Before tour, I was sleeping in the tree house behind my house, my old room now inhabited by a recent Bloomington immigrant while I was across the Atlantic. It was nice to sleep up in the tree, but noisy. I would fall asleep to the sound of crickets and frogs and I would wake up to the sound of birds or people talking on the street. Last night I slept in West Philadelphia and woke up to city sounds – cars, trolleys, and dump trucks. With the sound of the dump truck and all it’s clattering of steel and hissing of hydraulics, I couldn’t help but think of that morning in Binghamton, and I realized that I would now always hear the sound of a dump truck differently, not with a sense of foreboding or sadness, just differently.
We drove through the night from Detroit to Binghamton, NY. Following those great lakes on the US side, we dared not to try to get our sketchy asses through the Canadian border. I must have slept, but it was hard to believe because I could never seem to get comfortable. On this tour, I’ve realized that sleeping in a moving vehicle works okay for passing time, but does little for alleviating fatigue.
Looking around the bus, everyone was twisted and contorted with heads dangling off of seats, feet pressed high against the windows, or heads tucked into little balls resting gently on the back of the seat ahead. For the silence, the scene seemed so unnatural. One could imagine a disconcerting scenario where any one of us could have woken up and, for a second, thought that the bus was lying in a ditch after a horrible accident the way that our bodies were all twisted and strewn across the floor. One could have gasped in horror before realizing that the bus was not, after all, crumpled and twisted, but instead quietly pressing on through the night past the rusty cities and towns that line the great lakes.
A day later, after the show in Binghamton, we had been crammed, the thirty or so of us, in the extra rooms of a house inhabited by some people kind enough to put up with all of us. We nestled in where we could. I found some space in an attic room with Matte, Will, and Benji, amidst the broken window glass and the other relics of the house’s previous inhabitants. They had been frat boys, apparently and they had left such strange relics as some expensive work boots spray-painted gold as part of some strange ritual and the remnants of a porn collection with DVD titles like “interracial love” (or something similar but more crassly worded). Those of us sleeping in the attic were just waking up when we heard a grinding sound and then a crash and then shouts of “call 911!” We rushed downstairs, through our numbers, and out the door to find that a garbage truck had lost control and flipped over in the middle of the street, maybe 10 yards from where the school bus was parked, and exactly where the school bus would have been parked had we not backed it up to avoid blocking a driveway. I sat on the porch and watched as neighbors trickled from their houses to examine the carnage. The driver, who had managed to climb free of the dump truck, was staggering around deliriously. EMTs and cops arrived at the scene, followed shortly thereafter by a TV news crew.
It is strange to be a spectator to tragedy. Mere feet from the accident, and the realization that the multi-ton vehicle that crashed could have easily been the one that I was riding in, I don’t have any new found sense of my own mortality and don’t feel much at all other than a bit of concern for the victims. Fresh air doesn’t make that much of a difference, I guess, in terms of distinguishing real life from Rescue 911 or COPS. But it is minutes, perhaps, or yards, that allow this indifference. I heard that Erin had to run from the path of the careening vehicle. Chris was sleeping on the school bus, saved only by friction. Sherri ran to the side of the dump truck where the sanitation workers who had been hanging on to the back of the truck had been thrown and lay in pools of blood. On the porch, we remarked at how slow-moving and confused the emergency workers and police seemed, but Sherri told of how she, seeing the blood, was paralyzed, not knowing what to do to help the people laying in the street as people on the sidewalk screamed “DON’T TOUCH HIM!” at her.
I think all the time about those who lose their lives because of war or poverty or desperation or sadness, but I guess I hardly ever think of being wiped out by dumb circumstance.
Later in the day of the dump truck crash, we found that the tires on the bus were looking a little worn and some couldn’t help but think that we might end up like the dump truck. The tires ended up being fine, but shit, tons of metal is still tons of metal.