Roadside
The state has a policy about roadside memorials, and part of my job is enforcing it, which is the worst part of my job.
I work maintenance for the highway department out of Lakeview, in the south-central Oregon high desert. Our district covers about two hundred miles of US 395, two lanes through sagebrush and alkali lakes and the occasional ranch. People die on it. Head-ons, rollovers, deer, cattle, fatigue, ice. When they do, their families put up crosses, little white wooden ones with names and flowers and sometimes a photo in a plastic sleeve. The policy says families can apply for an official sign, and the rest have to come down after a year, because they’re a hazard in the clear zone and because a road lined with crosses makes people drive like they’re at a funeral. I take them down carefully and box them and call the family if I can find them. I hate it.
In the spring of this year I started finding crosses on Milepost 112.
Milepost 112 is a long left-hand curve along the shore of a dry lake. It’s banked okay. The sight lines are good. As far as I knew, nobody had died on it in the twenty years I’d been on the crew. I asked Merle Witt, who’s been on the crew since 1981, and he said the same.
The first cross was in March. White pine, about two feet tall, hand-lettered in black paint: DARLENE FUCHS and under that 1961–1994. No flowers. Just the cross, pounded into the gravel shoulder on the outside of the curve.
I pulled it. It was well past a year, if the date was right, and anyway it wasn’t there the week before. I put it in a box in the shop and looked up the name to call the family.
Darlene Fuchs was alive. She was sixty-four and ran a quilting store in Paisley, forty miles up the road. I called the number on the store’s website, and when I told her why I was calling she was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Was it on that curve by Abert? By the lake?”
I said yes.
She said, “In August of ‘94 I was driving home from Klamath at night and a stock truck came around that curve in my lane. I went into the ditch. I should have rolled. I didn’t. I sat there in the dark for an hour shaking.” She said, “I never told anybody but my husband.”
There were six more by the end of April.
All on that curve, all on the outside shoulder, all the same white pine and black paint. Different names. Different years. GORDON MAEDA 1947–1973. RUTH ANN COLE 1955–2002. TOMÁS ECHEVERRÍA 1988–2011.
I found four of them. Every one was alive. Every one had a story, if you asked, about a night on that curve. A blown tire. A deer. A moment of sleep. A truck in the wrong lane. A slide on black ice that should have sent them into the lakebed and somehow didn’t. Every one of them, when I asked, said the same thing in different words: I should have died there.
The year on the cross was always the year it happened.
Gordon Maeda was eighty and lived in a care home in Bend. His daughter put me on speaker. He remembered it exactly. He said, “I fell asleep. Woke up with the wheels on the rumble strip and the lake right there. Like waking up on the edge of a roof.” He laughed. Then he asked who’d put up the cross. I said I didn’t know. He said, “Whoever it is, they’re keeping score.”
I put up a game camera. The district has a few, for watching culverts. I strapped one to a fence post across the road, pointing at the curve. For three weeks it caught trucks, ranch pickups, a coyote, a lot of wind. Then, on a night in May, it caught nothing at all for one hour and twelve minutes. Just a black screen, timestamped, the infrared not firing. When the picture came back, there was a new cross on the shoulder.
MERLE WITT 1958–1985.
I showed Merle. We stood at the shop door and he looked at the cross in my hand for a long time. Then he said, “January. A grader. I was in the ditch on the plow with the blade down and somebody came over the hill too fast.” He shook his head. “Clipped the blade. Missed my cab by a foot. I’ve never thought about it again till now.” He handed it back to me. “Hell of a thing,” he said, “being remembered for something that didn’t happen.”
That night Merle had a heart attack in his recliner. He’s all right. He’s off work for the summer. His wife says he keeps asking about the cross.
I want to tell you what I think is going on, because I think about it every day now on that stretch.
A road is a strange thing. It’s a long, narrow place where a lot of people come very close to dying, all the time. Most of them never know. You miss a deer by a second, you come back into your lane just in time, you wake up on the rumble strip, and you drive on and forget it by morning. But the road doesn’t forget. The road’s been there the whole time, with its curve and its shoulder and its long dark lakebed, and it was right there. It was so close. It nearly had you.
I think 112 keeps track. I think the crosses are what it owes itself.
And I think after enough years of putting up crosses for people who got away, it might want to settle up.
Gordon Maeda died in June, in the care home, in his sleep. He was eighty. That’s not strange. Ruth Ann Cole died in July, in Sacramento, in a car accident, on a freeway, the kind of accident that happens a thousand times a day. Her son posted about it online and I saw it because I’d been following the names.
Darlene Fuchs closed the store and moved to her sister’s in Arizona. She told me on the phone she wasn’t going to drive anymore.
I’ve stopped pulling the crosses. There are fourteen now. I go out and look at them on my lunch break. I’ve thought about burning them in the shop barrel. I’m afraid of what it would do to the names on them, so I haven’t.
The last one went up on Tuesday. The game camera went dark for an hour and twelve minutes, and when it came back on there was a fresh white cross on the shoulder, the paint still tacky.
It has my name on it. It says 1979–2026.
I know what it’s for. It’s for last November, a little after midnight, coming home from my sister’s in Klamath Falls. I was tired. I’d been listening to the radio. I don’t remember the curve at all. I remember coming awake at the sound of my tires on the gravel and the lakebed right there in my headlights, white and enormous, and turning the wheel. I sat on the shoulder afterward and laughed at myself. I didn’t tell anyone.
The year is wrong. It says 2026. It’s 2026 now. Gordon’s said 1973, the year his near-miss happened. Darlene’s said 1994. Every one of them has the year of the night on the curve. Mine should say 2025.
I’ve driven past it four times since Tuesday, on my way to work. I’ve stopped looking at the curve. I just look at the paint.
Somebody’s been touching it up. The second number gets a little fresher every morning, a little darker. As if whoever paints them got it right after all, and I’m the one who has the date wrong.