In 1958, when I was seventeen, I was seriously injured in a nighttime truck accident, regaining consciousness on my back out in a field, several older men around me, one trying to get whiskey in my mouth.
No, I told him, my body has been crushed and I’m hemorrhaging inside, the alcohol will dilate the blood vessels and speed the hemorrhaging, whiskey is the worst thing. Another man, his arm supporting my head, was telling me an ambulance would arrive soon.
I couldn’t tell that I had pain, and I had seen my hips going off to the right in a strange angle with the right leg ballooned and turned wrong inside the pant leg and the right boot crushed flat, but I had been rational enough to talk the man into taking the whiskey bottle away so I knew my thinking was all right and, no longer wanting to look at myself, I turned my head to my left, looking out past the men into the darkness, and stopped thinking.
Where I was was in the Moses Lake desert. This is flat, desolate country of only some cheatgrass and low clumps of sagebrush with no trees for miles in any direction save for back in the town of Moses Lake. I knew that, and I knew my back must be broken, and again there wasn’t any pain, and my last thought had been I hope I am not a paraplegic, and it was easy not to think, and it didn’t bother me that out there on the line where the darkness of the land met the lighter darkness of the sky was a stand of trees, large and dark, within an elliptical disc of a strange, brilliant green, the green first flaring up about the boles, moving up in bursts about the tops, then slowing, beginning to flow out around all of the stand, etching each tree in exact location, glowing about them with an intensity I could feel inside me, then not moving, holding, as I knew that was where I was going to go, and would.
And not telling the men what I was seeing, lying there watching that light breaking, then steadying itself about those trees, I thought, So this is how it happens, well, it’s been a nice life, and only momentarily thought, No, it’s too soon, knowing immediately that it wasn’t, that for me it only went this far, that everything I was supposed to do was already done, and next awoke in an ambulance going at high speed toward Moses Lake and Moses Lake General Hospital.
Years later, in a truck stop garage in Flagstaff, Arizona, I talked with a trucker from Memphis, Tennessee, while an all-night mechanic worked on the heater of a car I was driving east to New York City.
This trucker, a large man in his late fifties, who introduced himself as Earl, had been in a Japanese POW camp on Luzon during 1942, ’43, and ’44. During his incarceration he contracted malaria and had it complicated by double pneumonia.
He should have died, he said, but for some miracle he didn’t understand. He said due to the severity of the prison rations, as well as his illness, his body had been terribly racked by a lack of water. The crisis of the illness, he said, passed while he was hallucinating.
In his hallucination he knew he was dying and he was desperate for water. He said he found himself crawling in a field that was the slope of a hill. It was nighttime, and what was eerie was that the field was bathed in an unearthly yellowish light that came not from the sky but from the ground, and on the crest of the slope was a series of water spigots. He said he could see himself crawling in that yellow light toward those spigots and the water he absolutely had to have. He said he crawled and crawled and almost reached one of the spigots. He said he was very glad he hadn’t because he knew if he had, that the moment he tasted that water he would be dead.
I thought his story was remarkable and told him my story, pointing out the similarity of the eerie lights, and the fact that dying seemed to be a peaceful journey to a new place.
He said, Perhaps, but he didn’t think so. He said from his experience it had been terrifying.
I said in my experience it had not.
He said, Well, and then told me how to drive across country the fastest way: by getting behind any semi that has an antenna on top of each of the outside rearview mirrors. Go fast when he goes fast, he said, and slow down when he does; those antennas mean he is two-way radio equipped and has all the latest information within at least a forty-to-sixty-mile radius of where all the police and speed traps are.
I thanked him warmly.
We shook hands and he left.