It never seems to fail. When I'm starting to get a little too down about life, work, or whatever, and find myself moping or wishing things were better, something happens to shake me out of it. Today it was this sight on the way home. (These are taken with my cellphone, poor quality, but you'll see if makes little difference.)
This was on NJ I-195 about 5:20 today. From this distance, it looked like an ordinary car fire.
At about this point, I started to wonder if a plane had crashed at the Allaire commuter airport nearby.
Around here, I could tell it wasn't the airport, that it was on the west-bound side of the highway, and I started to suspect it wasn't an ordinary car fire.
Definitely not ordinary. The fire was spread across both lanes of the opposite side of the highway.
This was right before I pulled parallel with it, and we were being shooed over to the right lane. Even there, you could feel the heat, and there was debris all over the road. My side of the road.
When I got right next to it, I had the windows up and the a/c on high, and it was still uncomfortably hot. And then I saw that there was definitely vehicular involvement. May even have been a plane after all. There was metal all over the middle of the road, but you couldn't tell what it had been five minutes earlier. No cops, first aid, or firemen were on the scene yet, and traffic on that side of the road was stopped dead - there was no way for them to go around. Many people heading west were crossing over the median to turn around and head east, away from it.
But someone wasn't that lucky. Someone didn't make it out of that, I'm sure. Someone, or some ones, didn't make it home tonight.
I did. And my perspective on my problems has been put in its proper place once again.
Update: It was a tanker. And a fatality.