A Brush With Disaster

In my cupboard upstairs sits a poster tube with a rolled-up print of Death on the Ridge Road by the famous American painter Grant Wood (You may be more familiar with his iconic work American Gothic), which I picked up at the Williams College Museum of Art in eastern Massachusetts on a visit with family back in 2009.  In the painting, a red truck hurtles over a hump in a windy two lane country road, on collision course with a black limousine that has chosen to pass a slower car at what is obviously a blind curve.  We are left to guess what happens next.

Rewind a few years further back to about 2002. We then lived in Sahalee, a suburb located on an elevated plateau near Redmond, Washington.  I had finished an early morning meditation session and was driving down Sahalee Way about 300 feet from the traffic signal where I would turn left on to Redmond-Fall City Way, when the thought flashed clearly and insistently in my head "Watch out, someone is going to jump the red light at the intersection!"

Now, the left turn light had turned green when I was still a fair distance from it, there was no one in front of me, and I would have usually taken the turn at about 20-25 mph, but something made me pay attention to the warning, and I slowed to a near standstill as the nose of my car entered the intersection and looked to the right.  As I watched, a large 18 wheeler truck bore down on the intersection and barreled right through the red light, narrowly missing me.  The truck driver had obviously realized his mistake and had hit the brakes, but was able to bring his vehicle to a stop only after crossing the intersection.  Had I ignored the voice in my head, the truck would have ploughed into the side of my car, albeit at a slow speed. 

He looked down sheepishly and apologetically at me as I drove past him, shaking my head.  Of course, he had no idea why I had abruptly slowed down, and was probably thanking his stars, as I was mine.  There was something surreal about it all - it felt as if the whole situation was somehow orchestrated, with the situation never seeming dangerous or out of control.

While we will never know how events unfolded on Ridge Road in Grant Wood's masterpiece, an unknown artist seems to have applied a few whimsical strokes of the brush that morning on the canvas of an otherwise ordinary morning commute.  The purpose of art, after all, is to shake us out of the mundane and to evoke the mysterious or transcendent.