So, this morning, driving home from dropping KidDibble off at preschool, and there’s a bunch of cops by the side of the road, next to the river. I’m wondering if there’s a car wreck or a floater, when I see what looks like someone looking down on the scene from a tree festooned with police tape.
Get closer…
Oh. Not standing in the tree. Hanging from it. O-Kay.
Hanging bodies look so very much like they do in pictures or movies, don’t they? That was the thought that struck me most. Then I came home, and I’ve been in a funk ever since, and I don’t really know why, besides the obvious.
See, that’s why you don’t look too closely at accident scenes - you might see something you wish you hadn’t. I think you’d be kinda strange if you weren’t in a funk after seeing what you saw, MrDibble. I suggest a healthy dose of Lolcats - they always cheer me up.
I know what you mean about feeling out of sorts. Last winter, a man fell to his death downtown. I didn’t see the body, but happened to stumble into the area once there was police tape up everywhere. When I learned why the area was roped off, I felt really bad about it. Bothered me for a couple of weeks when I had to walk through there too–especially when people were standing on the spot where he’d landed. I still think about it sometimes if I’m near there, but the icky feeling has faded.
Ditto. Last year a young man had a fatal motorcycle accident on State Street, along the route I drive to work. I still get in the other lane to avoid the bloodstain (much faded now). I’d be in a funk also if I were you.
About two years ago while starting my armored route, we drove past where a young woman on a bicycle had been killed when she shot into an intersection and was hit by a truck. Twisted bike, some blood, body under a sheet in the middle of the road.
Was one of those things that got me thinking about how dangerous my job was; when I drove a 20,000 pound truck on a downtown route and routinely had issues with stupid, unaware pedestrians and bikers. I kept thinking: Someday that’s going to be me parked on the side of the road, explaining how this person shot out in front of my truck and got completely creamed.
Many years ago, my friend and I left his house to go see a movie. At the major intersection about 1.5 miles from his house, a van had hit a pole and was up off it’s front wheels. Cops had just arrived. It was a couple of days later when I found out that the driver had been a guy I’d known in highschool, and that he’d been killed in that fairly minor accident. Not buckled in, hit windshield, died.
That feeling out of sorts thing hanging around is normal, I’d suppose. I can still remember that weirdness that followed me around for a bit after watching some guy down here set his truck on fire and blow his head off with a shotgun. No, I wasn’t there, but it was carried live on TV. It was the very disturbing end to a fairly mundane police chase. There were new rules put in place for televising police chases after that because it interrupted the afternoon cartoon hour and a lot of kids apparently were traumatized by it.
You know, you can watch all the blood and guts and violence in movies and on TV and totally dig it, but when you see the real thing, you’ll get a reaction that you’re not prepared for, guaranteed. It’s bizarre.
This is exactly why I never go looking for the Bud Dwyer video online (that link is just to his Wikipedia article), and never watched any of the beheading videos that were released just before and just after we invaded Iraq. You can’t unsee things.
Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit” to express his horror at lynchings after seeing Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana.
The first word in the song is “Southern”, but the horrible crime occurred in Indiana.
Cassandra Wilson has a version of Strange Fruit that is also heart wrenching. It is said that Billie wept each time she sang it.
Mrs. Plant, grand daughter of Russian Jews also hails from New York. Although afraid to drive across the Mississippi river, she knows where Indiana is.
