July 1, 2024:
We had been up north in Duluth, MN enjoying our “Family Fiesta” — the annual week in June where 5 nieces are invited to join us at a rented lake house on Lake Superior. All day the winds blew and the surf pounded outside our door. We had said goodbye to our nieces mid-morning as they headed home with my sister.
We decided to leave the Lake Superior beach since it was so cold and windy and spend the day hiking along the North Country National Scenic Trail in northwest Wisconsin. (www.northcountrytrail.org)
On the way to our destination, we stopped at a garden center on a whim and while there, a violent car accident took place on the street out front of the garden center. A very young driver, who was on her way to volunteer at a hospital in Duluth, glanced down at the directions on her phone and blew through a stop sign into a busy street. The car she hit was traveling on a street with a much higher speed limit and that car somehow flipped over and rolled three times before landing upside down very close to our parked car in the garden center parking lot. The young girl was unbelievably distraught and her screams filled the air after the incredible noise of the accident itself. We ran out of the garden center with the owner to assist in anyway we could. While others ran towards the upside down car where the woman she hit was pinned, we calmly walked the distraught young driver away from the victim’s car knowing nothing good was going to come from her seeing the condition of the victim in the other car. We called the young girl’s mother, then her father, and then waited with her until her father arrived on the scene about 20 minutes later. My shirt was actually wet from all the tears the young girl cried on my shoulder and her distress, despite our best attempts to keep her calm and help her breathe, was like a gut punch after spending our Family Fiesta time with our nieces who are the same age as this young woman. It was a clear case of a young, inexperienced driver, not realizing how fast accidents can happen when you are distracted. When the woman she hit was finally removed from her vehicle, she was responsive, and miraculously not bleeding (I really don’t know how that was given the condition of her car and all the glass!), but she seemed to have sustained some kind of a head injury. We hope both of the women involved in the accident are okay and will be okay. It was a little much, honestly, and we could not shake the impact of being a witness to this accident all day.
We left the scene and drove about 45 minutes to the trail head. We were both shook up despite the beauty of nature we planned to immerse ourselves in. And then we found the quilt heart with the soaring eagle on a green quilted heart at the trailhead of the Brule Bog Boardwalk trail spur of the North Country National Scenic Trail. It felt like a sign from the universe that everyone was going to be okay.
