Alligator Alley, Central Florida, Summer 1974

In memory of Troy W. Livingston, who always stopped to help a stranger.

When we lived in Miami in the early 70’s, we used to travel to Sanibel Island about every other weekend. My grandparents had a house on a lagoon there that was within 50 yards walk of the Ocean. It made for a great weekend away from my father’s weekday stresses. It took us about 4 hours to get from our house in Miami to my grandparent’s house on Sanibel. The majority of the trip was across the State on Alligator Alley.

Alligator Alley was a two lane highway that ran East-West across the Everglades of Southern Florida. It was 115 miles long, with one on and one off at each end. There was nowhere to pull over to stop, there were no facilities, there was nothing. Every mile, there was a small rise where the road goes over a canal. There were no streetlights, and the road becomes a dark ribbon in the Florida moonlight at night, blending off into the distance over the horizon. On each side of the road was a ditch, about 40 feet across and dozens of feet deep. At night, often, drivers would cross the centerline at the rises for reasons of road weariness, exhaustion, drunkenness or they just lose track of the road. When that happens, often, they meet an oncoming car, both going 70+ miles per hour. That’s a head on collision at 140 miles per hour.

Back in the 70’s when the CB was king of communication, the airwaves would crackle with reports of accidents. Travelers then, unlike today would stop to try to help the hapless victims of these accidents. My father was one of those that would always stop. He’d tell me to get down and not look, but I would anyway. I’d see the torn wreckage of the cars, the scattered remains of the occupants. I’d see the fires burning leaving tennis shoes behind in a puddle of what was a person. I’d hear the screams of a girl, pinned under the dashboard, her dead father crushed against the steering wheel on top of her. It appears that she was sitting in his lap steering when they went over the line and met an oncoming Buick. I remember one accident where there was so little left of the vehicles after the fires that trying to determine anything was impossible.

Depending on where the accidents occurred, it could take an hour or more for emergency vehicles to arrive. Ther were no Life Flights then, only ambulances that would cruise the highways at 90 or 100 miles an hour trying to save people. It was a futile effort most times. The people that stopped would find wrecked bodies, some barely alive still and try to comfort them as well as they could, but they could do nothing without real emergency medical skills. We always carried a first-aid kit, though we rarely used it. There was no point. A kind word and a comforting voice was all my father could offer more than one victim as they passed.

I probably only saw a half dozen really bad accidents as a child. But they all seared into my mind. The family of four, trapped in a burning sedan that had been hit by an oncoming car. People using tire irons trying to pry open doors to get to them, broken glass everywhere, trying to pull people free as the flames engulfed the vehicle and the occupants screamed. The would be rescuers being thwarted by the heat, sobbing and giving up as the screams dwindled  mercifully. The night air full of the stench of burning car parts, plastic, rubber and people. The eerie backlight of the flames on the scene.

The VW bus full of teenagers, hit head on by a large sedan. Their mangled bodies spread around the ground like disjointed cordwood. Someone was trying to do triage, trying to determine if any of them were still alive. The driver of the oncoming vehicle half out of his windshield, buried in the bus.

My father would get back in the Camaro, the smells of burning clinging to his t-shirt. “You weren’t supposed to be watching.” He would say resignedly. I’d just shrug and look away.  

I knew that I’d see it all again in my dreams later.