When Things Just Happen
/The Boston Herald
I smiled when I read it.
A 75-year-old New Hampshire woman who jumped out of her car just seconds before a train demolished it last Monday, was quoted as saying, 'All I thought was, thank God. My blood pressure was sky-high. I was shaken and cold, but these things happen.'
These things happen.
How I envy the acceptance behind these simple words. The old accept what the young rage against. The old count their blessings in the aftermath of tragedy. The young too often focus on what they have lost.
My friend Julia says when you've lived through the Depression and a couple of wars, when you've buried people you love, when you've lost things that can never be replaced, you don't cry over what can. You don't sweat the small stuff. Cars do get wrecked. These things do happen. That's life.
And yet Evelyn Vashey's philosophical response to a set of circumstances which could have led to her death is something that begs visiting. The old can teach us so much, but only if we listen. Interestingly, KISS 108 radio phoned her a few minutes before I did, courage and humor obviously a clarion call to all ages.
'You mean to tell me that you at 75 years of age were sitting in that car and you weren't nervous?' the bemused radio announcer asked. Vashey told him, 'No, I wasn't nervous. You don't get nervous when you're sitting on a track with a train coming at you.'
She continues to make a joke of her near miss. She laughs as she relates what happened, not to minimize the incident but to put it in its proper place. 'I'm fine,' she insists. 'They tell me a lot of people would have frozen. But I didn’t.'
Evelyn Vashey simply did what she had to do.
She was leaving the Wakefield, N.H., dump Monday afternoon when her black Mercury Topaz stalled on the railroad tracks. These things happen. Cars stall.
'I tried to get it going. I could see the train coming -- down the track and hear it whistling and blowing, and I thought about a sermon a preacher gave once about how if you couldn't get things done, just try one more time. So I tried one more time and the car started. But it was on a patch of ice and it wouldn't move backward of forward. It just spun.’
'I said, at that point, 'You better get out of this car, lady.' So I unfastened the seatbelt. I was hoping it wouldn't stick and it didn't. And I got out.
'But then I did a foolish thing,' she confesses. 'I stood in the middle of the track waving at the train like they do in the old Westerns. But that train couldn't stop. It was a gravel train and had too much of a load.
She decided as the New Hampshire Northcoast freight train's whistles shrieked that it was high time to get off the track.
'I put my hands over my ears so the crash wouldn't deafen me.'
Then she watched as the 22-car 2,860 ton train demolished her car. 'They checked me out in the ambulance. They told me I was all right. They tell me I'm a very young 75.’
She says she had 'the cries' the day after the accident. 'The track is out behind my yard. I can't see the trains but I can hear them.'
These things happen, too. Emotion catches up with all of us. What could have been can overshadow what is. Vashey says she's fine, now. She's planning to drive again as soon as she gets a car and to drive over railroad tracks, despite her experience. 'I probably will be leery, but I'm a tough old bird. You can't let these things bother you.'
You can't let these things bother you.
These things happen. These things are part of life. You do what you have to do. You get past crises. You pick up where you left off and you continue on.
Words of wisdom from a wise and lucky lady.
