The Dead I Know

When I was six years old, I was playing Hide and Seek with my friends. Friends from my neighborhood. It was on Whittier street in Idaho Falls, Idaho, I remember that much.

At some point, my mother called me home, for what, I don't remember. Lunch, probably. So I left my friends to their game and went home, and I forgot about them.

Some time later, an hour maybe, I came back outside, and there were police cars out there. Something was happening, I didn't know what. Police cars everywhere. But playing with my friends was not in my future. The police were playing with my friends.

They had found a chest freezer. This is in the 1970's, so chest freezers were a little different. They had a latch, and if you got inside of them and closed the lid, you would suffocate, with no possibility of getting out. More effective than a fly trap, you were stuck and caught, and there was just no way to get out.

So, the memory is dim to me now, some thirty-plus years later. But I know that three of my friends died that day. At least that's what they tell me.

And there, but for the grace of God, go I. Called home for lunch, and Death walked the street where I played with my friends. Three of them in a dark freezer in a garage. I was eating tuna fish sandwiches and drinking Kool-Aid, and three houses down on the other side of the street, the Reaper was collecting his due.

A couple of years later, a friend, maybe more of an acquaintance, was digging a cave in the side of a hill of damp sand. His name was Clay, I believe. It's been a long time, I can't be sure. But he did not survive the collapse of that damp sand cave.

Was he seven, eight, nine years old? That is as old as he ever got. His whole life, maybe nine years, and that was it. The story, for him, was told. The End.

I've worked for one company for ten years now. Longer than his whole life.

What does that mean?

When I was fifteen or sixteen, a group of friends and I were driving, somewhere, in rural Idaho. I don't remember where we were going. In the car I was in I occupied the back seat. Randy and Greg were in the front. In another car were some friends, three of them. Friends of Randy more than me. I believe her name was Monica. She was in the passenger seat. As it happened, we were behind them, so I saw it all.

We weren't drinking or high, or even acting irresponsibly. Just teenagers driving on a country road, and I don't even remember where we were going. But that was all it took, to be put into that little moment of history, a small place where doom prevailed, a pocket of fate where families were ruined forever. Where fathers and mothers were left to wonder how it all went wrong.

I was looking out the front window, and suddenly there was dust, I remember, a great cloud of dust. And I saw this person's car, the bottom of it, falling away from me, forward, down that Idaho country road.

The driver had run a stop sign. Apparently he had not seen it. I still remember that after it all, when I had a chance to talk to one of the passengers, the person in the back seat, the one who survived, he quoted the driver as saying "Am I supposed to stop here?'."

He was broadsided by a pickup truck. The two in the truck survived. As I recall, it was a man and his daughter on that country road in Idaho, driving along and minding their own business. Do you remember the last time you drove through an intersection, where the opposing traffic was supposed to stop? That was his position that day, and they survived.

Three people in the car. The one in the back seat was ejected through the back window. When I came upon the scene he was sitting in the dirt, dazed, stunned. Sitting there like he was waiting for someone, but staring ahead, looking away from us, into an unseeable future that only the doomed and the near-doomed can see.

I don't remember his name, he wasn't a friend of mine. He was sitting in the dirt, staring, and twenty feet away, upended in a ditch, was a car, the car he had been riding in two minutes earlier, the car whose rear window he had seen from both sides. There was that car, upside-down, with two dead fifteen-year-old children in it.

"Am I supposed to stop here?"

Randy still has that car, I'm told. Twenty five years later and he still has that brown Plymouth Roadrunner that we were in that day, witnesses to doom.

That's six people, six deaths, before I became an adult. Were they real friends? Acquaintances? People known to me? Maybe, I don't know. My memory is not so good about things that happened so long ago.

In college, I knew a man briefly, but I remember his full name. It was Brian Emsminger. He was driving his Volkswagen Scirocco, white, on Cat Canyon Road, near Santa Maria, California. He went off the road, nobody knows why.

He had dated a girl that I had dated, her name was Rhonda. Before I knew that he had gone, I had been jealous of him, even disliked him, a man I barely knew. I had talked to him briefly at a party. And then one night, on Cat Canyon Road, he drove his car off a cliff, was gone.

And now, I just think that I am so much more fortunate than him. Rhonda went on to marry someone with an airline, I was told. I don't know where she is now. But Brian is at the bottom of that Canyon, still. It's 1988, and he is in a canyon in a Scirroco, white.

Alone.

A little correction, a turn of the wheel, a slipping of tires on a dark road, and that is all there is to say. That is the history of Brian Emsminger.

"Am I supposed to stop here?"

They died, and their memory, except for their families, is distant and faded. They don't show up in search engines. They died before the Information Age, and so what happened to them is lost. Maybe that's why I need to tell you. Maybe I need to write it down and commit it to the memory of the Internet. Maybe in this small corner, this insignificant little blot of text, I need to tell their story, so somebody knows what happened.

Maybe you'll stop and think of those two teenagers, that nine-year-old boy, those three children who died in darkness in a garage in Idaho. Maybe you'll see a little bit of meaning, maybe they will teach you something about your life, maybe.

Maybe it's a new world, where information is not husbanded, where these gateways and fateways don't exist any more, and if people want to say something they just say it, and maybe nobody is listening but it gets said anyway. Information is free, freely distributable, and thus, there is an infinite amount of it.

You just have to listen extra hard to hear the important parts.

What does it all mean? How many of us saw six people die before we hit sixteen? I am forty two years old and I am looking back on Clay and Monica and Brian Emsminger, and I don't know what it means, and I wish I did.

I don't know what to make of it.

I don't know what to make of any of it.

"Am I supposed to stop here?"