1957 The Dog Angel

We had some friends who lived a couple of towns away from us named Miche and Jean LeMaitre.  Their son was at hotel school in Paris, which I thought was wonderful.  I had a bit of a crush on him actually.

The LeMiatres had a very nice big dog.  Whenever we went to visit them, we usually stayed most of the day because it was fairly far away, and I spent all my time playing with the dog.  One spring day, we went to see them and the dog wasn't there.  When I asked where he was, Jean LeMaitre said that he had taken him hunting over the winter, and somehow the dog got shot.  Jean tried to save him but he lost too much blood.  The ground was frozen, so Jean made him a grave under a pile of leaves and branches, and put a little cross over it. 

This made me very sad because he was a wonderful dog and still young.

About a month later, we got a phone call from Miche that the dog had come back.  Someone had found him and unburied him and taken him to a vet.  The vet was shocked that he was alive, though barely, and called someone at a university.  The vet took him there, where they performed tests on him, and transfused him.  Apparently, he had lost most of his blood, and had been in a deep freeze, like suspended animation.  After transfusions and slow warming of his body, he came back to life.  They got the LeMaitres' name from his collar.  Needless to say, Jean and Miche were overjoyed.

Of course, the dog probably wasn't really dead, he was just at a low body temperature and his body functions had slowed down.  

The university wrote some articles about him and he was on the TV news once.  You could see the place where he had been shot, right in the chest.  He was like a canine angel come back to earth.  I never forgot him.

In a totally unrelated story, the LeMaitres' son had gone to Switzerland for vacation that winter.  He and two of his friends were running for a train, and one of them attempted to jump up onto the train from the platform.  He was hit by the train and decapitated.  I remember hearing my parents discussing it when they thought I wasn't listening.  I had nightmares about it.

1990 The Train

In 1990, when we were living in Vernon, we were literally "on the other side of the tracks".  We lived on what we called Smith Hill.  There were only 4 families living there:  A Vietnam vet, Jay, who lived with his wife in a trailer right by the railroad crossing (who suffered from PTSD and when he got drunk on whiskey, would get his guns and shoot at the trains); my in-laws, Martha and Ben Smith; Trey, Benjamin, and me; and the Masons, which included Jean and her two daughters, Tammy and Tiffany.  Jean's ex-husband, John, lived in Lubbock and we had visited him a couple of times.  John was a great guy, the lift of the party, but he had an arrest warrant in Wilbarger County so couldn't come to town to see his daughters. Tammy Mason was a great singer and sang at almost every local event.  Her younger sister Tiffany occasionally babysat for Benjamin, who was about 3-1/2 at the time.

SMITH HILL
Red = Martha & Ben Smith // Aqua = Fay, Trey, & Benjamin Smith // Red = Jean Mason // Yellow = Jay

The coal trains would go by our house all the time, sometimes several times a day.  Our RR crossing had no lights or barriers, just a stop sign, and the engineer would blow the whistle from pretty far away.  Our dog, Critter, would howl every time she heard the whistle, which was really annoying.

On May 12, the day before Mother's Day, 1990, I was washing my hair in the kitchen sink.  I had all the windows open because it was hot.  Benjamin was playing somewhere.  There was an airport just north of us on the Oklahoma side and the Altus AFB was close as well, so we often heard plane noises, as well as trains.  I heard what sounded like a jet engine, very loud, not normal at all.  I shut off the faucet and listened and it was a horrible metallic screeching noise.  I ran to the back door which faced north because I thought a plane was crashing, but there was nothing.

I then ran to the front door and I saw a train moving slowly along the track.  I could only see the top half of he locomotive because the track dipped down after the crossing so it would be able to go under Hwy 287 a little further down.  There was what appeared to be a huge cloud of smoke above it.  I couldn't imagine what was going on, but I had a bad feeling.  I towel dried my hair and got Benjamin and we set off on foot down to the crossing.  By the time I got there, the train was stopped and was blocking the crossing.  There were several cars on the other side and there were emergency vehicles there as well, one in particular on the bluff above where the engine was.  As I got closer and came around the bend, I saw something lying on the ground near the track.  It was a little boy.

I picked up Benjamin and turned him away.  It was a little boy about Benjamin's size, wearing blue jeans, and a white shirt with a brown belt.  He was lying face down in the dirt.  Benjamin saw him, though, and kept asking me, "Why is he lying there Mommy?  Why is he lying there?"  By this time, I had a sense of what had happened.  I told Benjamin that the little boy was taking a nap because it was hot.  Benjamin, bless him, kept asking more questions,  "Why is he in the dirt?"

