To milestones

Today is my twenty-second birthday. It's also the day that two bikers may have lost their lives and one innocent man had his change forever.

Shortly after a couple of motorcycles collided with a white grand am at the intersection of Highway 27 and Black Oak Ridge Road, I pulled up at the wreck ready to snap some photos and get quotes from onlookers.

I can only say that I underestimated what walking up on a wreck would be like. In all of my years as a Herald-News correspondent, I've never worked a crime scene or wreck or site of injury or fatality.

I didn't really consider it until it had already happened. People were doing what people do and gawking hand-over-mouth, each giving his/her accord of what took place. But some weren't. Some were just watching.

I spoke to one man who drove up on the accident and parked and got out rather than sit and wait for emergency personnel to clear the road. He had nothing to say to me. But his face was telling. He looked on as if one of his own loved ones had been involved. He was wearing a red Redskins ballcap and glasses. He reminded me of my dad.

There were others who showed genuine horror at the accident. I was surprised, though, at who these people were. They weren't the fellow bikers who had stopped and were part of the group that the victims were riding with, although undoubtedly there was angst and worry in them. They stood around and bellowed at drivers to go here and there, and they hugged one another.

There was a fifty-something couple from Ohio who are just in town visiting. Their daughter lives in Dayton because she graduated from college here. I used to work with her. They were nice, and we talked about the Strawberry Festival from a few weeks ago.

And there were the emergency personnel. They see thousands of wrecks, accidents and deaths every year, but today, at the scene of a wreck involving six people at the max, I saw grief in their faces.

That surprised me. The man who drove the white grand am that the bikers hit stood silently away from the crowd propped against his wrecked vehicle. He just looked.

I was hesitant to speak to him for several reasons, but my job superseded my own preferences. I walked over to him and found that he walked with a cane. He wore thick brown glasses and a tucked in long-sleeve button down shirt with khaki pants. I didn't look at his shoes. I was unable to tear away from his eyes.

They were red and hollow. He had been crying. He was still rattled. Very rattled, almost in shock. His eyes said sorry in every way that a human being can feel it, but his lips never uttered the word. I think he wanted - needed - to tell someone what he was feeling. But it couldn't be me, and I knew that.

I only asked his name and if he is from Dayton. He is. I told him I was sorry about the accident several times, but it didn't help, and I couldn't go any further and comfort him. So I walked away and left him there, alone, by his car with a dried trickle of blood along his hairline and down his face.

It was a horrible experience, but I'm better because of it.

I didn't tell him that it's my birthday.