Death in the Tall Grass

Cresting the hill, big Dodge engine running like a hound, a heart drum of blown muffler hurrying me onward when I see the sign. At the artilleryman’s crest, just before you can see over the hill, is the marker: Yellow and square, turned onto a corner, “Accident Ahead”.
I slow making the crest and rolling the wheel into the declining turn, and see the glut of disorder that marks an accident scene. Emergency response vehicles strewn across the road at cubist abstract angles, uniforms and bunker gear hurtling around masking the people inside them. A black uniform yells at yellow bunker gear, and we all get directed onto the shoulder. Parked, waiting.
It is in this stillness that I really see it, the maroon van off the shoulder of the road, down the slight slope and through the barbed wire fence. It sits on all four wheels, perfectly inline with the fence, someone could have parked it there except for the obvious. All the glass is gone, save the windshield which is shattered, a crystalline spiderweb narrowing in focus to the solid white knot of a million sand-grain fractures where the drivers head hit. The drivers side of the van is crushed inwards, the surface metal twisted into figures and forms challenging the imagination. The drivers door is covered with a yellow plastic and foam emergency blanket, held on by duct-tape. The blanket moves gently in the breeze, dancing with the tall grasses surrounding the van, its bright color highlighting more than hiding the nature below.
It is quiet as I stare at the van. It sits alone, ten yards from any police or emergency vehicle, ten yards from any living humanity, perfectly lined up with the fence and pointed up the hill. There is no illusion that it might start moving again though, its stillness and quietude are of something much older, much more final, something that is now part of the earth and grasses.
The uniform and bunker-gear shatter the stillness, waving us on and ordering us to stay on the shoulder. Further down the hill, further into the curve, other uniforms are picking up pieces, measuring distances, and speaking loudly and irreverently of the materiel of the dead. Beyond them, just off the shoulder, is another vehicle. Small, black, a pickup before the top of the cab was crushed down into the seats, and folded back into the bed. It is surrounded by activity, and we’re rolling now, hitting the road again – Chaos rarely sees itself in the maelstrom.
As I drive, picking up speed, passing the van ahead of me as it struggles to regain sixty-five, my thoughts return to stillness and death, the order of it all. How natural it seems, death in the tall whispering grasses. And, isn’t it?