I walked further down the track and saw my worst nightmare.  There was a car in front of the locomotive.  At that point, a police officer called over to me to stop and not go any further, so I walked back to the crossing.  My head was buzzing.  I kept looking at that little boy.  He didn't seem real.

Suddenly, I saw Trey looking through the railroad cars at me and waving and yelling.  I walked closer to the train and a police officer push him aside and asked me if I was okay and if I had seen what happened.  I told him that yes we were okay and no I didn't see what happened, but I heard it. He said they would come talk to me later.

I was able to talk to Trey and apparently, there was something on the radio about a train hitting a car at the Harrison Street crossing, that there was a small boy killed, and that it was a brown car.  One of Martha's friends heard it and immediately called Martha, who was in Colorado with Ben at the time. Martha  called Trey at his shop and told him to get home.  We lived on Harrison Street, I had a brown car, and Benjamin was a small boy.  Obviously, Martha and Ben were frantic.  Eventually, I passed Benjamin between the cars and Trey took him to the shop.  I wanted him away from the scene.  

I sat on the ground and stayed near the little boy.  Someone called to me and handed me a blanket through the cars and asked me to cover him up.  I didn't even know his name, but I couldn't help picturing that being Benjamin.  

Car (red) and Train (black) on Track

There was a lot of activity at the bluff. I walked down to my side and was able to see what was happening.  The car was crushed.  There was debris everywhere.  The paramedics had just run down the bluff to get to the car and they had set up ropes to get victims up to the road.  Eventually they brought up a little boy, older than the one on the ground, who wasn't moving.  Then they pulled up a woman who didn't appear to be badly hurt.  Two ambulances left for the hospital.  But there were still several paramedics at the car working on someone else.  Eventually, they stopped and other people went down and started trying to get parts of the car open.  At that point, they blocked off the car and I couldn't see anything anymore.  I still didn't know who these people were though.  Benjamin and I were the only people on our side of the track.  Martha and Ben, Jean Mason and her daughters, Jay and his wife, all seemed to be gone.

After some time, the engineer uncoupled the cars so the crossing was open, and I was able to drive across.  I went to the hospital, which was very close by.  As I pulled up, a medical helicopter was just taking off.  Someone said it was the bigger boy who had severe head injuries.  I asked if they knew who the people were and they wouldn't say.

I went home after that.  I was terribly shaken.  I think I was still in shock.  I stopped at the bluff and looked down.  The train was still there, of course.  But so was the car.  It was mangled so badly that it was almost unrecognizable.  There was just one part that wasn't, the back seat behind the driver.  I crossed over the track.  I wanted to walk down the track, but there were police guarding it so I went home.  I just kept walking around aimlessly.  I thought I knew who had been in the car, but I wasn't sure.  I kept seeing that little boy lying there, with those clean blue jeans and that clean white shirt, face down in that red dirt.

Eventually, we found out who was in that car.  This is what happened.  

The driver was Janna Hardage, who was a local school teacher.  She had gone to the Masons' house to pick up Tiffany to take her to a school concert.  In the car with her were were her 2 sons, Colby and Connor.  Tiffany's sister Tammy and her mother Jean had already left for the concert.  Janna picked up Tiffany and they crossed the track on their way to the school.  Then Tiffany realized she had forgotten her purse and begged Janna to go back and get it, as they were still very close to the Mason house.  Janna was not happy about it, but she turned around and drove quickly back.  She looked both ways at the crossing (per her statement) and the next thing she knew, there was a terrible impact and the car starting moving sideways.  When she looked back to see if Connor was okay, she realized he was gone!  The car seat was there but he was gone.  His window had been open because it was so hot.  She looked for her son Colby and saw him lying on the back seat.  Tiffany, in the passenger seat, looked unhurt but was not moving.  Janna herself didn't appear to be hurt.  She said that when the car stopped moving, she tried to get her door open to go look for Connor, but she couldn't.  She couldn't hear anything because of the screeching of the train pushing the car along the track.  As soon as the train stopped, the engineer was able to gt her out of the car.  By then, the first ambulance had arrived.  It just happened to be at the hospital about 2 miles away, and they heard the noise.  It was also called in by people working at Celanese, right beside the crossing.

