No, seriously...motorists, watch for bicycles.

I was leaving my apartment on Saturday, ready to go off and do some shopping. I wanted to check my mail first, so I wheeled myself right at the end of my building. As I did, I could hear a loud, idle engine behind me, which would have been toward the driveway leaving my complex. It sounded quite large. A moving truck? A garbage truck? Whatever it was, I wondered if it might be blocking my way out to the street, but I figured I'd look and see on my way back with the mail.

No mail in the box, so I headed back that way, and found the the engine I heard belonged to a fire truck. It was sitting directly across from my driveway, blocking lane 1 (the left lane) of southbound Garfield Avenue. Cones were down, closing lane 1 behind in front of it, so southbound traffic was cut down to just one lane - lane 2, the closest to my driveway. I could also see that there were cones across the middle cement divider, blocking northbound Garfield's lane 1 as well.

Had their been an accident without my hearing it? My apartment is right next to the driveway, so that seemed odd. It must have happened, I figured, while I was in the shower. To get a better picture of what was happening, and to see if I should even bother trying to get my van out onto the street, I rolled up the walkway beside the driveway; it stays level as the driveway drops down a hill, so going to the end of the walkway would give me a slight overlook on the whole thing. As I approached, I noticed other people standing on the sidewalk on Garfield, watching the scene...and could see the same on the other side of the street, where the other, more populous, complex is.

I stopped behind some hedges and looked down, and could see the firetruck with two firemen sitting on its front bumper. Ahead of them, I spotted a group of about five CHP (California Highway Patrol, for those of you out of state) officers standing on the center divide a ways ahead of the truck, talking amongst themselves. I didn't see any wrecked cars around, but I quickly spotted something that always puts a chill down your spine at one of these scenes.

A bicycle.

The bike, bent up a bit, was laying on its side near the officers on northbound Garfield's lane 1. I looked around for an ambulance, but saw none. I assumed that meant the ambulance had already come and taken the rider away, and I hoped that he, or she, was all right. The officers were laughing as they talked, so I hoped that was a good sign. I rolled forward to get a better look southbound, to see if the inevitable auto involved was parked there, and I could, yes, see one just ahead, with another vehicle stopped ahead of it and some people standing around.

As I'd rolled forward, my eyes had caught something on the street, in my side's lane 1, right next to the center curb. It was yellow and long, but something about the fact that no one seemed to be around it, or be too concerned about it, made me skip right over it and look for the car. As I continued trying to put together what happened (old claims adjuster habit), my eyes went back to it. It occurred to me, then, what it was, but I didn't believe that first thought right away. Then it became clear my first thought was right. I was looking at a yellow police tarp.

And it was covering a dead body.

It still didn't make sense for a moment, considering the casual, seemingly jovial nature of the officers there, but a further look around the scene showed me two shoes, a ways from each other, on the street near the firetruck, each with orange chalk marks around them. Bike, shoes, no ambulance, yellow tarp - yeah. Dead body. There'd been a fatal motorist vs. bicycle accident right in front of my home. And the victim of that accident was laying out in the street, under the sun, with cars slowly driving right by it in the one open lane, and with no one in charge bothering to stand there with it.

I felt terrible, and had that sinking "oh no" tingle of sadness in the chest, but I wasn't shocked. At my age, I've seen a number of dead bodies in my life. And thirteen years in the auto claims business means that this kind of thing has been part of my life for a long time, and I've seen plenty of scene photos like this one. And, as always, my very first thought was of the family member or spouse that's going to get that phone call and find out that person who went out for a ride is never coming home. I know those people well. I've had to talk to them many times, in different stages of the emotional process. My later claims years got easier, as I moved into vehicle total losses, which meant there were often a few days between the loss and the claim getting to my desk. In my earlier, front-line days, I'd get them on the phone a day or two after it happened, if I was lucky - the same day if I wasn't. Sometimes I even got the call right from the scene. Awful stuff to deal with, but I always remained kind but calm, professional but understanding, trying to be the strength for them that they had no earthly reason to have themselves at a moment like that.

A photographer was speaking to the police, his camera and its long protruding lens in his hand, and he, too, was laughing. One has to understand, I suppose, that when you do this kind of thing day in and day out, and see all this tragedy, you have to shut yourself off to it or you'll go a little insane. But still...just from a strictly P.R. angle? Is joking it up around the gathered pedestrians and slowly passing cars really sending the right message to the public? I would think there must be some way to remain detached without seeming callous and disrespectful and the seemingly forgotten corpse.

