In Search of Rhyme and Reason Along a Deadly Stretch of Highway

It seemed odd. A poetry contest about a stretch of highway where 11 people died in just five weeks last winter--California 126, a place most of us know as Blood Alley.

Are these matters for poets? Forsooth, I thought when I first heard about the contest, I think not!

The idea was dreamed up by Wendy Basil and John Lockhart at Halsted Communications in Ventura. As part of their work with the California Highway Patrol and other groups to address the problems on the highway, they figured a poetry contest would help.

“We were looking at how we could help raise awareness of the issues, and we needed something that would draw people in,” Lockhart said.

Not every one was enthusiastic.

Some people thought it was too weird. Local Caltrans officials hated the concept, Lockhart said.

I couldn’t imagine stirring verse emerging.

There would be no Whitmans in Wheeler Springs. No Thousand Oaks Thoreau. No Frost in Fillmore.

More like McKuen in Moorpark.

I took a look at some of the entries, expecting to find that the best would lack all conviction, while the worst would be full of passionate intensity.

There were poems from a paramedic who worked the crashes . . . from an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy . . . from passersby . . . from a couple in British Columbia from a person who lost a friend in a 126 crash . . . from a person who apologized for her penmanship--she had lost a hand in an accident on Interstate 5.

To be sure, some of the poets were, uh, less than lyrical:

“If someone doesn’t leave you room,

You’re trapped and it will mean your doom.”

“I round the bend at Dead Man’s Curve,

I hope and pray no one will swerve.”

“Stay alert!

Do not flirt.”

Others stole some inspiration:

“Mary had a little car,

Painted white as snow,

And everywhere that Mary went,

Speeding she would go.”

Stanford Brown of Ojai took a different tack. He wrote about a dog hit and fatally injured while crossing the highway.

“I held him, bloodied, broken,

put my hand upon his neck.

His time was short. I knew he’d soon be gone.

I whispered that he didn’t have to hurt.

And I told him, ‘It’s OK for you to die.’

He understood. I gently brushed my hand across his face. He didn’t blink, didn’t even close an eye.”

Some Fillmore High School students entered as an assignment for English teacher James Cook. Seth Hipple, 16, wrote a “Blood Alley Haiku.”

“Even the willows

Sadly bow their heads and weep

For the ones who die.”

I’m glad I didn’t have to judge this contest. The winner was Therese Dury-Corona of Camarillo, who earned a $500 prize. There were also $250 second- and third-place poets and $100 for an honorable mention.

Dury-Corona wrote about nightfall on the the road’s bumpy, twisting spine.

“And don’t be lulled by apathy

When darkness works her spell

The stars stare down upon the scars

The road has hidden well”

I would have found it tough to pick a winner, although some entries lacked in a few basic areas--meter, rhyme, spelling, grammar. Minor details like that.

A few got a little too graphic for my taste. Lots of blood-on-the-asphalt, crunch-of-steel prose.

But a few were good, and one or two were genuinely moving.

Heidi Sporny of Simi Valley, an emergency medical technician with Medtrans ambulance service, was on the scene the day a crash killed two little girls, Andrea and Katie Tello, and injured their mother, Diane. Sporny knelt down next to Tello as crews worked to free her from the wreckage, trying to comfort her, but not knowing how to answer her repeated question--what happened to my girls?

Sporny’s poem is an anguished 22-line piece about broken hearts and angels and injustice in the deaths of two innocents. More poignant was a letter she attached, in which she discussed her first reaction to the case, which was to quit her job.

But she didn’t give in, and now finds renewed strength from her career.

I had a hard time separating from the family’s feelings. Although we are to care for our patients, to keep our sanity we need to have limits. But for the life of me, I could not put out of my head Diane’s loss. Nor could I comprehend her loss. I grew very confused about my purpose in life.

A number of things helped her deal with the incident.

One of them was poetry.

Rose is a Times assistant city editor.