When You Become the Lead Story, part 2

Now that you know the catastrophe Carole suffered on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015, and have a basic sense of how it came across on the local news, we can start to take a look behind the scenes.

Things to keep in mind:

•        Carole would spend more than two days in the hospital, getting her injuries assessed and receiving medications to get her through the coming weeks.

•        I took off roughly a week from my various jobs to stay with her in the hospital most of Sunday and Monday, and then bring her home and care for her after she was discharged the afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 13 … helping her get out of bed and walking her to the bathroom, administering her ice pack and heating pad and medications, cooking the meals, walking the dog alone three or four times a day, answering the phone, and retrieving packages and mail.

•        Ten days (Oct. 11-Oct. 21) passed between the morning of the collision and the day it made the news.

Let’s go back to the morning of the incident.

It was a Sunday. Carole had established a routine of taking the dog -- our six-pound toy fox terrier named Pixie -- for an hour-long walk every morning. It was a great way to exercise herself and our girl, as well as explore the new neighborhood to which we had just moved a little more than four weeks before.

We had lived ten years in an apartment in the heart of downtown Portland. Our new locale, known as South Waterfront, is undergoing rapid change. It’s a former brownfield industrial strip on the west bank of the Willamette River just south of downtown. Seven apartment and condo towers, and a health-care structure, all between 20 and 32 stories, have been constructed here within just the last ten years. According to Wikipedia, South Waterfront “is one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the United States.”

We moved into one of several six-story apartment complexes that are even newer than most of the towers (the one next to ours is specifically for low-income residents). At least two more are nearing completion as I write. After the nearly 24-hour noise, bustle, panhandlers, cigarette butts, skateboarders, and street fights that had characterized our environs for much of the past decade, our new neighborhood is quiet and sedate. It feels like an entirely different city -- almost as if we had moved to Europe -- though it’s only a mile and a half southeast of our old place.

Three quarters of a mile north of us is Portland’s newest bridge: Tilikum Crossing. It’s the longest span in the nation that is not for automobiles. MAX light-rail trains, Portland Streetcar trains, Trimet buses, bicyclists, and pedestrians may all cross it, but no private vehicles. It’s the first new bridge across the Willamette River in downtown Portland since 1973, and it opened to the public only a month (29 days, to be exact) before my wife’s unfortunate experience on it.

Since I work part-time for Portland Streetcar as a customer service representative, I got to ride across the bridge via both streetcar and MAX a month before it opened, and I actually worked at both ends of the bridge on its grand opening day, Saturday, Sept. 12.

Shortly before 9 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 11, I was less than a hundred yards away from where my wife was walking, but did not know that. If I had been standing perhaps 20 feet south and looking the right way, I might have even witnessed the collision. Certainly I would have beaten the ambulance to my stricken wife on foot. But I didn’t. A bystander who arrived at her side immediately after the incident sent me away.

My cell phone rang, and a strange woman informed me that my wife had been knocked down by a cyclist near “the new pedestrian bridge.” When you hear “pedestrian bridge,” what does that tell you? A bridge that’s only for pedestrians, right? The only one I could think of was a quarter mile south, beneath the aerial tram to the top of “Pill Hill,” where the teaching hospitals are all perched.

On the map above, the collision occurred on that grey thoroughfare and bridge at the center, just to the right of the final “g” on the “Collaborative Life Sciences Building” label. I was just west of there at that moment, at the intersection of the grey thoroughfare and the north-south white street, SW Moody, though perhaps just around the corner of the building. But the stranger on my wife’s cell phone misled me into thinking the collision site was to the south, near the bottom of this diagram, where that thin grey line crosses the bright yellow-orange routes that constitute Interstate 5 and connects with SW Gibbs Street.

Seeking clarification, I asked: You mean the one by the aerial tram? Yes, she replied, evidently under the assumption I was speaking to her from much farther than a mere hundred yards away. Carole is conscious, I think the woman told me, but your dog is here, and she needs you to come get her. If the woman had simply used the word “Tilikum,” I would have known where to go.

Instead, I started jogging south, and away from my injured wife. I arrived at the foot of the aerial tram tower just as the doors to the elevator to the bridge were closing. To my left at that moment, an ambulance was racing north up Moody. That may be Carole in there, I thought; they’re already transporting her to the hospital. I missed her.

But they weren’t. The ambulance was still on its way to tend to her, as I ran the 132 steps up the tower (shown here, at left; photo used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, credit Steve Morgan) to the Gibbs Street Pedestrian Bridge across Interstate 5.

LESSON NO. 1: IF YOU WITNESS A CRASH OR ACCIDENT AND CHOOSE TO HELP OUT, KEEP A CLEAR, CALM HEAD AND COMMUNICATE ACCURATELY.