Player in a Tragedy

I was asked not too long ago about a tragedy in high school that had really brought everyone together like family. I'm amazed that today, nearly 18 years later, as I look through my high school yearbook, how that tragedy comes back so clearly. Everyone crying. Everyone wanting to know how. Why? Why some were spared and others, with so much potential in life, were gone in an instant.

18 years ago.

It's not that the town I lived in, when I started high school, was small. It was just that the population was growing on one side of town. As houses were built, the lonely junior high, suddenly found itself needing to expand to include grades 8 through 12. It meant, for the youngest students, they would never know another high school in their lives. For their 5 remaining years of schooling, they would walk down the same halls in the same building.

It meant that the younger siblings of senior high students would see their brothers and sisters on a regular basis at school as well as at home.

In March of 1987, there was a basketball tournament about a three hours' drive away. Vans loaded up with players, managers, and equipment and headed out to the tournament. One van was leaving later than the others, picking up the stragglers and following about 20 minutes further behind the caravan headed north.

Once it entered the mountain pass, tragedy struck.

As the van made its way around one of the winding curves in the highway, it hit black ice and spun out of control. The driver tried to turn into the skid, but the narrow highway, piled high with snow on the shoulder of the road, didn't give himmuch time to try and correct the vehicle. It hit the snowbank on the other side of the highway.

No one's sure just how long the driver and the six teenagers in the van were stuck in that snowbank when the logging truck came around that corner. The truck jack-knifed and slammed into the van.

Where 2 boys and 2 girls once sat in the back 2 rows of the van, there was nothing but carnage in an ecnlosed space less than 2 feet wide. Gone in an instant. The other 2 passengers suffered massive injuries. One needed open-heart surgery and the other suffered a broken back which kept him in traction for the remainder of the year. Both drivers were not physically injured. The total impact of the accident wouldn't be finalized until 6 years later at the inquiry as people questioned the condition of both drivers at the time of the tragedy.

Meanwhile, at home, sat the shocked brothers and sisters of the dead. In a school of 758 students, not one went unaffected. Brent was a jock. Darren, a math whiz. Meghan was big into drama. Michelle was into sports. Sean, who broke his back, was one of the preppies, and Rod hung out with the stoners and headbangers.

But in that one instant, it didn't matter which clique they were a part of. There was a greater whole.

And for the youngest students at the school, The ones who lost 2 big brothers and 2 big sisters, a world where everything seemed amazing great and wonderful and life would go on forever came crashing down and they turned toward each other for comfort. And 5 years later, they came together for their graduation ceremony and had to draw on some of that closeness to get through the ceremony.

At our 10-year reunion, I and the rest of the reunion committee sat back in wonder when we saw that out of 175 grads in our class 130 had come to the reunion. We'd been told by earlier reunions that turnout was small. Uusually 50% or less of the class returned to see one another.

But for some reason, our class had bonded in 1987 and in 2001 those bonds had held tightly among so many of us. Geeks, jocks, stoners, preppies and everyone else still felt that connection.

And still do today.