The first car wreck I covered as a reporter was a doozy. It was out on a Danville back road and the carnage was shocking.

The car itself was almost unrecognizable as a means of motorized conveyance. The entire frame was twisted as though a giant hand had plucked it up into the sky and given it a petulant squeeze before dropping it back onto the pavement. The roof was peeled back like the skin of an orange and the car’s fluids had bled out everywhere.

Contents of the car were strewn all over the place, a scattered inventory of an ordinary life suddenly flung into disarray. A date book sat in the middle of the road, its pages flapping in the wind. A neatly rolled tent had come to rest on the dirt shoulder where it lay surrounded by a small army of dented canned goods. A folding lawn chair made it all the way to a field where it shared company with a backpack, an aluminum baseball bat with glove attached, a badly cracked acoustic guitar and a few fizzing cans of Mug root beer.

Sad, all of it. I walked up to a police officer who stood near the wreckage jotting notes. How many were dead, I asked him. One? Two? More?

“What are you talking about?” he said. “The lone occupant is over there talking to the tow truck driver.”

Alive and well, the driver was, with not so much as a fat lip suffered in the ugly wreck. His biggest concern, as far as I could see, was getting to work on time and getting another can of sweet root beer.

A week later I would be sent to a crash site where a truck had slid nose-first into a roadside tree. The truck snout was slightly curled back in the wreck, but that wasn’t much. A new grille, a hammer and a little buffing would take care of that.

Turns out the driver in that one was dead. And not just dead, but Dead on Arrival. A crash that looked like a minor inconvenience turned out to be deadly and what do you know about that? I had learned a lesson. The lesson being that you can’t make assumptions about car wrecks.

What you see is not always what you get at a crash scene. Drivers walk away unscathed from cars that have rolled a dozen times down embankments. Others die in rear-enders that look barely violent enough to spill a cup of coffee.

If you’re a reporter who finds himself sentenced to hard time on the police beat, you will cover a hundred of these things your first year. Stick around a while and you’ll cover thousands of wrecks, to the point where they all tend to coagulate in the memory, morphing into one blurry image of mangled steel and broken glass.

Maybe not all of them. A few crashes, because they are horrific or just downright bizarre, will stand alone.

The first summer on the job, I covered a crash wherein a toddler somehow drove his parents’ van into an in-ground pool. No one was hurt, just a lot of soggy upholstery and a very upset flotation duck. Good times, rivaled only by an almost identical crash a few years later that was caused by a cat.

I’ve seen a car fly through the side of a house, causing a lot of damage and interrupting a cribbage game but inflicting injuries no more serious than a minor cut.

The problem is, if I think about those wrecks, I also have to think about the 2006 crash on Canal Street in Lewiston that claimed the life of an 18-year-old. He had been a passenger in a car that spun out of control as one driver raced another toward Lisbon Street. The result was a dead teenager in a twisted mass of metal, but that’s not what got to me. What got to me was the arrival of the dead boy’s father, a man who absolutely howled in rage and pain upon discovering his lifeless son at the side of the road. That howl haunted me a long time, and still does on occasion.

On a dead-end street near the Lisbon town line, responding to the second motorcycle fatality of the night that crazy summer, I came upon a scene where a sobbing young lady was cradling the head of her boyfriend. He had fallen over backward while pulling a wheelie, a routine act that cost him his life. And while his suffering was brief, hers was only beginning. It was her agony that got to me. It sticks in my head like a toxic splinter even now.

It’s almost never the dead that stay with your thoughts if you’re an observer with a notebook and pen. It’s the living folks left to contend with the violence of their loved one’s passing. The wails of agony and shrieks of rage. The haunted faces and disbelieving eyes.

Crashes suck, even the ones that merely tie up traffic for a few hours. The deadly ones are often flukes of horrible timing — the kind of life-shattering events that could have been avoided with even the tiniest alteration in the sequence of events. One mph faster or slower and ol’ what’s-his-name would have missed that deer while he was cruising his bike out Minot Avenue on his last ride of the summer. If they had been a single second behind schedule — or a single second ahead — that family of four never would have collided with the mini-van at the quiet intersection in the Middle of Nowhere, Poland.

Crashes are one of life’s many ways of arbitrarily throwing lives into chaos. It happened to me in 1989 when I lost my oldest brother to a wreck on the turnpike. I never saw that crash site. It was handled by another reporter, from a different paper, whom I’ve never met.

I’ve often wondered if that wreck stuck with him, or if it was just another routine crash to join the blurry, twinkling mass of crashes in his memory.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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