I play it pretty cool with the whole tire blowout thing. I regale a couple groups of friends at the rescue squad with the story, but it's always funny and never near-tragic. In the story I'm in the back of the ambulance when I feel it yank sharply to the side then begin to shake as smoke and bits of tire fly out behind us. The story's culmination, delivered as a punchline, is when the normally-unflappable EMT who's riding in the copilot's seat turns around and yells back to us "HANG ON!" and I make a face that's like um, okay, we're doing that already. In both tellings that gets a laugh. Then someone wryly observes that we were lucky that we had the squad's most experienced driver behind the wheel at the time, and then there's a short interval in which we speculate on grisly alternate potential outcomes of the event.

We don't make a huge deal out of it. When someone asks about it I tell them they should go around the garage in the back and take a look at the tire. There's not much left of it, just the metal wheel encircled with a shredded wreath of torn rubber strips and some bits of silver mesh. It's impressive but we don't make a big drama out of the whole thing. This is a rescue company, after all, and everyone there sees worse on a regular basis. We have almost a studied coolness when it comes to being impressed with tragedy. Near-tragedy hardly rates serious consideration, so we joke a bit about the blowout and walk away from it still laughing.

It occurs to me from time to time; coming unexpectedly to replay unbidden in my mind. The details are enormous, like I momentarily zoomed in on an instant in my life and beheld its texture in gargantuan detail. My perspective is skewed, and those moments seem perpetually more recent than my lunch or today's conversations with my clients. I'm very familiar with the way that real trauma gets stuck in memory, having been in a few car wrecks. At age twelve I flew around the inside of a Honda Civic that flipped twice after it left the road and hit an earthen bluff, and I spent the next few days mentally reviewing the instant replay tape of the wreck until I thought I would scream. That fifteen-second time interval got stuck, like a bad tune that won't go away, and didn't release me until memories of the accident had become tedious and exhausting. But this event isn't anything like that, just some histrionic scare-mongering of what might have been. It's not going to change the way I live my life, which is already pretty close the way it might be if I knew I was going to die soon.

What really surprises me is that I was never frightened. Maybe I'm hoping that this broke loose part of the machinery that makes me afraid. I started riding an ambulance in part to face my fears, and it worked for a while... until I saw so many more frightening things.