The little boy on the track was Connor Hardage.  He was ejected from his carseat on impact, and throw out through the window.  He died of head trauma.  The boy who was airlifted was Colby Hardage.  He had severe head injuries.  Apparently he was flown to Dallas, where they performed some experimental surgery on him, successfully I think.  The person in the car was Tiffany, Benjamin's babysitter and our neighbor.   At impact, her aorta ruptured and she basically bled to death in the car.  She died before they could remove her from the car.

AFTERMATH

After I got home, I was in shock.  I couldn't sit down.  I couldn't do anything.  I called Trey and fell apart.  Trey called the police to see if anyone had notified John Mason in Lubbock that his daughter was dead.  Apparently the Police Chief had done so and had told him that as long as he stayed out of trouble, they wouldn't pursue the arrest warrant they had for him, they would turn a blind eye at the funeral as well.

The next day, Mother's Day, John came to see us.  I will never forget what it was like, seeing him standing in our yard, looking at the train, and crying.  It was  heart wrenching.  We all cried a lot that day.   It was while he was there that they moved the train.   

I called in sick on Monday because I wanted to go to the funeral home to see Connor.  In fact, I couldn't stay away.  I went 3 or 4 times on Monday.  On Tuesday I went back to work but all I did all day was draw diagrams of the crossing, where Connor had been lying, etc.  Dr. Gilmore, the Director of the Research Center came and talked to me and said that if I wanted to take some time off, it would be fine.  In fact, he recommended it.   But I didn't want to.  It would have made it even easier to obsess about it.

Example of Diagram Trying to Make Sense of It

Every day that week, when I left work I would go to the funeral home to visit Connor, then I would go home and walk along the track with Benjamin, both sides, over and over.  I found a lot of things.  I even found one of the wheels from the car that had rolled a long way down the track.  Every day I would take home anything I found, no matter how tiny, and put it in a pile under one of our mesquite trees.  I guess I was building a memorial in a way.

One day that week, I was interviewed by the police.  I showed them where I had been washing my hair, where we had walked down to the track, etc.  They kept asking me if I had heard the train whistle.  I had to tell them I couldn't remember.  When you hear it so often, you tend to block it out.  Plus, I was washing my hair at the time.  I just couldn't give them a yes or a no.  It wasn't until I had gone over it in my mind probably hundreds of time that I realized that I hadn't heard Critter howling, which would definitely had been audible even with the water running.  If Critter didn't howl, did that mean the whistle didn't blow?  It was important because there was a wrongful death lawsuit against Burlington Northern in the works.  I had to write a detailed statement.

The day after the accident, as I was coming home from town, I saw piles of flowers at the mailboxes at the crossing.  Every day, people came and left flowers.  They sometimes parked by the crossing.  Sometimes when I was combing the tracks, I would talk to them.  I understood, because I have done that myself at scenes of tragedies.  I just never expected to be living near one.  I put a notice in the Vernon Daily Record thanking everyone for the flowers and promised as long as they kept coming, I would take care of them.  After that, people started leaving flowers in vases and plants.  Every day, Benjamin and I would walk to the mailbox with water and take care of them.  It helped me, actually.

About a week after the accident, Benjamin starting having his Ugly Man nightmares.  That's also when his friend Shelfis arrived (see separate posts).  

I'd lie awake at night reconstructing the scene in my head, over and over.  When Janna was driving around Celanese, did she hear a whistle and decide she had time to cross?  She said she didn't hear a whistle.  But were the kids chattering and she didn't notice it?  Why would the engineer not blow it when he knew the train was a little hidden behind the Celanese buildings?  My gut feeling was that he had blown it, but there was the Critter thing....  The people at Celanese had the same problem I did, they tended not to hear it anymore.

A few weeks later, Benjamin and I were walking up and down the track when a pickup parked by the mailboxes.  A man got out and started walking toward us.  it was Mike.  He said he sometimes came and did the same thing I did, walk the track.  He told me that Colby was recovering slowly but they were optimistic he could have a normal life.  I told him about the 'memorial' I had of items I had recovered and asked if he wanted to see it.  He said yes so we got in his pickup and  went to the house.  I told him to take anything he wanted.  He found a keyring and took it; He said it had belonged to Colby.  My heart went out to him.   

Janna took a leave of absence from teaching for the 1990-91 school year.  I found out later that she and Mike were divorced a few years after the accident.  She had no visible scars but two children, one of them her own, had died in her car, and her other son was seriously injured.  She has scars.

