A car crashed next door

Yesterday evening, while waiting for my husband to arrive home from a bit of overtime after his regular shift, Little M and I noticed a small pickup in the alfalfa field next door. I thought it was strange, as there was a guy standing up in the back, and through binoculars I noticed they seemed to be looking up the hill towards the road at something. There were a couple trees in my view, but I didn't see anything on the road, so figured maybe it was a deer or something. I kept my eye on them as they backed out, but then my husband pulled into the driveway and I didn't think anything more of it.

A half hour to an hour later, I was walking back up from the garden, and realized what they must have been looking at. There was a car over the edge on the hill! The driver must have veered off the narrow road and went straight down the hill until the nose of the car got stuck in the bottom of the old irrigation ditch. I ran up to the house and got my husband to call in to dispatch and make sure someone had already called the car in. No one had. So my husband walked over and checked to make sure no one was hurt inside - it was empty and locked, so whoever was driving it had crashed, then locked their vehicle up and left the scene. My husband decided he was going to wait over there until first responders arrived.

Little M and I got loaded up into the stroller and headed down the road to see what was happening. While we were walking down, Fire & Rescue showed up. The first guy on scene made sure that the car wasn't going to start a fire and checked the damage. A couple other fire & rescue guys showed up and kept an eye on things.

You can see the car down the hill, but this picture also shows where the car went off the road, you can see the flattened weeds on its path from the left corner and down into the center of the picture. Scary ride or what!

Then two police units from the nearest town showed up to keep an eye on things (and chit-chat with my husband) until the county deputy made it up. Fire moved on once they established that no one was inside & the car wasn't a danger to the tow truck or any one else. Then the cops all waited for the tow truck to arrive, after having an involved discussion about whether a normal wrecker would be enough or if they would need the bigger vehicle to get the car up the hill since there wasn't anywhere to tie the smaller wrecker off to. While they were waiting Little M and I headed back to the house to get her down to bed, as it was definitely after her bedtime already. Once the tow truck arrived the town cops headed back into town, and the tow truck started the process of attaching to the crashed car and pulling it up.

I didn't get any pictures of the car coming up the hill as it was getting fairly dark by then. But they did get it up and towed away successfully.

I can't imagine the ride down the hill - how scary that must have been. It's pretty likely that the driver was under the influence, and may not really have registered what was happening. Since we moved in here I've always worried that one day I would look out in the winter and there would be a car off the road down that hill, as the road is quite narrow and really has no shoulders at all before you are straight down over the edge. I never thought it would be in broad daylight in the middle of summer! Luckily it doesn't seem like anyone was hurt, so it seems that it all ended well.

We rarely see emergency services actually responding to a scene up our road (we do see emergency vehicles more regularly, but typically they are just dropping by to say hi!), and it definitely caused a bit of commotion with our neighbors. We met our soon-to-move-in new neighbors up the road as we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive, and another neighbor dropped by the house while I was putting Little M down to bed & the tow truck was pulling the car up. Apparently another neighbor just up the road had visitors arrive who mentioned driving by the scene, so she called the other neighbor, who came down to see if I knew what was going on. I know this makes it seem like there are a lot of people further up our road, but in reality there are only 6 full time places and a couple of cabins up past us.

I love that we have great neighbors around us, and that we know them well enough that they aren't shy to stop by after 9 at night to make sure things are ok & get the gossip :) Knowing my neighbors, and having everyone know everyone else's business is very familiar to me - after all I grew up on a dead end dirt road in a very rural area of Ontario. I love that even moving across the country and down into the US, I've still found a place like this where I know my neighbors for a good ways around on all sides.