This past weekend, as I filled up my Ford Expedition at Preeceville's Midtown Service, the local Esso station/convenience store/Subway, I looked around a little nervously. Would we see another bale? Should I keep my head on a swivel?
My slight case of anxiety had its roots in a very real event two weeks prior, when I was nearly smeared by a runaway round bale.
When I had pulled up to the pump that day, I thought, "I should probably pull ahead to the next pump so the next guy can get behind me."
Turns out, that was a very good plan.
The kids were in the truck. My wife had gone inside to pay. I just finished cleaning the back and passenger windows and had moved to the driver's side when I heard a "Whoosh, whoosh, swish."
I walked around the truck and there, right along the passenger side within two feet of my truck, was a path of loose hay. At the end of it was the full-sized round bale that had bounced along and hit the back of a sturdy 1980s Ford car with a substantial steel bumper.
Holy crap!
I immediately realized I had just been standing in the path of the runaway bale, which can be up to a tonne in weight. If I had not moved the truck ahead to the next spot, it would have impacted on the rear passenger door right where our son was sitting in his booster seat. The bale would likely have bounced off the truck, but the window would have shattered right in his face.
Everyone around was simply in awe. I didn't actually see it happen, but I was the one who just escaped being smeared. An older lady who was in her truck with her husband had stopped and said they had tried to flag down the driver, but to no avail. He was in a truck pulling a trailer of round bales, obviously unsecured.
The highway curves right at Midtown. He was coming from the northwest and the road curved to due east. Newtonian physics took it from there, with the first law of motion, that of inertia, coming into play. "An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same directionunless acted upon by an unbalanced force."
After the surprise wore off I phoned it in to the Mounties, the closest of which was in Canora. I don't know if they caught the driver, but we found another bale on the side of the road near the Amsterdam curve on Highway 9, about 25 miles south of Preeceville.
Seeing the humour in this, I thought, "Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bale." But entirely random occurrences like this can happen at any time.
On Thanksgiving weekend we were diverted around a collision of two vehicles that occurred near Otthon, between Yorkton and Melville. The RCMP reported, "Two elder females were driving a Dodge Neon car which collided with a Nissan SUV that had a lone male occupant. The vehicles came to rest in the ditch and caught on fire. The two elderly ladies passed away as a result of the accident on scene. The male occupant of the Nissan SUV has suffered a lower body injury and is being transported to a Regina Hospital."
Knowing that highway well, and the amount of traffic that is on it, I would suspect it was a head on collision. The pictures seem to support that. These collisions happen in the blink of an eye. I was thinking of that bale when we drove down the grid-road detour, with the sound of the STARS air ambulance helicopter coming in from the open windows.
It seems that no matter what you do, some random act or object can come out and smite you. Keep your head on a swivel.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