A tow truck pulled up and went passed me, pulling up behind the auto that seemed to have been the cause. Obviously, in a collision between car and bike, the car's not going to have a lot of damage, but in cases where a fatality is involved like this, the police have to take the vehicle. It's going to be in storage for a while, I can tell you that. The truck stopped with its rear slightly in front of my driveway, and that was going to make me pulling out difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. I was on a schedule to make it somewhere before it closed, but it wasn't so big a need that I wanted to maneuver my van around the truck while trying to keep my distance from the yellow tarp. I know enough of these things to know you don't leave a body out of full view for that long, and it had been a while now, so I figured the coroner van must be on the way. So I decided to wait it out.

And with this, I made the decision to stay where I was and verify it was clear before I headed to the van. The last thing you ever want to be is one of those people that gather around an accident scene and stare, and I was tempted, for this reason, to go back inside. But in the end, the (former, but hopefully not for long) claims adjuster in me won out, and I felt that I should remain and watch the process. When you do phone claims, you don't always get the full picture of what happens at the scene itself. If it wasn't such a ghoulish thought, I'd think that claims adjusters should be required to go to accident scenes as part of their training, so that they'd know not only how the steps go (to help with their investigation), but to see what those involved go through, to be able to properly understand them when you've got them on the line.

So I stayed, keeping up on my hill, at my respectful distance, and quietly waited behind the hedges.

Other neighbors of mine were NOT so respectful.

I spotted the woman I see leaving for work at 5am each day (if I'm out here at 5, which I often am), standing there with her husband or boyfriend. And I was dumbstruck to see that there were binoculars in his hand. And he used them. He would use them to watch the car down the way (which I didn't have a clear view of, so I didn't know if some juicy bit of wailing guilt was going on for his amusement), and would then use them - yes - on the body. We were 150 feet from a dead body, and he had the nerve to use binoculars to get a better view of it.

Across the street, by the low-rent complex, groupings of watchers were gathered. One stood out. He was a man with a video camera. He never stood still for long. He kept walking quickly up and down the sidewalk to get better angles.

Below me, a woman in shorts and a tank top came plodding up, dragging a child of maybe seven with her, anxious to get a closer look. And she got one. I'm not a parent of course, but really, is pulling your child up to get a nice clear view of the dead person the best idea? My neighbors were making me ill. But, at the same time, I realized I was still there watching, too, so I supposed I didn't have much of a soapbox to stand on (or sit on, in my case). I liked to think there was a difference between observing and gawking like it's a spring break wet tee shirt contest.

Soon a car pulled up on the northbound side and came to a quick stop, parking on the sidewalk. A man and a woman got out, both looking anxious, but not grief-stricken, so I put together that they weren't related to the victim, but likely to the other driver, who'd likely called them. The spot where they parked put them in a straight diagonal line to the soon-t0-be-towed car across the street - with the body between them and it. They checked for traffic, walked quickly across the lane to the divider, and didn't even seem to pay attention to the body that they looked close enough to trip over. They paid it no mind at all, didn't even give it a wide berth as they passed. This made me even angrier, and increasingly agitated the no one without a video camera or binoculars even seemed to notice it was there. It occurred to me, having that thought, that this person was no longer a "he" or a "she". In one unlucky second, "he" or "she" had transformed into an "it".

After a while a saw the man coming back across, heading for his car. And once more, he all but stepped on the body. This time, I was happy to see, an officer turned and saw him and made a "come on..." gesture of disbelief and said something to the man. I didn't hear the words, but I hope they were terse ones. That man didn't seem to understand what he was being chastised for. Moments later the woman he'd come with reappeared with an older woman. I assumed that was the driver, imagining that she'd called her daughter and son-in-law, who'd come to drive her home since she no longer had a car. They all got in the parked car together.

At this moment, the tow truck started and pulled out into the lane, clearly going to get itself in front of the car to set up the tow. The man with the video camera all but ran down that way, stopping when he was directly across and filming again. My neighbor with the binoculars zoomed in on the scene as well. The police photographer (or someone who works with the police, as he wore no uniform) joined up with with a second photographer, who pulled up in her car. They talked. They smiled. They laughed. They started taking shots of the scene and the covered body.

