The first car accident I witnessed did not produce a fatality, but it should have. I was six years old. Our ranching family had taken most of the day to go picking huckleberries up Rattlesnake Gulch, but we were back home and chores were being handled while Mom prepared supper.

I was using a pitchfork to move hay from a haystack to a manger for the horses when a sound pitched somewhere between a roar and a scream suddenly filled the air. My head whipped toward that unbelievable and for a brief moment unidentified noise. Then I saw it. A big bronze Hudson automobile was screaming westward down U.S. Highway 10, plunging down off Rattler Hill, amazingly managing to negotiate the fairly hard turn at the bottom, then shooting on down the straightaway that ran right past our log house.

Incredibly, the huge car ran off the left edge of the two lane road on the straightaway directly opposite our dwelling. Its hundred foot plunge down the steep embankment ended with the machine buried nose first in the Clark Fork River. Moments later, two ferociously drunk men crawled out of the wreckage. Fatal car accident? No one was even hurt!

Not that you have to be drinking to stick your vehicle in a river. In 2008, a gasfield water truck driver (not me!) lost a brand new bobtail tanker when he parked a touch too close to the Colorado River to take on water. His employer was not pleased.

If we drive, we're more than likely to have a car accident or two during our driving years. Hopefully, none will be as dramatic as the Day of the Hudson. Even more hopefully, none will involve a fatality. In my case, I've had a few, but nothing beyond the fender bender category. I've been a rodeo circuit rider and also a long haul truck driver, so my exposure in terms of miles is considerable, and I'm more than grateful for my relatively clean safety record.

Others have not been so fortunate.

Death by car accident is not something for which you'd want to compile a "Top 10" list, but Personal Worst Five? Even if the list is never put on paper, the memory knows. Here's my list:

1. Wendy Mentzer's rollover on I-90 east of Drummond, Montana, in September of 2004. The details of this car accident are given in the Hub on How To Investigate A Suspicious Death. While it was a hit and run trucker that killed her directly, not the car accident itself, this still counts as my "personal worst" fatality in this category. She was my niece, my kid sister's youngest daughter, and that makes all the difference.

2. The launch of Mickey Boyce's 1961 Chevy 409 across a T intersection on the back roads north of Havre, Montana, in 1963 (if memory serves--it might have been late 1962). Mickey was not family, but he was a fellow working cowboy and a friend who sometimes played nickel ante poker with me and my college rodeo team buddies. He'd been born with a birth defect that left him without much in the way of forearms, but he could drive...and fast. Some of us were unsurprised that he eventually died in a car accident. He'd been alone, he had the hammer down on the big Chevy, and he crossed over to the point of being found with the nose of the car buried in a gravel pile. Those of us who knew him figured it was alcohol, not suicide.

3. The end-over-end at the foot of Rattler Hill. My Dad and I returned to the ranch on that early summer evening to find a cleanup crew just finishing. The eastbound vehicle had been occupied by parents and at least two children. A tie rod broke. The front wheels splayed out immediately, and the tail end of the car immediately came up and over. All survived but the mother, who was propelled through the windshield...which decapitated her. A most horrific fatal car accident; I can still see it happening even though the bodies were gone before we arrived, and that was fifty years ago.

4. The flying car accident west of the ranch house. Late one afternoon, I returned from goofing off with a friend (I was fourteen), well aware that I'd have to face my Dad's wrath for having skipped out on digging some important fence post holes. Dad never said a word. He wasn't home. Instead, he was out helping pick up the pieces. A lone driver, a man about whom I never did know anything, had missed the eastbound curve at high speed. That launched him in what must have been a graceful but ultimately deadly three hundred foot arc terminating in a pileup in the middle our alfalfa field. Another fatal car accident where, for whatever reason, Dad had to help clean up the mess. He seemed to be involved often in that sort of thing.

5. The Cascade, Montana, rancher's death in November, 2001. While Pam and I did not witness this one, it was like we were there. A few miles from where we lived at the time, an elderly rancher pulled onto the I-15 freeway and hit another vehicle head-on. He was going in the wrong direction.  I don't honestly remember how many died, although I seem to recall at least one fatality in the vehicle he hit. There are people killed on our nation's highways every day. What makes this the sort of fatal car accident to remember is the powerful image of an old man's confusion on the roads he'd driven safely for so many decades.

In closing: It would have been simple enough to write about a fatal car accident that made the news by killing a celebrity. Princess Diana, for instance. That was a dandy. But we humans, at least in the United States, all have a more personal memory of a fatal car accident tucked somewhere in the back of the brain. The old commercial asks, What's in your wallet? I would simply ask, What's in your memory?

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32