Nothing was happening, so they pulled their winter coats out of the back, bundled up, and hiked up the road to see. A lot of people were doing this. This struck Doob as unusual. The normal behavior was to wait in the car, thumb the iPhone, listen to a book on tape, and wait for the authorities to come and deal with it.
The stranded truck was only about half a mile ahead of them. It looked to have gone into a spectacular skid. The colossal weight of the gantry—a welded steel truss looking like a section of a railway trestle—had swung the rear end of the truck forward and sideways, sweeping across all lanes of traffic and finally grinding to a stop by flopping over onto its side and then destroying about a hundred yards of guardrail. Behind it a few cars had spun out as their drivers had stomped the brakes, and a few people were dealing with the aftermath of minor rear-end fender benders, but no one seemed to have gotten seriously injured.
The pedestrian traffic toward the crash had been considerable, and yet Doob saw few of the sorts of people he would classify as gawkers or rubberneckers. Where were they all going? As he and Henry and the other students drew closer he saw cars moving around, headlights sweeping across the wreck to better illuminate it, and then he saw a stream of people squeezing through the gap to the other side, or clambering through the space between the tractor and the trailer. Self-appointed safety wardens had stationed themselves at critical locations to focus the white beams of their LED flashlights on trip hazards and useful handholds. Doob and the others crowded through those gaps and then broke free to the far side of the wreck. The view here was worth a look. The wet interstate, completely empty of traffic, stretched away from them. A ski area, lit up for night use, spread up the mountainside to their right. In the distance maybe ten, twenty miles away, a streaky patch of mountainside was flickering a lambent orange through intervening veils of snow and mist: the impact site of the bolide. Doob saw now how it had all happened. The meteor had passed overhead. To him it had just been a flash above the clouds, but to the people cresting the pass at the same moment it must have been visible as it streaked into the ground and plowed up a mile-long stretch of forest. Cars must have faltered and strayed out of their lanes. The driver of the truck had been forced to apply his brakes and the tires of the trailer had broken loose from the slushy pavement.
The number of people on this side of the wreck must have been well over a hundred.
Twenty minutes later, there were enough of them to flip the rig back up onto its wheels. Like a work crew of Egyptian slaves moving a great block of stone, all of these people in their parkas and their microfiber gloves and snow pants just got under the thing and started lifting it. Towing straps had been fetched from toolboxes and anchored to the other side of it, and run to the trailer hitches and the bumpers of several pickup trucks that had four-wheeled their way to the scene, and they pulled while the humans pushed, and with surprising ease the whole thing came up, balanced for a moment on half of its wheels—the only sound now being the skidding of pickup tires as the drivers burned rubber—and then dropped into place. A huge uproar of people shouted Whoo! as much in relief as in exultation. Doob exchanged thumping, mittened high fives with twenty people he’d never met before and would never see again.
Getting the truck pointed in the right direction again, and back on its way down the interstate, was a more tedious operation that would likely span another couple of hours. But within a short time they were at least able to open one lane. By then, people with four-wheel-drive vehicles had already begun to cut across the median strip and claim lanes on the wrong side of the interstate, which was sparsely trafficked by veering cars holding their horn buttons down in long Dopplered howls of protest.
Another slowdown caught them an hour later when they entered a low plume of thick smoke drifting across the highway and bringing visibility down to almost nothing. Galaxies of red and blue flashing lights emerged from the murk and then receded: places where emergency vehicles had clustered to stage firefighting efforts, or to aid locals affected by the strike. At one place, sitting in the middle of the road, festive with road flares, was a rock the size of a car, which had struck the pavement hard enough to pierce it and lever up thick shards bristling with snapped rebar. Not the meteorite itself, but ejecta: shrapnel hurled out from the impact site.
There was another delay, this one purely for gawking, at the place where the interstate crossed the Columbia River, almost a mile wide, at Vantage. Something was going on down below the bridge, on the eastern bank of the river where the low span angled up away from the water to let big barges pass beneath it. Blinding lights had been elevated on poles, creating a mottled spill of daylight where something huge and cylindrical was being winched up off a barge.