Mile marker 120, 4 p.m. on a Sunday. Three of us were heading home to Western Colorado after a great climbing and camping trip to Maple Canyon, the Uinta National Forest, Utah. The drive is about six hours, much of it on I-70 with posted speeds of 80. It’s a beautiful, big-horizon route, cutting through the San Rafael Swell with its overlapping fins and upthrust white-rock formations named Ghost Rock or Temple Mountain.
On a straightaway 40 miles west of Green River, the halfway mark on the trip, we drove into a curtain of rain just ahead of a blind curve. Through sudden hard splats on the dusty windshield I spotted a man on the shoulder to our left, in front of a bluff wall. He was violently waving downward, over and over. He had a beard, a white T-shirt. No rain jacket.
“Slow way down,” I said to my husband, Mike Benge, already starting to brake. “Way down.”
We decelerated around the curve onto an eighth- or quarter-mile hill. In front of us were two lines of cars at a full stop on the highway, with ahead a chaos of flung vehicles. They were semi trucks.
All I could think of was my friend Laura Kirk’s husband, Dave Carpenter, who came along on I-70 in winter, slowed to a stop upon seeing an accident ahead, and said to a coworker, “I think we’re going to be here awhile.” Just then they were hit from behind and spun completely around. (They were somehow uninjured; the car was totaled.)
“Pull over to the shoulder,” I urged, and we swerved off.
The rain was now hammering; cars behind us were also braking hard. We heard the first siren.
In probably five minutes the line of backed-up cars stretched up the hill and around the curve, so that taillights would at least be visible to approaching highway traffic. About 20 cars ahead of us was a four-semi pile up, with glass and metal pieces strewn for hundreds of feet on the highway.
“We were probably three or four minutes behind it,” our friend Jim Gilchrist said from the back seat.
More sirens; pounding rain. It poured in thick noisy gushers over the nearby banks, outward onto the road. When the torrents eased, I left the truck, tried to ask around for information. A helicopter arrived, circled, landed.
We saw rescue vehicles arrive, the Jaws of Life carried down the hill: one set, and behind it another. Somehow, only one person was injured, we were told; but he would have to be cut out from his truck.
The truck must have come around onto the suddenly greasy hill and skidded; the truck behind him couldn’t stop in time; and a third one managed to pull over but was hit by the fourth, which ripped the third open in massive glancing blows all down its side.
We were to wait there for a long five hours. By providence no cars or citizen pickups (like the one we were in) were tossed around in the mayhem. Grateful to have been those few minutes behind the pileup, and for a guy who thought fast, bolted up the hill, and stood out in the rain to warn others, I asked people who he was to try thank him. No one knew.
I can still picture him in a T shirt, though I may be wrong that it was white. In any rain, you get soaked and cold immediately. He saw the implications and instantly acted. I’m certain he prevented other crashes, and I wonder if he saved lives. We’d have all come around the bend at highway speeds to rows of stopped cars.
People milled around, walked their dogs. Mike, Jim, and I met others; I talked to the woman driving the third truck, which had been hit. “It’s such a random group, thrown together for hours,” Mike said. We shared food from our coolers, asked for information as possible from a doctor who had walked down to the site to see if he could help.
I only knew that the driver was in his 40s or older, not young and inexperienced, as many truckers seemed to have been in recent accidents on I-70. The interstate, for many a line to recreation—hiking, skiing, rafting, climbing—is crowded and beset by heavy weather.
Finally the helicopter flew away with the injured driver, all of us watching in fraught silence as it diminished and disappeared.
“He’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Mike said. I thought of how my old roommate, a critical-care nurse, always said the hospital in Grand Junction was excellent. Finally cars began moving in a slow roll, and we passed the truck, now missing its entire front end, and drove the four hours home.
In the next few days, I found two short news items, and at least saw nothing about a fatality. I asked a friend in the medical field, who was able to discern that the driver had many injuries but should survive. That was all we knew.
That was in July of 2022. It was my sixth or seventh trip to Maple, with Mike and, when they were younger, our kids, or with friends and more friends and their dogs. I’ve been again since, and will always think of that accident at Green River.
I am originally from Annapolis, Maryland, and was there in the early winter of 1982 when a Boeing 737-222, Air Florida Flight 90, took off out of Washington, D.C., in a snowstorm, and crashed into the 14th Street Bridge and the ice-covered Potomac River, breaking into pieces.
The fatality toll was 78, including four people in vehicles on the bridge and 74 from the plane. Five people—four passengers and a single crew member—from the flight survived, rescued from the river. Another person was in the water, but at least once when a rescue helicopter arrived, he passed the lifeline to others. When the chopper came back, he had gone under.
We in the region waited, appalled by the news and images, wondering who the man had been. For a time no one could say. But I remember that co workers of Arland Williams, age 46, believed it was congruent with what they knew of him. For a time there was even something mystical in not knowing: a sense that maybe we could attribute the best in human nature to anyone there.
Eventually Williams’s body was retrieved, and, while it is hard to know what happened, he was identified as the only passenger who died of drowning.
I’d like to think the guy in the white T shirt could be any of us. I’d be willing, but doubt I’d have thought that fast. Maybe now I would, and that, too, is thanks to him.
It is now the summer of 2024. The above story appeared one year ago, after a subsequent trip to Maple Canyon. This week, to my amazement, I received a very feeling email update from someone who at first signed herself “the trucker’s wife,” though then gave her name.
Jessica (she approves a post but prefers first names) and Brian have been trying to, as she put it, connect the dots from that day. Brian has been through many surgeries and has more to come, but Jessica wrote that he is positive and tough, saying, “He is doing very well considering all his injuries. His determination to get better for his wife and four sons is amazing.”
The couple’s sons were aged 4 to 18 at the time of the accident.
“We have always been a very close family,” she wrote, “but this experience has brought us closer.”
As the two-year anniversary of the accident approached, Brian, who cannot remember the first three weeks after the accident, was looking on the internet for information, and stumbled on this article. He and his wife had only previously seen police and news photos.
Her email continued: “We have heard how heroic the whole scene felt as everyone came together and rallied around…We spoke to one bystander who said, ‘Men were walking around with their shirts missing, as they had used them to apply pressure to the wounds, and everyone was helping where they could. I could see his wedding ring so I tried to keep him conscious by talking to him about his wife.’”
She and Brian would like to thank everyone, from bystanders to all emergency responders and medical caregivers, who helped.
Brian was flown to Denver, 400 miles from their home in Farmington, New Mexico, and remained there a month. Jessica wrote, “The two older sons helped care for the younger ones, and we have a wonderful family, friends and employers who also helped with the boys while Brian and I were in Denver.”
I still haven’t found the stranger who waved us all down, and she’d very much like to, too: “The stranger is a true hero, and I would love to thank him as well for helping to prevent other injuries and taking action….Every day we are thankful for all the people who have helped to keep Brian with us.”
It is a long shot, to think we’d ever find the guy in the T-shirt in the rain, but then again I never expected to hear from the driver, which alone would be enough.
Now and then the internet helps us solve a mystery, such as when, ten years ago, a curious Aspen Times reporter, Tim Mutrie, unearthed an old climbing pack in an office closet and wondered where it came from. By chance I saw his note on Facebook. In 1988, four of us had found that lone pack, a disquieting sight, on top of the remote 400-foot Moses Tower, Taylor Canyon, Utah. Tim opened the old camera within and had the film developed. A week later we had a face, and in three weeks, again by chance, we had
Maybe the internet can help here. If you think you know who the quick thinker was at accident, please write aosius@outsideinc.com.
Alison Osius is a travel editor at ϳԹ.
