It was a rainy Saturday in the March of my junior year of
high school, and I was at work. At the time, I was working as a tour guide at
Longhorn Cavern State Park, and I was the even-hour tour guide. This meant that
I was leading hour-and-a-half long tours through the cave that left at 10 am,
12 pm, 2 pm, and 4 pm. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and I was walking
back up to the visitor’s center from the cave entrance. Now, it wasn’t
storming, but the rain was definitely coming down at more than a drizzle. I
walked through the rain, wet and a little cold, and I looked up and saw my dad
standing under the awning of the visitor’s center. He was watching me, and
waiting for me to get up to him and out of the rain.
Dad coming to the cave while I worked was an uncommon
occurrence, but every once and while he would drop by with lunch or with a soda
from Sonic, so I didn’t think much of it. But as I drew closer to him, I could
tell that something was wrong. He wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t look like
himself. I asked what was wrong, and he drew me aside to tell me that Colin
Clark, a freshman in our high school band and a good friend of my brother
Korey, had just been in an accident. It was his first time to drive behind the
wheel since he received his permit, and even though he had done nothing wrong,
a driver on the other side of the road had overcorrected and caused a head-on
collision with his car. His dad was in critical condition and his mom was
bruised pretty badly but had suffered no major wounds.
Colin, though, had died almost instantly.
Now, Colin and I had not been very close friends, but we ran
in the same circles. I was good friends with many of his good friends, and I
had spent a good deal of time with him in band. But the one thing that I can
say without a doubt about Colin was that he was a good soul. Everybody loved
him, and I don’t think he met a person that he was not immediately friends
with. Even though we were not extremely close, I liked him a lot, because he
always let me play his base drum during football games.
He was a great person, and his absence in Burnet High School
was a tragedy.
I got another tour guide to cover my shift for the rest of
the day, and I went home to check on my brother and everyone else. Korey was
with his friends, so I went to check on some of my friends from band. I found a
number of them sitting on the porch of Colin’s house. Since Mr. Clark was in
the ICU and Mrs. Clark was with him, the house was empty, and my friends were
just sitting on the porch… not saying anything… just sitting.
So I pulled up and joined them, and we all just sat there
together. Every once and while someone would say something, and we’d talk for a
few minutes. But mostly, we just… sat.
