Sole Witness To An Accident

The morning was cold enough that I wore my rain pants just for the insulation, even though it wasn’t raining. This had a useful side-effect: No one could see just how alarmingly stained my sweatpants were. Highway tar does not look good on anything.

The view in the campground was glorious, and as I struck camp I paused for a while to take a video of the tumbling clouds.

Daylight revealed big splats of mud on my walk-around jeans, so I rinsed them in the restaurant bathroom and roped them to the bike. The dry wind would do the job the weak sunlight couldn’t.

Before joining the main highway, I rambled back down to the end of the road I’d been walking last night, and saw a cool radar station that had only been a row of blinking lights before.

The landscape was even weirder during the day. I could see why it was popular with photographers.

Just before the highway, the rockslide got so dramatic that I had to pause and take this brain-bending photo with the camera tilted:

The late morning mist was really working today, adding dramatic layers to rock and sea.

When I reached the highway, the tunnel was visible again. The first one of this trip. (I’d been through a few on the northern side a few years ago.) This would be fun!

The tunnel turned out to be a modern one, with a decent amount of space on the side for bicyclists.

Further in I saw a few spots that were already in need of repair. I wonder if volcanic eruptions cause the ground to quake enough for this? Or is it just the ordinary free-thaw destruction of harsh winters?

Alas, the tunnel wasn’t a long one. I emerged into daylight regretfully.

To amuse myself and contrast with the serene landscape, I cued up an ancient radio show by The Firesign Theatre, The Big Internet Broadcast Of 1996. I wondered if the Icelanders around me would go for such absurdist humor? I might be making the day’s experience less Icelandic, but, … a geek’s gotta geek.

“We’ve got a lot of everything out here.
And a lot of places to … put it in.”

The Firesign Theatre describing America

So, you should have headlights if there’s no road, or a road but no city, unless you’re a bus, in which case go various speeds. But if there’s mixed company, then … go the same speeds? Thank goodness I can ignore this, since there aren’t any bicycles.

Around the corner I found a nice place to sit:

And further on – good grief – the terrain just got ridiculously photogenic.

Even the hay bales looked amazing in this light. When it comes to golden-hour light, it’s hard to beat Iceland.

Then my afternoon changed. I was biking along an S-curve, and ahead I noticed a car hurtling along, approaching the other end of the curve. I was a bit concerned that it was going to take the corner pretty fast. Then it didn’t take the corner at all.

Instead, the car went down the embankment on the outside of the curve, then up another embankment from a perpendicular road.  It flew almost 15 feet into the air, tilting downward from the rotational force of the front wheels being first to leave the ground, then it came down with a heavy thud just on the other side of a fence, see-sawing back up into the air throwing a large dark object out behind it.  It landed again, the airbags deployed, and finally it ground to a stop in the grass.

Witnessing all this, I pedaled faster to get around the S-curve to where the vehicle had landed, certain someone was seriously hurt. Less than a minute later, a young woman opened the driver-side door and got out, standing unsteadily. By the time I drew close with my bike, on the other side of the wire fence, she had walked a circle around the car, apparently inspecting it for damage, and then sat down heavily on the grass by the open door.

I looked ahead towards the first impact, where I’d seen a giant object come flying out. There was a large rectangle of bare earth, and a long blanket of sod the same size beyond it. The impact of the vehicle had ripped it out of the ground all at once. I was quite relieved it wasn’t a mangled body, human or otherwise, and that I didn’t have to try and triage some horrifying injury while waiting for assistance, since I wouldn’t be very good at it.

I asked the woman if she was alright, and said I would call emergency services. I had a feeling she wasn’t confident enough in her English to answer back. I took my phone off the handlebars and realized I had no idea what the number for emergency service in Iceland was, or even if my phone would connect to it.

Before I could start puzzling this out, another car came along. It slowed for me, then slowed dramatically when the driver saw down the embankment and noticed a car sitting on the wrong side of a cattle fence.

The car parked, and the man who emerged was a local farmer, fluent in Icelandic. I told him what I’d seen and he immediately began attending to the young woman, who looked no more than 17 years old, and was clearly in shock. He called for the highway patrol, and with a few minutes to wait he turned to me and gave the woman’s side of the story, as she remained shell-shocked in the grass.

“She was up really late, trying to drive home from the other side of the island,” he said. “She fell asleep at the wheel. When she woke up, the car was in the grass. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident, just waking up with her face in the airbag.”

A few minutes later an SUV marked as law enforcement pulled up. Two officers talked to the woman, and a third came up to me and asked for a retelling of the incident, since I was the only one who’d seen it. I walked him over to where the car left the road, and to the embankment where it vaulted into the air. The car had missed hitting a metal sign embedded in a concrete footing by only a few inches, then had flown just far enough to avoid having the rear end come down on top of a fencepost. That would have turned the car sideways and possibly thrown her from it. Or, if she’d been going slower and come down in front of the fence, the steep angle would have plowed the post upward and sent it through the windshield.

I was gobsmacked at how absurdly fortunate she had been — and how incredibly well the airbags had done their job. Holy crap do those things save lives.  The extent of her injuries was a bruised ankle and some PTSD.

I stood around texting for a bit. The young woman got moved to the back of the SUV. The farmer sat next to her, providing company for the ride home. It turns out he knew her father, a fellow farmer. I leaned in the window and told her: “You’ve very lucky. Think of all the time after this as bonus time.”

She nodded and smiled weakly.

There was nothing more I could contribute, so I rode on. By evening I’d found a campground, and set up my shelter.

The place had a cute little common area, making a pleasant island of light. I sat around for a while listening to a few other campers chatting about their hike.

As my mind settled, it conjured up a haiku:

Cathedrals of ice
Hold unbroken twilight mass
My spirit rises