Later, I heard that the engineer of the train had previously been involved in a death through no fault of his own.  After this happened, he retired.  He was suffering from PTSD, not surprisingly.

About a year later, Benjamin and I went to an EMS demonstration and talked to one of the paramedics who had responded to the scene and who had worked on Tiffany.  He said she was awake while they were working on her.  He could tell she had a very short time to live unless they could get her to surgery but she was pinned in the car.  He said they all knew she wasn't going to make it, and all they could do was reassure her.  It was a painless death, he said she just went to sleep.  He said it was so traumatizing that he took a 3-month leave of absence from EMS.  I am eternally grateful that she didn't know she was dying and that she wasn't in pain.   

Every time I saw a Burlington Northern train for years after that, I checked the number on the locomotive, just in case.  It was burned into my brain.  It actually did go by a couple of times and it gave me a chill.

We moved to Denver about 5 months later, in October 1990.  I kept looking at trains, but never saw that locomotive again.  

About 18 months after the accident, I was interviewed over the phone by a lawyer involved in the lawsuit.  I also had to send them a written statement (see below).

This is my opinion of what happened.  Janna left the Mason house after picking up Tiffany.  She turned around in the Celanese parking lot after Tiffany said she forgot her purse.  Because there was arguing in the car about being late for the concert, Janna probably didn't think much about a train coming.  She wasn't used to the crossing like we were.  She left the parking lot driving as fast as she could and didn't look down the track like we always did, as she wasn't really tuned in to it the way we Smith Hill residents were, plus she was distracted.  She starting to cross the tracks at the same time the engineer realized she was there.  He probably didn't see her until she was almost at the crossing because of the Celanese buildings.  By the time he hit the brakes, it was too late to make any difference.  A train going 30 mph takes a long time to stop.  Whose fault was it?  I don't think Burlington Northern  and the engineer were at fault unless he did not blow his whistle.  Obviously, the driver was at fault for not stopping at the crossing and looking.

I found out later that the suit had been settled, with Burlington Northern accepting 25% responsibility and Janna being held 75% responsible.  That fits with what I think happened.

I still look at trains, even though I can't remember the numbers.  I think I forgot it on purpose.  But I always stop at every rail crossing.  

Ironically, the train track is even closer to me than it was in Vernon, and I have 2 crossings nearby.  Instead of upsetting me, it comforts me in a way.  I always stop at every crossing and look both ways.  If anything, I am over cautious.  But I have reason to be.


I also stopped celebrating Mothers Day.  I told Benjamin that if he wants to send a card or something to me, that's fine.  But for me, it just brings back very traumatic memories of John Mason crying over his daughter, and the screech of that car being pushed down the tracks.

1990 The Ugly Man

When he was about 3-1/2, for about 6 months, Benjamin had nightmares.  He would wake up screaming and crying.  Sometimes I brought him into our bed, and sometimes I stayed in his car bed with him.  He said in the dreams he was stolen by "an ugly man".  He couldn't really describe him, just that in various situations, the "ugly man" would grab him and run away with him.  

I talked to Uncle Carl (our family doctor) about it, and he said it was probably a reaction to the train accident.  A boy about his age was killed, and even though I didn't really talk to Benjamin about it, he saw it and he saw Colby lying there.  It affected me greatly, and I'm sure he heard me talking about it.  It's possible that because he couldn't really express his fear, the only way he could visualize it was that he was stolen, the way Colby was "stolen" from his family.  In that context, it makes sense.

That is probably also the origin of his imaginary friend, Shelfis.

After we moved to Denver in September 1990, he didn't dream about the "ugly man" anymore.

1989 Sunny on the Tracks

When he was about 3 years old, my son Benjamin had a Wolfhound named Sunny.  I had an adult named Shadow, and I had decided Benjamin needed his own puppy.  He loved Sunny, they went roaming around together.  We lived in a trailer house on my in-laws' land and there was plenty of space.  We had a fenced yard as well, where the dogs could stay.  But sometimes we liked to let them out and take them "out back" where the land dropped down to fields and then the Pease River.

Smith Hill

Not too far away from our trailer was the railroad track.  The trains went by pretty regularly.One day, I went outside and didn't see the three dogs, Sunny, Shadow, and our white German Shepherd, Critter.  Then I found a hole dug under the fence.  I started running up our towards the track and the street because that was I feared the most.  As I did, I saw Shadow and Critter come running towards me.  Critter kept going to the house, but Shadow was visibly upset.  I went with him up the embankment to where the train track was, and then I saw him, a pile of fur a little way down the track.  He didn't appear to be moving.

