For a while we didn't really know what caused Jonathon's change of heart, and for a long time, he never told anyone. Some people thought it was a result of a bad trip. Others thought he must have finally found God. It wasn't until a couple of years during a particularly long and boring shift that he finally told me.
He was driving through rural Virginia on his way to take a flight back to Chicago after helping some family. He had left the church where his mother-in-law was setting up for the next day's service; she was the one who made sure that all the tables had beautifully curated tablecloths and wreaths and flowers in bowls she found at the dollar-store, though it had been a long while since he had last attended a service. He had taken a back road - one of those winding affairs that cut back and forth through rolling hills of dense forest, the kind that went extinct once engineers realized they could build long, straight sections they would call the highway.
It was on one of these rare straight sections that he found himself face to face with a car barreling towards him in his lane. The driver had cut the blind corner ahead, speeding around the bend with his full car in Jonathon's lane and a tire almost touching the grass.
He slammed on the brakes to slow: there was time to fix this. But he didn't know and would often ask himself many times in the future – perhaps he must have startled the other driver or maybe the weather was too nice and the day too beautiful that it surprised the driver that anyone else would be enjoying the driving roads: the driver of the car overcorrected, careening the car left and right and left and right before flying into the dirt on the side of the road.
He couldn't remember what it looked like in his rear view mirror or recall to the officer exactly what happened. It was an implosion of man-made parts and nature made materials as the car hit the embankment and spun itself clear to the other side of the road.
Jonathon slowed and called 911 immediately as he ran towards the wreck. When he got there, both the front half of the car and the back half were missing. He passed by an air-intake valve on the road, and shiny muffler was in the grass a distance away. He checked on the man.
It was weird, Jonathon said to me, how often our first question in these situations is to ask if they are okay. Maybe it's to reassure ourselves. The dying man was not okay. He was slouched over, his seatbelt holding him in place like a psychiatric patient. Blood dripped down a cut on his head.
Jonathon flagged down a couple of other cars, and together they came to the conclusion that the best thing they could do is leave the man in place until more help arrived. Surrendiptiously, one of the cars that stopped had a part-time EMT inside. When she checked on the man, she didn't help him either; she simply relayed to another 911 dispatcher that this needed the ambulance, not the other volunteers. The man had a collapsed lung - Jonathon heard him gurgle - and had already thrown up and shit himself.
Jonathon and a couple of the other passerby's cleared the road debris so that it didn't puncture any tires for the emergency vehicles. It was like the car had reversed its own creation, going back to its individual screws and bolts and raw plastic materials. The first to arrive was a local sheriff who parked too far away and ran to the scene, along with one of the volunteer firefighters. They waited for the other paramedics. When the town's only real firetruck arrived, one of the volunteer's ran the Jaw's of Life over with their deputized Chevy pickups.
Eventually, a team of out of towners arrived – sheriffs, troopers, and paramedics with a real ambulance. They carried the man out: Jonathon couldn't see what the driver looked like: he was occluded by what now was a good baker's dozen of people. Jonathon gave a statement to one of the troopers after he saw him trying to make sense of how the bumper ended up on both sides of the road.
The man came around the corner in Jonathon's lane. Swerved to get out of the lane. Overcorrected. Hit a tree on one side. Hit a tree on the other.
The trooper thanked Jonathon, took a couple of photos with a cheap camera, and went back to directing traffic. Jonathon went back to his car. He passed a man in the line of vehicles waiting to go if the car flipped - a little too callously. Jonathon just made the wave motion with his hands and seemingly satisified with the answer, the man turned around and drove off. Further down the road Jonathon passed by box truck who had been reversing a couple of miles just to find a spot to turn around.
Jonathon had a hard time dealing with it all on his drive to the airport. He thought about the series of events that led him to that moment. All these years we have, he thought, and its the seconds that matter the most. He had entered the airport address wrong before he left the church, and that cost a couple of seconds. Had he entered it right the first time, he might have met the driver head on. When the maps wouldn't work due to slow service, he decided to continue on instead of waiting; had he waited a couple of seconds more, the man would have passed him without incident.
His mother-in-law would remark that it was God and the fact they prayed before he left the house. Jonathon couldn't argue with that. He had believed in God enonugh to ask for favors like touchdowns and health and love and other sorts of other silly things in those small, dark, introspective common moments when men find momentarily religion. But at the airport, when the adrenaline had left him and the shock had worn off, Jonathon wanted to say a prayer. He was overcome with the faith, and needed to pray. He found some Jehovah's Witnesses spreading the Good Word inside the airport, and asked them if they could pray together, explaining the situation. Apparently, Jehovah's Witnesses don't pray with other denominations, and Jonathon had to pray alone for the man whose name he did not know but perhaps God would.
So Jonathon prayed. He prayed in the security line waiting to be frisked by the TSA agent. He asked for small things and thanked God for the big things and he prayed for the man and asked for mercy and other things he sparsely remembered from Sunday school years ago and snippets he caught from the phone line his mother-in-law called into each morning to pray and gossip. He prayed once he got to the gate. He thanked God, but ordered two drinks at the airport bar and left one untouched when he boarded his flight because he couldn't figure out how he would explain pouring one out in the airport bar. Some ancient tributes die from modern conventions, but he figured the intention was enough.
Jonathon didn't find religion, but he thanked God a little more often and stopped saying his name in vain. He didn't stop swearing, but he did give people a little more grace when he was sworn at.
He wasn't reborn or rebaptized nor did he become a virgin again, but after this incident, Jonathon was more wary of the signs he missed.
