I almost never see things as they happen. I'm usually caught up in everything else going on around me and I fail to see the moment as it arrives.
Unfortunately I saw something yesterday, and I only saw it because I just happened to be looking in its direction.
When I work at the jet ski races, I don't watch the racers if I'm not scoring them. Yesterday I was walking around taking a survey of the spectators (it's for the Convention & Visitor's Bureau, not just for fun) and as I spoke to someone I gazed toward the nearby water. There was a race going, and I saw two very large jet skis hit each other, very hard. When these guys are racing, they are going 60-70 miles per hour. That's a pretty tough hit to your body, should you be unlucky enough to sustain it.
As I watched the medics pull the hurt rider from the water, I could tell that this was a very, very bad accident. Indeed, it was...he was gone.
His name was Cesare Visrara, an Italian racer who was no stranger to the World Finals that's held here every October. We've had almost thirty years of Jet Ski World Finals on Lake Havasu and there's never been a fatality. It was shocking, to say the least.
I was a bit pensive last night, thinking about how surreal it must be for the guy's family. Maybe they came with him, but most likely they did not. He raced all the time, and to go halfway around the world to see him in yet another race probably wasn't reasonable. So they hear from his teammates over the phone that he went to Arizona and was tragically killed during a race. How does someone deal with that? They're thousands of miles away and they can't even go to him and say their goodbyes.
It makes you think about your loved ones, where they are, and what kind of effort it would take to go to them and make sure they are okay.
