The Ditch

One of my earliest memories begins with a car in a ditch.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

My father was driving home from work at the Royal Scot, where he cooked long hours, and somewhere only a country block from home—so close to safety he could nearly touch it—he fell asleep at the wheel and drove our brand new car into a deep roadside ditch.

He had been working too hard.

That was the adult explanation.

I did not understand overwork or exhaustion then.

I only understood that something bad had happened to my father and to the new car, and that the world felt suddenly tilted.

But what I remember most vividly may be the least important thing in the scene.

I had left my G-Force puzzle in the back seat.

And I was worried about it.

That detail has stayed with me for decades because it captures the strange innocence of childhood grief. Adults are reckoning with danger, money, injury, insurance, fatigue.

And the child is thinking:

What about my puzzle?

Will it be ruined?

Is it still in there?

There is something almost painful in how true that feels.

Because children approach catastrophe sideways.

Through the beloved small object caught inside it.

I can still picture the ditch in my mind, though memory may have embellished its depth over time. It seemed enormous, a ravine almost. The car nose-down and wrong. The terrifying wrongness of a machine not where it should be.

And what haunts me now is how near he was.

One country block.

After all those miles home from work.

To make it almost all the way and then lose consciousness.

There is tragedy compressed in that kind of nearness.

As though fatigue waited until the final possible moment.

Looking back, the accident feels less isolated than emblematic.

My father was always pressing beyond prudent limits.

Cooking at Royal Scot.

Then farm work.

Then house projects.

Then gardens.

There was always more labor than seemed humanly advisable.

The ditch was one visible consequence.

A warning, though I do not know whether anyone named it that way.

My mother, I’m sure, would have.

She worried constantly about how hard he drove himself.

His love often took the form of expenditure.

He spent himself.

And sometimes the body protested.

What moves me too is that this happened coming home from cooking.

Food was one of the quiet threads running through his life—from Royal Scot to pig roasts to church dinners. Even his labor as chef fed into the larger story of provision.

He was working for us.

That is part of what the ditch contains.

Not merely an accident.

But the cost of trying too hard for a family.

And yet, because memory is mercifully strange, what rises beside that seriousness is still my G-Force puzzle.

I can see it vividly—small, treasured, lodged in the back seat of disaster.

Almost comic.

Almost holy.

Because it reminds me that every family story contains overlapping realities.

My father narrowly escaping harm.

My mother likely frightened half to death.

And me fretting over a puzzle.

All true at once.

There is another reason the memory lingers.

It was perhaps the first time I sensed my father was vulnerable.

Before that he belonged to the category of giants.

Fathers do not drift into ditches.

Fathers rescue others.

But here was evidence otherwise.

And once a child sees that, something subtle changes.

Mortality enters the picture.

Though dimly.

Though years before one can name it.

I think about that brand new car, too.

How painful it must have been financially.

A new car on a farm family budget was no small thing.

And to lose or damage it through exhaustion—that carried its own unspoken anguish.

Yet I have no memory of him dramatizing any of that.

Only of the story remaining.

Retold.

Folded into family lore.

The night Dad drove into the ditch.

What I love most is how even this memory, rooted in danger, ends with a child’s absurd concern over a toy.

Because that is how memory resists becoming pure tragedy.

It keeps hold of the ridiculous and tender.

A deep ditch.

A father asleep from overwork.

And a little boy wondering whether his G-Force puzzle survived the wreck.