-sitting for my sister and her family in Tucson, I drank an iced coffee on the patio with Frida the velcro dog by my side. I had a two-hour meeting with work colleagues in California and France, then dropped Frida with her sitter, packed up the car, and set out on the five-hour road trip north to Flagstaff, my overnight stop on my way to Vegas.
After a torrential monsoon storm the night before, the sky was clear and the air, hot. The drive, uneventful. Too many trucks. I listened to 90s pop and hip-hop and tried to get lost in my thoughts, which I probably did, but now I can’t remember a thing from the first few hours except for my meditation on gestures and rituals, inspired by my interview with filmmaker Jessica Oreck:
I love the gestures that we use on a day-to-day basis when we are not actually thinking about the movement—when it has become such a part of our lives that it's invisible. You tie your shoe, you button your shirt, you pull on your pants one leg first, like nobody ever thinks, “oh, today I'm going to do my left leg first.” I love watching people wash their face. I love watching women put on makeup. I love watching men shave or tie their ties—those routines that become rituals because we've done them so much.
Jessica’s words were still on my mind when I stopped at the McDonald’s in Camp Verde for a bathroom break and to text my dad about the arthritis in his back. The way to die young is in an accident, I remember thinking, surprised by the crispness of the idea, which I assume sprung from my anxiety about aging bodies. Then, as I sat there checking email, I watched a man not 10 feet in front of me drench himself with water from a big cup. He dumped it all over, leaning forward so that it wouldn’t run down his legs and into his socks and shoes.
It’s unusual to soak yourself near the picnic tables in a parking lot, so I studied him for clues. Why? He wore long, black shorts and a t-shirt, a black leather backpack, the kind you might buy to look cool trekking across Europe, and black socks. (I don’t remember his shoes.) He was blond, probably early-40s, hipster. It occurred to me that either he didn’t have air conditioning in his car, or he was on a motorcycle, hence turning himself into his own cooling unit.
Not twenty minutes later, back on the road, a highway patrol car sped past. Then traffic came to a halt, and we piled up, car after car, and we waited. We turned off our engines, rolled down our windows. Restless children and moms, shirtless men glistening with sweat, and long-haul truckers began pacing up and back the shoulder of the road to stretch their legs and satiate their curiosity.
“What’s going on?” I asked a woman walking by my window.
“Motorcycle accident,” she said. “Guy lost control of the bike.”
At first I thought the helicopter, a giant locust landing in the middle of the road, meant the man in the accident was probably alive. It wasn’t until the next morning that the other possibility occurred to me—that he had not survived but the helicopter was sent because we could harvest his organs for transplant.
That harvesting organs wasn’t my first assumption astonished me. When Morgan—my friend, writing partner and “comrade,” as I referred to him—was in the ICU in January 2012, on life support and waiting to have a second double lung transplant, there were no organs available despite that he was at the top of the transplant list covering hundreds of miles. Morgan had cystic fibrosis and underwent his first transplant in late December, but it didn’t go as hoped; the new lungs were dying inside of him. He needed another pair, and quickly.
Deaths from car and other accidents comprise about a third of all organ donations, but as it turns out, people take fewer risks in January than they do in December. January is icy and cold. People are overfed, over-stimulated and financially over-extended; partied out. They don’t travel or drink and drive. Instead, they cook at home, hit the gym, and read the books on their shelves per their New Year’s Resolutions. I remember it was like an out-of-body experience to realize that all over the world, lives hung in the balance waiting for new organs in the new year; meanwhile, the rest of us were purifying our vessels and improving the odds of our personal survival.
We sat on the road between Camp Verde and Flagstaff for more than 90 minutes waiting for the helicopter to lift off and the patrol to finish their investigation. A woman in the lane next to me wedged her phone in the sun visor and kicked back to watch a show. An SUV packed with teenage boys played their current jam on repeat. I turned my music off; the silence felt more reverent. Eventually, everyone got back into their cars, the cops moved the orange cones to the side of the road, and we slowly rolled forward, past the black skid marks where the biker lost control, and past the mangled metal that once was a vehicle.
When Jessica and I spoke about daily rituals such as putting on makeup or getting dressed, she noted how we perform them with as much reverence as we might a religious ritual, and this resonates with me. We assume our religious rituals are a way to usher the spiritual realm into our material lives, but I think the opposite may be more true. Our rituals, and the language we use to shape and hold them, are what make the sacred meaning.
The following day, it crossed my mind several times to call the Flagstaff hospital to ask what happened, but I didn’t. It isn’t for me to know if the injured man was the same one I observed, or whether he survived, or if his life saved others. Yet it struck me that I woke up still processing this, and I wondered what to label my experience—a trauma response, intuition, pattern recognition, synchronicity, sleep deprivation, or all of the above. What I will only, ever know for sure is that I saw a cooling ritual, a practical baptism, in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Then there was an accident. Then our collective witness made it not mean nothing.