I lived in a little house out in the country area around Rio Linda forty-one years ago. Our house was two houses from the main road. Our front door was probably a hundred and fifty feet from the intersection of our road and the main road. There was another little road connected in the intersection so it was really a three-way intersection. The intersection was angled so that it took some neck craning to be able to look both ways from my street to see traffic on the main road. But there was never very much traffic. It was the country and when there was traffic it was usually going fast.

My daughter had just been born and she was born in that little house. We had been wrapped up in the house, nice and cozy, for a couple of days since her birth and we were oogling the new add to our family in the evening one day. The days were getting longer, and it was still a little light out, so maybe eight PM or a little later. The front door was open for the cool breeze taking away the day’s heat.

There was a loud boom outside. It shook the floor inside. I thought it was a bomb at first. I told my wife to grab the baby and get ready to go and I ran out the front door to see what happened. There was a motorhome in the intersection with an old 60s Chevy Impala, I think, stuck in the side of the motorhome and there was a fair size fire going on. The front of the car was in full flame, smashed, and fully stuck in the side of the motorhome and I could see a figure in the driver’s seat inside fully engulfed in the flames.

The fire was also burning the motorhome and I could see someone in the driver seat and he was moving. I ran toward the motorhome. But the door for the coach was right where the car had hit it. There was no other door I could see. I didn’t think the driver had a chance in hell of getting out of there before it completely went up in flames.

As I was running I could see the guy inside. He started kicking the windshield. After a few kicks, he broke the windshield frame out where I could grab it and we yanked it open enough for him to get out. I helped him away and he sat down on the grass over in front of my house about the same time as the motorhome propane and gas tank blew up. It shook the whole street. And I could feel the heat on my face even though I was pretty far away. I could smell electrical fire mixed with grass fire smoke from the small fire in the field on the side of the roads.

The fire lit up the early evening like it was full daytime. Flames were shooting high over the wires on the telephone poles. And it burned. People started showing up from the down the street and from cars that had to stop because the road was completely blocked.

A few fire engines showed up and knocked down the fires in the fields on both sides of the main road that had been sparked, and they sprayed water on the car/motorhome concoction for hours. I watched for quite a while after an ambulance took the man away.

The whole time I was watching, I kept thinking of my new baby and how scary this world can be. I watched the figure in the Impala burn. By then some people had arrived and I could hear some poor girl wailing, and others crying. There was a group of people as close to the wreck as one might get, huddled and obviously heart-broken. The woman in the car had lived one block away. She’d been on her way back home from the little grocery store in town was what I was told.

The guy in the motorhome never saw her as she was driving down the main road when he went to cross. She hit him and never even had time to hit the brakes. He had a broken arm and he broke an ankle kicking out his windshield. He was seconds from being trapped to burn. But he lived to remember this tale from a different angle, I’m sure.

I never knew the outcome for any of the people. We had bought a house and moved shortly afterward. I just remember the fire burned ‘til way after we had gone to bed. I could see the orange light outside for hours like a signal. We held our kid close.

My kid’s birthday is in a couple of months and it is one of the few anniversaries I acknowledge, really. And a few days after that is an anniversary for some other folks that is not so welcome, I’m sure.