Candles on the Highway

The headlights of the cars blinked on like candles in a church, even though the sun was bright and the air as still as death.

They came on deliberately and sequentially as a long line of traffic entered that area of Interstate 5 where two days before wind and darkness had prevailed in the afternoon.

One can guess that the gesture was born of fear rather than tribute as the fresh memory of 17 dead hovered over the place like a ghost; drivers felt somehow safer by turning on their headlights.

But I don’t think so.

I think the blinking on of lights was a silent memorial to those who died so suddenly and violently there on the day after Thanksgiving.

The lights were, in that sense, candles at a place of grief.

I was L.A.-bound on I-5 Sunday when I noticed the lights of the oncoming traffic. They came on where the road was gouged and scorched by the fires that had consumed vehicles and humans in an open forge 48 hours before.

What called attention to the lights was the way they came on, one by one upon entering the region of calamity, as though by prior arrangement.

I asked a Caltrans worker on the side of the road if he had heard of any such planned tribute to those who died and he said no. I asked a highway patrolman at the intersection of California 41 and he said no.

A waitress in a restaurant at Kettleman City, on duty the night survivors streamed in, said later that headlights would be a fitting memorial to the darkness that had engulfed them.

“You should have seen those poor people,” she said. “They had sand in their eyes and blood on their clothes.”

This isn’t exactly an L.A. column, except that I-5 is an extension of our city to other places, and what affects that link affects us all.

The degree of impact on each of us is often determined by a caprice of timing, and on this occasion I was a part of fate’s whimsy.

Five of us were due to leave before noon Friday for a family reunion in Oakland, but last-minute projects kept delaying our departure.

Time, with its accompanying deadlines, has dominated my life. Under normal circumstances I would have had us out of the house as planned if it meant beating everyone unconscious and stuffing them into the trunk of the car.

But bypass surgery creates new priorities, and being somewhere on time isn’t one of them. In this instance, that was fortuitous.

Leaving just before noon would have placed us in the middle of the dust storm that rose like a darkness out of hell to blacken the day at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Fate kept us away until the dying was over.

By the time we crossed the Grapevine, I-5 was closed and we were routed on to California 99 for the remainder of our trip.

Later, we would speak uneasily of the circumstances that delayed us and of other circumstances that brought 17 men, women and children to the time and place of the maelstrom on Interstate 5.

Why, this one time, were we delayed? Why, this one time, did I not object? Why, this one time, were we spared?

For the next two days I submerged myself in reports of the disaster, as though information would answer the kinds of questions I knew couldn’t be answered.

One positive element of the tragedy caught my eye. Richard and Marjorie Brucker, both in their late 60s, lived because a trucker risked his own life at the last micro-second to spare theirs.

They were stopped in the middle of the pitch blackness and in their rear view mirror saw the headlights of the big semi approaching from behind, like the eyes of death itself emerging from the gloom.

“We were dead,” Marjorie Brucker said to me later. I reached her by phone at her home in Contra Costa County.

She was speaking in terms of what could have happened but for the courage and presence of mind of the trucker who, disregarding consequences, veered off the road and drove his rig into the darkness and uncertainty beyond.

“There is no doubt in my mind if he’d hit us we wouldn’t be here,” she said. “We’ve got to find that man. We’ve got to thank him.”

They tried later, but the cab of his truck was empty. The vehicle was upright, indicating the unknown person had survived, but the Bruckers were in no state of mind to write down a truck name or license number.

“We did take a picture,” Marjorie said, “but nothing shows. Everything is gray. Even the people are gray.”

There was no grayness Sunday as we drove back to L.A. The sky was bright and still and the traffic flowed like honey off a hill.

There were only those candles to remind us of the death and darkness that had stalked the highway only 48 hours before.