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My father pulls over to the side of the road and runs down the ravine to see if the driver is okay. At this point, I have trouble visualizing all that he saw. He later tells me that there was a woman in the van, that she was unconscious, bleeding from where her head struck the steering wheel. A crowd begins to form around the wreck. The woman awakes from her concussion but seems disoriented. She asks for her baby. And it is then that my father notices the hole in the windshield and, further down the ravine, an infant’s car seat resting in the snow.
He later tells me about how surreal it was, picking his way down to base of the gorge, with the sun setting on the hills, to look for this dead child. The sheer stillness of those long moments is what he found most unsettling—the way time drew to a crawl, as if to offer plenty of opportunity to dwell on his anxiety, both the anxiety at the prospect of finding the child and the anxiety of having to carry that news back to the child’s mother. Fortunately, it turns out that there is no dead child. Someone from the crowd calls down and tells my father to come back. Someone has found the woman’s license, has called information to find her home phone number, and has called her home. Her husband answers; he explains that he has already picked up their child from daycare. The baby is safe at home.
There are more details to this story, such as the conversations that pass among the crowd as they wait for the ambulance, how the man who ran the woman off the road returned to see if she was okay but sped away. However, we can pass over these details. It is enough to mention one more moment. My father comes home. He embraces us: my sister and my mother and me. And he cries. And it takes him some time to explain why he is crying.
This is a face-to-face encounter. The moment when my father pulls over to the side of the road. The moment when he rushes to the wreck. The long drawn-out moments when he wanders along the ravine. And, perhaps most of all, the moments afterwards, when he is holding us and, over the next few days, when he keeps puzzling over why it has upset him so much. All of it is a face-to-face encounter.