EYE WITLESS TESTIMONY

A couple of days ago I had a really narrow escape. About 1:00 in the afternoon I was working in the rose garden at the side of our house when I heard the roar of an engine and the agonized screeching of tires down the street. This is a normally quiet street, running along one side of the house (we're on a corner lot) and carrying only a modest amount of traffic except at certain rush hours--which this wasn't.

I looked up just in time to see a BIG pickup (I later learned it was a Ford 350) making a sharp turn onto this street from a block away, fishtailing wildly and then swerving all over the street and burning rubber like something out of Dukes of Hazzard. It was heading my way, weaving from one side of the road to the other, making an ungodly squall because the driver was gearing 'way down and flooring it at the same time. He ran clear over onto my side of the street (the wrong side for the way he was going; fortunately there was no oncoming traffic) and actually scraped the curb at our next-door neighbors.

I was standing less than 20 feet from the street, and was convinced he was going to jump the curb entirely and run right over me. Did my life flash before my eyes? Did I try to jump out of the way into the rose garden? No, I just stood there like a dummy. I didn't even think to pee my pants. I just stood there with my mouth open.

At the last minute he wrestled the truck back to the other side of the street, laying down lots of black rubber, ran the stop sign at the corner, and roared off into the distance, still weaving and wobbling. And just as he ran the stop sign, here came another truck--a smaller one--in hot pursuit, going fast but not as crazy.

It's hard to describe the sensation I felt. It was just plain weird, almost an out-of-body experience. Not fear so much as sheer astonishment. I felt like some stupid comic-book character, with a balloon over my head saying "What th-?" By the time it all sunk in, the truck was gone and it was all over. Too late to get scared then.

Remember--this all happened in maybe five seconds. It takes longer to read this than it took for it to happen.

What was really interesting to me was how poor my memory was of the whole episode. I knew one truck was big (the first one) and the other was small. I knew one was red and one black, but I couldn't remember which was which. If a cop had asked me to describe the truck, I wouldn't have been able to. I didn't remember what color it was; I had no idea if it was a Ford, a Chevy, a Dodge Ram, or what; I thought the driver was a white guy, but he could have been a Mexican; I never thought to look at the license plate as it went by. I would have had to say, "Gee, Officer, I dunno--it was just BIG!"

Now I understand how eye witnesses can see a murder and then come up with a dozen different descriptions of the gunman. And I understand now how my brother in Oklahoma City could describe the guy who robbed him once at gunpoint as "a big 7-foot-tall black guy with a .357-magnum" and then when the cops caught him, it turned out to be a 5-foot 6-inch skinny little dude with a .22. It has been a humbling experience. I will no longer denigrate these eye witnesses.

Oh, yeah--the rest of the story. I thought I would never know why the guy was driving so crazy or what finally happened to him. But the next day, right there on the front page of the newspaper was a big story about this, along with a picture of the truck all smashed up. The driver was high on drugs (probably meth), had stolen the truck, then had hit a car with it and kept going. This was the point at which he came roaring past me, with a witness to that wreck chasing him. When he disappeared from my view, he raced another mile or two through city streets, terrorizing other drivers and sideswiping a few cars, a street light, and a concrete abutment under I-40. He finally wrecked the truck in the parking lot of a new Wendy's, almost running down some landscape workers in the process. He jumped out of the truck and tried to run away, but they wrestled him to the ground and tied him up with a garden hose. The cops came and put him in jail, where he sits charged with everything in the book.

Oh, yes. In the picture in the paper, the truck was red. I knew it all along.