East Main Road to Hell

This past Thursday I had the misfortune to have to call the Portsmouth police for the second time in four days. The first time was actually kind of exciting, and I got to feel like a do-gooder and all that fuzzy stuff (see my previous post). This time, not so much. In fact, not at all.

After an entertaining afternoon with my elfin younger granddaughter, Olivia, I was heading homeward down East Main Road - that very same island artery up which I had tracked the erratic driver described in the aforementioned post. It was around 6:00 pm, well after sunset, dark and damp. I was in the right-hand southbound lane, moving along with the moderate-to-heavy traffic stream, just past the fire station.

Abruptly, there was a large - Labrador-sized - black dog right in front of my truck, running for the right-hand shoulder. There wasn't even time to brake or swerve - there was a solid thump from the right front, and yelping fading behind me as I frantically looked for a place to pull over. The headlights of the vehicles behind me obscured any sight of the poor creature, and I desperately prayed that he'd been thrown to the shoulder and not hit by subsequent cars.

The split second just before impact kept flashing through my mind: the dog had been moving fast, and was actually well to the right by the time I hit him. Was it possible that the bumper had hit his hindquarters, rather than midsection? Would the consequences have been less dire? The yelping I'd heard made me think that the blow at least hadn't knocked the wind out of him, but broken bones seemed unavoidable.

Looking for a way off the road, but nervous about making a sudden turn into a driveway with traffic close behind me, it seemed as if I'd gone a mile before I spotted the parking lot at Moriarty's Invisible Fence. I flicked on my turn signal and pulled off into the driveway. With shaking hands, I tapped in 911 and asked for the Portsmouth police. Tearfully, I told the dispatcher what had happened, where I was, and where I thought the accident had happened.

As I waited for the officers to come, I succumbed to a case of the fidgets, which I somewhat subdued by turning the truck around so I'd be facing the road and could see the cruiser coming. Still consumed by anxiety, I decided to take a look at the front of the truck, even though I dreaded what might be found. Mercifully, the cruiser arrived just as I had set the parking brake and unbuckled.

The officer listened to my disjointed account sympathetically. After trying to pinpoint where he might find the dog, he handed me a clipboard to write out my incident report, and took himself off on foot in the direction from which I'd come. Miserably, I wrote it all out as plainly as possible - just the facts, ma'am - and signed my name. By that time, the officer had returned, still shining his flashlight around. He'd hiked all the way back to the police/fire station - which actually was not that far up the road - and beyond, then back, without finding a sign of the dog.
I handed back his clipboard.

"Maybe he's a tough guy," he said optimistically, just as the patrol car's radio came to life again. After a short conversation, he turned back to me with bad news - there'd been another report of a dog being hit in the same area. As he left to answer that call, he urged me to take it easy on the way home.

I did, acknowledging how shaken I was. But that last bit of news kept my mind churning all the way. Had the second report been prompted by another accident involving the same dog? Or was it a second report of the same incident? Could the dog have somehow kept his feet and wandered back into the road? If so, how could the officer have missed him in his careful backtracking?

My heart ached for the humans who belonged to that dog. In the headlights, that black coat had the glossy sheen of a well-cared-for animal from a good home. What mischance had put him on busy East Main Road in end-of-day traffic?

Over the years, I've lost a cat and two dogs to cars. In no case did the driver stop or report the accident. I'd just learned firsthand that it's just about impossible not to know that I had hit the dog - even if I hadn't seen him, that thump still echoes in my mind. And it could just as easily have been a person - several years ago, a friend was killed on a dark road in Louisiana when his motorcycle went off the road. As he was scrambling to his feet, he was hit by a pickup, then hit again by a second truck just behind the first. Neither one stopped. Local authorities opined that the drivers probably thought they'd hit an animal.

When I got home, there were two wagging tails waiting for me - my dog Tucker, and my granddog Nicki, visiting while my daughter was out of town. And that's when I finally lost it.