After a few more minutes, the coroner's van finally arrived, pulling in front of the body and backing up to it. The workers got out, putting on their gloves. The police, and the photographers, headed for that spot. After a few moments of them chatting, one of the officers looked around at all the gathered spectators. He didn't just look, but seemed to glare, and I felt that was more than appropriate for all of us. He called the fireman over and said something to them, and they quickly headed back to their truck. They pulled it over the divider, to the north side, and lined it up to block the view of the body from the folks on that side of the street. The same officer made a motion to someone out of my range of sight, and a CHP motorcycle appeared, parking just behind the body, blocking the view from behind. The officer then produced a sheet from his waiting car, and a couple of officers unraveled it, stretched it out and held it up, the final wall to cover up what was about to happen. It mostly worked, but not completely.

While all this was going on, the guy with the video camera had dashed across the street to my side and run up to our driveway, the nearest vantage to the scene, and was getting lined up for the camera shot. The same indignant officer as before spotted that, turned and started walking toward him, and started making a clear "cut it" slashing motion across his throat. This time I could hear his words. "No. This is not happening for your entertainment or for you to film. Shut it off". The man obeyed, slowly, taking his small camera and making an overly-done gesture of putting it back in its leather case. The officer just shook his head at him and went back to his duty.

Through the opening between the sheet and the motorcycle, you could still see part of the body. They removed the tarp. I could make out a man's chest and a shoulder. Shirtless. Whether he was shirtless at the time of the collision or became that way after, I have no way to know. The photographers took their shots. An arm was lifted, and the body rolled. They were soon finished, and one of the coroners started pulling a gurney and blankets out of the van while another, with a plastic bag in hand, went to collect the body's missing shoes. They wrapped and lifted the body and strapped it to the gurney, and the sheet was put away. They loaded the last of this man (young man? Old man? I don't even know) into the van.

Seeing that their van was pulling away, I went to mine.

With that done, and the tow truck already having left, I had a clear exit. I carefully made my right turn as on officer picked up and moved the broken bicycle. As I straightened out on Garfield, I saw that there was a spray of wet, soapy water across both lanes, from the center divider to the sidewalk. That's where, of course, they'd had to hose the blood away. There was no way around it. I had to drive over it, and that, I think, was the most sobering part of this for me. The rest had been just seeing the accident's aftermath. This was physically touching a part of it. I drove away, solemnly, wondering who that bike rider had been, if he'd even been identified yet, and who of his loved ones was going to be receiving the call that night. And which unfortunate adjuster was going to get the call to handle the necessary claim details.

I came home later that night, with all evidence of the incident now gone, save for some orange chalk-marks on the road that traffic would soon dispose of. I went inside and tried to search the web - would there be any details yet? Anything on the CHP site? I found nothing. Later that night, just before sunrise, I checked again. No Sacramento news sites had reported anything about it. It just seemed like they should have. It was important. A man died in front of my home that day. And he lay there lifeless as police and firemen and photographers laughed, and as locals gawked and filmed.

As of tonight, still no news. I don't know who he was, or what happened. The adjuster in me, again, drives me to know. I need to see the incident in my head, find out where the other car came from, know if the auto was at fault or if the bicycle made an erratic last-minute turn that not only ended his universe but forever changed the life of the woman behind the wheel. I'm not looking to blame. Claims isn't about blame. Liability, yes, but not about blame. We don't make moral judgments. Just legal ones. It's not something I currently do for a living, but the old muscles are still there. And I guess, more than anything, I just want it to make sense. I guess I still have this superstitious belief that if, somehow, the reason behind a tragedy like this is known, we (on the assumption of some kind of collective unconscious, where my understanding somehow transmits to all of mankind) can learn from it and somehow keep it from happening again in the future.

But we won't. It will keep happening. As long as we have cars, and as long as we're behind the wheel of them. And long as these things are true, there will always be a need for my chosen profession.

A profession that's already telling me to get the facts, put it behind me, and move on.

But while I can't reach all of mankind through some kind of new age transference, I can at least speak to those reading this blog. I don't need all the facts to remind us all of this - watch for bicyclists, always. You won't much care if they were the one at fault or not when you're left knowing that it was your car that ended someone's life. Let's all keep a closer lookout for them this week, okay?