The night before the big move we loaded up the truck. Because we were moving EVERYTHING we owned, we had a lot of stuff. All of our clothes, wedding presents, books, and every other thing we owned. My dad and Daniel built a wood structure that fit right over the luggage once it was piled three stacks high. They then tied it all down and put one last board on the back end so that the suitcases wouldn't fall out the back. It looked like a ghetto little Mexican truck loaded with junk!
We woke up super early of the 5th of January so that we could get to Utah early enough to start unpacking that night. Well, things didn't go quite as planned.
We had decided to listen to Harry Potter on tape for the drive. It was 5 am, pitch black, and we had been driving about one hour exactly. All of a sudden, Daniel said, "Oh no, oh no. You've got to be kidding me." I of course was yelling, "WHAT? DANIEL, WHAT'S GOING ON?" During the time this frantic, 10 second conversation occurred, Daniel had pulled over onto the shoulder and raced out of the car. I looked back through the little truck window and saw Daniel running toward what looked like my worst nightmare. All I could see was about 247483294 things in the freeway, and nothing in the truck bed. I broke down. It was all too overwhelming for me and I started to scream and cry louder than I knew was possible.
Then I instantly became so scared because I realized I could not see Daniel other than his silhouette as he dodged cars to grab the items that were close to the shoulder. I ran toward him yelling, "DANIEL GET OUT OF THE FREEWAY!" He kept running into the lane as he saw a gap within cars and was piling the items on the shoulder. I went back over towards the car and called my parents. I was hysterical because I was sitting and watching every item I owned in the freeway, being run over. My mom answered with a groggy voice, obviously having been woken up, and she instantly was as alert as ever when she heard the hysterical sobs from my end of the line. She thought we had been in an accident and that Daniel had died based on the way I was screaming. At that, I felt very stupid because I realized this was all just stuff, and that we were safe. Then I became freaked out again because Daniel was running onto the freeway and I ran to him. I explained to my mom what happened and she woke my dad up and had him get in the car to come meet up with us. She then called the highway patrol and asked them to come block off the first lane so we could gather up the things that had not been ruined. She was also extremely concerned about how dangerous it was for us to be going in the lane to get our stuff. We continued to gather our things and place them on the shoulder as we waited for the Highway patrol to show up. I felt a little more calm to know help was on the way.
When the Highway patrolman showed up, he was FAR from helpful! He rode up on his motorcycle as I was picking up broken pieces of keepsakes that were so meaningful to me silently sobbing with tears running down my cold cheeks and he said with a sickening chuckle, "Looks like someone is having a yard sale." I looked up at him with the most pissed off face I have ever given someone in my life and said, "Are you serious? Do you realize how upset I am you jerk? This truck full of stuff you see on the freeway is everything we own to our name."
I think I caught him off guard and he instantly went from having a grin on his face to looking like he felt kind of bad. I was glad. I wanted him to feel badly. He was rubbing salt so hard into a wound that was fresher then mint gum. I hated him. He did not know how badly I was hurting and made a joke out a situation that was disastrous to me.
He then got off his 'big man bike' and pretended to help. He apparently didn't want to spend the time to lean over so he instead kicked my items onto the side of the freeway. I saw him full on kick my ipod, hard drive, and pretty much every other fragile or special thing that had not been smashed yet.
This made me dislike him even more and I did not hide my anger. I said, "So are you going to do anything useful like block off the freeway or put flares so cars don't run off the road and hit us?" He said, "No, you just need to sit in your car and wait for your ride to come for you. You should be okay in your car but put your seatbelt on so if a car hits you, you won't get as hurt."
I just looked and him and said, "WOW." Then he left. Some help he was...
We sat in the car and just held each other and prayed that we would be safe. It finally started to get light and my dad had about 15 minutes until he would be reaching the point where the stuff first started to fall off. Daniel tried to convince me to let him go back out to collect more, now that it was light and I became very mad because I was so scared of the thought of him getting hit. I told him there was no way I would let him go out there for even one second until my dad got there. Once my dad got close, He pulled over and started looking for any items. Once he hit the spot where he could first see our belongings, he called us. It was only about 300 yards from his car to ours and we combed the area as best as we could. We found many things that we had missed in the dark. My dad drove up my parents Yukon XL so we just threw the stuff into the car and did that for the whole area where the stuff had fallen out.
It was about 36 degrees and by the time we had loaded everything into my dad's car and were ready to figure out the next plan, I was so cold and overwhelmed I just couldn't really talk to anyone. I was traumatized pretty severely. I just pray that I will not have to experience something like that again, especially with people getting hurt. I am such a baby!
We decided that Daniel and I would continue the drive in my parents car and my dad would take the truck back with him. We could not put all of our stuff in the Truck again because it had no way of keeping it all down. The Yukon is enclosed so that was safer.
My parents were really nice and they paid for all of our gas and told us they would help us replace stuff.
We made it safely and arrived pretty late. The manager forgot to leave it unlocked so that was another adventure trying to get ahold of him and wait for him to bring a key. Once we FINALLY got into our apartment, we unloaded the whole car. Everything had been organized so perfectly for the move and now we did not even have any boxes. They had been destroyed.
We surveyed the damage and realized how lucky we were. Many things had scratches, a whole suitcase of my favorite shoes had been brutally ruined, my hard drive was smashed, I was missing some clothes and keepsakes... but other than that, only small wedding gifts were ruined and other little things. None of our big, expensive things had even a scratch! It all could have been SO much worse so we prayed so much for how lucky we ended up. We could have been so far from home and stranded that we would have been in big trouble. Or there would have been about three times the amount of people if it had happened even two hours later. Or we could have frozen if it happened it Utah. Or we could have lost everything if it happened on a bridge or an area with no shoulder.
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