I ran all the way back to the house to get my car, which was a little Dodge Colt Premier Turbo.  I put Critter and Shadow in the yard and grabbed a couple of blankets.  Then I called our vet, Dr. Roger Lacy, and told them I was coming, and took off to the track.
When I got there, I left the back door of the car open.

Then I climbed up the embankment to where Sunny was lying.  He wasn't moving, but he seemed to be breathing.  He had a long singe mark all the way down his side from his shoulder to his flank.  I wasn't sure what to do, what if he had a broken back?  But I couldn't leave him lying on the track, knowing more trains would be coming.  I spread out one of the blankets and dragged him onto it.  He made some movements, so I know it must have hurt, but he didn't try to bite me.  After I got him on the blanket, I managed to get him down the embankment to the car.  He weighed about 80 lbs, I would imagine.  Somehow I got him onto the back seat, shut the door and took off to the vet.

Lacy Vet Clnic

When I got there, they took him in and told me to wait.  It was a long wait.  When Dr Lacy came out to get me, he told me Sunny was lucky that he was still alive.  He didn't appear to have any broken bones, but, he had a severe concussion and his responses were not good.  Roger thought he might have been hit a glancing blow on the head and landed between the 2 rails.  That would account for the singeing of his coat, from the heat of the metal wheels going by him.  It was close to a miracle that he actually only had the concussion.

Sunny stayed at the vet for about a week.  When he came home, he was subdued and lethargic.  I didn't think he would ever be back to normal.  But he remembered Benjamin, and Benjamin remembered him.  That was the important thing.  Shadow was extremely protective of him, but Critter never had liked him since he stole a snake from her as a puppy.

Sunny recovered to be almost completely his old self.  He retained the singe marks down his side for a couple of months, but otherwise, he was okay.  Dr. Lacy later told me "I wouldn't have given that dog a 30% chance of surviving, much less being back to normal".

I was just grateful I found him so quickly.  If he had been there when another train came by, we would not have been so fortunate.

1966 Samedan

Gare du Nord, Paris

We went to Switzerland in the summer of 1966 when we were living in Paris.  We took a train from the Gare du Nord at around 10 pm.  We had sleeping cars, but I couldn't go to sleep, it was too exciting.  I remember when we crossed the border into Switzerland, there were a lot of voices and ringing bells.  People came down the aisles of the train, but they didn't wake anyone up.  I guess we were stopped about 30 minutes. 

 

The Mountains

Then in the morning, we stopped and got into a really small train, it looked like a toy, and the track wound around the mountain.  I was sure we were going to fall off!  The snow was like nothing I had ever seen before.  It looked like whipped cream.  The trip in the little train was like something out of a movie, it was spectacular.
 
When we arrived at the town, we rented a car and drove to a house that was one of a group of several rentals in a valley. Then some friends of ours from Paris came to join us with their two daughters (Val and Irene Dale).  Val was Russian, and I always loved to listen to him talk.  

Samedan

One day my mother and Irene went to St. Moritz shopping.  We got mad at being left behind, so we started walking along the road, in the snow, with no idea if we were even headed in the right direction.  Finally, someone picked us up and took us back to the house.  

  

One of Val's daughters, Valerie, and I did not get along and she and I got into a horrific physical fight.  After that, our families pretty much went our own separate ways, only seeing each other in the evenings.  

One day, we went to a ski resort.  We didn't ski, but I remember sitting outside in the sun on a huge wooden balcony surrounded by the most amazing mountains.  It seemed like I could reach out and touch them, they were very tall and jagged.  One of the ski instructors came and sat down and talked to us, telling us about how the air was so thin that everything seemed very close.  He said the sun also felt very hot the reason.  He also told us we were very close to the area where Buddy Werner* had died two years before in an avalanche.  I remembered him as an Olympic skier I used to watch it on TV, and how sad it was when he died.  

Buddy Werner

Then we took the little toy train back around the mountain, and the big train back to Paris.  It was an amazing trip.  I remember my mother, before the trip, wondering if we should have stayed in St Moritz, which was a huge tourist area, but Val had convinced my parents to go to the small town of Samedan and I think we had a lot more fun.