Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
- Jun 7, 2018

An Accident Going Into Chicago

Sometimes a story is too scary, too horrible, too exhausting to write for very long, like this one.

Going into Chicago late at night on this Sunday past, I was stopped under a freeway underpass for almost two hours, waiting for an accident to clear. Scary. A police officer at the accident scene was diverting six lanes of interstate traffic onto a single-lane off ramp, and as I went by I foolishly yelled to ask him, “Will this take me back to Chicago?” He screamed back at me, which was frightening in and of itself as men do not scream, “Go, just go.” I caught his anxiety and looked back to see three semi-trailer trucks overturned and spilled across the interstate highway with emergency response vehicles around them, but in the dark I could not see what had spilled. It all looked mangled, one was an open slat cattle semi-trailer truck. Horrible. As I rounded the curve of the exit I saw a fourth semi-trailer truck overturned across another interstate highway and several lanes of traffic were stopped up behind it.

As I found my way back toward Chicago, the traffic was zipping and darting as it always does going into that massive mound of humanity. My nerves were jangled and I tried to hold down my speed, but my turn was off to the left which put me in the high-speed lane and pressure from other cars was reminding me of that fact. Suddenly, just ahead and next to me was a dark motorcycle, running without lights, going slow, about fifty miles per hour, across the middle lanes of the six lanes of high-speed interstate traffic. The car next to me was crowding up on him (protecting him?) and the cars behind us were pressuring and jockeying to pass us because they could not see the motorcyclist, who was kneeling, then standing on the seat/gas tank of his motorcycle, flapping his arms as if he hoped to fly. That insane maneuver, called doing a Christ, could have but did not fly him directly to heaven. I saw no way around him and there was no way to drop back from him, and my feelings vacillated from hot rage at the risk he put everyone into and cold fear that I would hit him. By the time he drove his evil little self off an exit, I was exhausted.

Did this crazed biker cause the ghastly accidents earlier?

Sober note: As I waited several hours for the accident traffic to clear, I realized that if I had been going 1 mile per hour faster, I would have been in that accident.